Mixing Art, Science : A small number of dedicated professional restorers bring new life to antiques that have been damaged or neglected.

Look for someone to repair and bring back to life a precious piece of antique furniture or antique art ob ject and you will know that qualified restorers practice a rarefied trade.

Irv Weiss, a Tarzana restorer of art objects, and Roger Sweetingham and Fernando Camberos of Antique Services Inc., a North Hollywood antique restoring and refinishing shop, will attest to that. They have a few colleagues in the Greater Los Angeles area, but not many. They are part artists, part craftsmen, with a dash of science and a dose of fix-it intuition.

In fact, the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Objects, the national organization of conservation professionals based in Washington, lists only 2,700 members.

Its local equivalent, the Western Assn. for Art Conservation, counts about 400 members in its ranks. Formal training in restoring and conserving is a challenge in itself, requiring years of advance schooling and internships.

According to Sara Smith of Attic Unlimited, a Yorba Linda restoration company in business for 20 years, there are only two schools in the United States and one or two in Canada. “It’s highly competitive, they ask you for a B.A. first and sometimes you have to go back and take chemistry classes. Then you pick a specialty and stick to that. So you have a lot of street-trained people. You have to check out their reputation, but a lot of them are very qualified,” Smith said.

Steven Colton, objects conservator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, agrees. “To judge whether an object should be treated and how much so, you need to develop a certain consciousness, like an angel on each shoulder, but many self-trained restorers have it innately,” Colton said. Those angels were never very far from Irv Weiss, since his taste for repairing whatever was in need quickly matured into the fine techniques of restoring art objects.

“Years ago, I would go into friends’ homes and notice a porcelain bird with its beak broken, or a handle missing on a basket, and I’d say, ‘I could fix that if you’d like.’ My wife would get mad at me--she said I was pushing myself on people,” Weiss recalled.

So when he was laid off from his job as a traveling sales representative for a West Coast welding company in 1986, he began to salvage and restore professionally. “In the beginning, I’d repair things that cost maybe 69 cents when they were new,” Weiss said.

To accumulate knowledge on top of his natural fix-it skills, he headed for the library to research the history of objects and techniques he encountered. He kept up with the latest materials and tools offered by the country’s only specialized suppliers, Conservation Materials Ltd.

Quickly, Weiss earned a prime reputation among the likes of store employees at Gumps and upscale art collectors around town.

But he still plies his trade in his garage. Shelves of diminutive bottles of paints surround his table. Goblets of brushes, containers of dental pumice and dental grinders, epoxies, solvents, endless supplies of toothpicks and Q-Tips, an extending magnifying glass, welding equipment, a hot plate for a cup of coffee, and Weiss is set to put almost anything together again.

Last summer, for example, there landed on his workbench an Upper Nile Egyptian funerary mask, or rather 83 pieces of it, to be reassembled and restored.

After talking with an Egyptologist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Weiss proceeded to copy the techniques of Egyptian craftsmen of 60 to 50 B.C.

“They put cloth over the person, pottery over it, then cloth again, then plaster and pottery over that, and then the alfresco finish,” Weiss said.

He revived the mummy’s mask, but, showing the restraint of a conservator, he left one broken corner untouched, to the dismay of the customer. And he steadfastly refused to complete the restoration.

“That corner had been missing for a long time,” Weiss said. The mask “may even have been found that way.”

Indeed, the customer found later that the exhibition stand for the mask allowed for the severed corner.

Weiss’ credits also include a Roman marble bowl he restored last year. The precious 2,000-year-old vessel was brought into his garage broken on one side.

“I kept the two large loose pieces and I ground the remaining fragments, mixed them in a water-based medium, added color and bonded all the pieces together with epoxy,” Weiss said.

Next, the seams were painted over to match the rose marble’s pattern and color and dissimulate all traces of repair.

Just one of Weiss’ albums recording the last year’s work rivals--if only in pictures--Ali Baba’s cave. But the Forty Thieves would probably have disdained the tattered treasures shown in the “before” shots.

Here are torn Chinese screens; bronzes with amputated limbs; a Nubian slave mask dating back to 19th-Century England and disfigured by a gash across the face; Chinese ivory statuettes that didn’t survive a fall; a giant ivory eagle from 1930s Japan, broken in several pieces, some wing feathers gone; a Hungarian bisque puzzle jug from the 1860s with one peeping hole slashed off.

