I recently had the good fortune of picking up a completely hand made, hand tooled mahogany drop leaf dining table with 4 leaves. All are single boards including 21" drop leaves and hand made extension runners. The hand plane marks are quite evident such as scrub plane marks on the underside and fine tell tale cabinet scraper scratches on the surface under a very fine shellac surface. I have been in the business for nearly 40 years and this is a very well crafted piece. I have disassembled the apron and runners so I could add hide glue to the loose mortise and tennon joints and found some barely legible signitures on the underside of the main top. I tried to photograph them with various settings on my 35mm digital and that has made it clearer but not good enough. I've read somewhere that the museums have a method that they use to enhance the signatures and I'm not sure what it was or where I read it. I'm thinking black light and perhaps the American Furniture series. The signatures are either a blue chalk or crayon. Any advise?
Ross
Ross