Weiss is very proud of this puzzle jug. The melon-shaped base and the long neck are all decorated with gold and intricate colors. It has six handles, each pierced with a hole. To pour liquid out, the user has to grab one precise handle and thumb the hole shut. That is the puzzling part. The difficult part was applying five or six different colors in a few minutes so they could be fired together.

As if they were old friends, Weiss remembers all the objects that passed through his hands and recites for each their origin, the damage and the repairs. For accuracy, he photographs each patient sized up with a pack of Life Savers. “After all, I save their lives,” Weiss explained.

Some arrive just before their last gasp. “That goat came in with pieces missing, some rotten, some warped. It had splits and cracks filled in with plaster--somebody had even put mahogany shoe polish on it. I had to take the animal completely apart,” Weiss said, pointing at the toy’s photo, shaking his head at the memory.

For others, it’s a matter of quick surgery. “This water buffalo came in, it just needed a horn,” Weiss said.

Besides good technique, talent and instinct, a restorer such as Weiss needs to keep his cool when reviving, say, a thousand-year-old statuette from the Yucatan Peninsula whose owner just happens to be Ricardo Montalban.

“I am not intimidated by the value or the beauty of objects. In fact, I don’t price my work according to the value of the object, but depending on the difficulty of the repairs,” Weiss said.

So the costs can range from $10 to $5,000. And it may come as a surprise, but high price or not, all of Weiss’ work can be undone.

Weiss follows the code of ethics of conservators and restorers. “I may think that I am repairing something the best way; however, 50 or 100 years from now somebody might have a better idea. So all my work can be dissolved in acetone or other chemicals without hurting the original piece,” Weiss said.

Preservation of the original and of the fine patina of age on furniture is also the core of Sweeting-ham’s and Camberos’ considerations as they work to bring antiques back to their best shape and value.

Sweetingham, 35, trained in Sussex, England, at the British Antique Dealers’ Assn. College for Antique Furniture Conservation and Repairs. There he mastered techniques for rejuvenating and preserving woodwork, studied history and learned about the chemistry of waxes, solvents and lacquers.

Push him with a few questions and soon you will hear everything you ever wanted to know about his wax recipes (carnauba for hardness, beeswax for stickiness and paraffin for workability), which he keeps for those special museum-quality pieces.

You could also hear about the mysterious alchemy that transforms the secretion of lac beetles into shellac, a finish often used in this shop.

Camberos, 22, took a different path toward the restoration business. He specialized in industrial arts and woodworking at a Los Angeles high school and was hired on at Antique Services six years ago.

Camberos likes carving, and he becomes animated as he describes his work on a mid-Victorian, European marble bust of a woman. “The base was broken, so we added a section. We ground some original marble from the bottom and used it to fill the cracks and chips in the curls of her hair. It’s like donor marble,” Camberos said.

And he is equally proud of his dexterity at sculpting new toes, a new hand and a trumpet out of basswood for a wounded cherub that served as the pedestal to a 1930s table.

Camberos and Sweetingham get their pickiest about stripping old furniture. Although they might shower a semi-antique from, say, the 1940s in solvent to then refinish it, they oppose erasing the glow of years of use and care on an older piece.

“We make our own gentle reviver cocktail by pouring varying amounts of denatured alcohol, vinegar and turpentine in a bottle and shaking it till it mixes. And I would not recommend anyone attempt that at home,” Sweetingham said.

This reviving blend dissolves the old grimy wax, but leaves some old finish in the pores and corners so that even when restored, the piece looks old, as it should.

That is very important, according to Judy Udoff, manager of Mitchell Litt, a store in Sherman Oaks that specializes in European antiques.

“Finding a qualified craftsman can be a challenge. It is a dying art, and Roger Sweetingham is very good at obtaining a high polish finish that duplicates the original on old furniture,” she said.

“I also recommend them (Antique Services Inc.) for altering, or for complicated reconstruction jobs, because I feel they will give a very high quality of craftsmanship,” Udoff said.

Besides craftsmanship, the job sometimes requires artistry and imagination to create a missing piece, or figure out a way to repair something damaged almost beyond hope.

But creativity is the stuff restorers seem to be made of. Weiss had a recent example. “A few weeks ago, my niece had invited me to a dinner of short ribs. I saved the bones, put them through the dishwasher, bleached them, and I sculpted one of them into a hibiscus flower to give my niece,” he said.