Victrola - Electrola 10-70 Finish

[EarlH]

I bought this 10-70 a month ago and it got nice enough out the other day that I was able to wash the old finish off the cabinet. I can do a sort of log on me putting it back together, but since it's an all electric machine, I really don't know if there would be much interest in it. Someone sort if did an awful job of refinishing it 30 years ago or so and what my question is, does the finish on the inside of the cabinet match what was on the outside? On this one, the only remnants of the original finish is in the turntable area.

In the course of the previous "tune-up" they gave the rest of the cabinet the polyurethane treatment. It actually didn't look too bad if you were far enough away from it, but it really needs to be refinished. I have the pot rings out of the lid now, and all the loose veneer glued back down, so it should go pretty easily from here. And I am having Eduardo down in Peru re-make the decal on the inside of the door to remind you to remove the discarded records from the drawer. Gosh he does nice work and I am so glad he is willing to do work like this.

It looks to me like Victor used a glazing stain and then rubbed high spots light with steel wool or something and then gave it a coat or two of dull lacquer. Or maybe a seal coat of shellac and then lacquer (which would be very typical in those days). The finish on the inside of this is almost flat and it really doesn't even look like they made much of an effort to fill the grain. There was a little bit of color in the topcoats, and a little bit of highlighting with lacquer, but it looks like most of highlighting was done with the glazing. It makes sense to me they did it that way as much of the expensive furniture was finished like that late in the 1920's.

Other than it needing an enormous amount of work (mostly to undo what someone did on it years ago) it's a nice machine. I am kind of glad that they nailed the loose veneer back down with carpet tacks though. That is a fairly easy fix compared to having to work Elmer's glue out from under the veneer and then having to re-veneer the whole cabinet.

I really enjoy reading your guys postings, even though I rarely can add much to what has been said. This really is a fascinating hobby.

[need4art]

You might find that there would be more interest than you might think in this type of machine. While I love my cylinder players and have a number of acoustical Edison and Victors as well as Brunswick machines a hearing problem has moved me towards the early electrical machines. An Edison C-2, Victor 9-25 and Victor 9-54 have joined the family in the last year.

There are a number of folks on the forum, Marc C., Chuck A., Pierce-arrow, myself and others who like these machines, but I do have to admit that I cannot do all of the work myself as I can on the acoustical machines.

I bought a Fuji HVLP unit a couple of years ago and have just started putting down some finishes on cabinets. Mohawk makes a series of lacquers that I have used for a number of years but something changed recently and I had to learn to work with them all over again-less laquer-or maybe not eve-n but they still sell it as such. The Edison and the Victor 9-25 do not have a glazed finish but the 9-54 does. Side by side you can really see a difference.

In my field of art restoration I have been restoring antique frames of all types including those that are gilded. Doing a cabinet takes a lot of prep work and I am working my way up to a full size cabinet but a Victor 10-50 that will be coming my way will need pretty much a full job so I need to move up my skill level.

Keep us posted.
Abe

[EarlH]

Abe, well thanks for your reply. There was a stripped out 9-25 up in Wisconsin awhile back, but it just looked like too much work to hunt up the parts to make that quest worthwhile. Plus, they wanted something like $300 for the cabinet. If the grille had still been with it, it might have been worth considering, but I really have enough on my plate right now. I saw an old movie from the early 30's awhile back that had a 9-54 in it. A radio guy was sent up to the man's apartment to fix the thing. I've never seen one of those in person, but they look pretty impressive. Those cabinets came with a number of chassis in them, and I suppose they were kind of a slow mover because of the economy at the end of the 20's. Probably too, most of the folks that had a lot of money to spend on a huge radio/phonograph, already had one. In some of the old radio magazines from the late 20's there are articles lamenting that one.

I have a couple of Panatropes and they really are nice sounding. This Electrola I'm working on more or less has the same electric components, so it should sound pretty nice once it's back together. The volume on those things is really remarkable, especially on the radio side.

My lacquer gun is almost as old as this Electrola. It's from the mid 30's and seems to work fine for me. I've had it a really long time and painted a couple of old cars with it when I was in High School. I really doubt decent solvent based finishes will be around for very many more years. I used water based finish once and had a really bad experience with it. My Mom has the dresser from that set, and after 20 years, it still gets tacky in humid weather (which is nice).

I've never used an HVLP sprayer, and really don't know much about them. My brother keeps wanting me to try his, but I really don't want to experiment with a cabinet I like. I refinished 25-30 pianos a long time ago to figure out what I was doing, and don't have the ambition to go through that again! I really doubt I'll ever refinish another piano, but they are cheap and you can get a TON of experience doing one. The fit and finish on even a cheap piano is remarkable. It would comparable to a really nice phonograph, but pianos really were the industry standard when it came to fit, finish and overall quality in those days.

This 10-70 is really nicely fitted together, but I do wish Victor put finish on the bottoms of their cabinets. Edison should have done that as well. The Brunswick's I've refinished have had some finish on the bottom. If you wonder why the veneer is nearly always loose around the bottom of your phonographs, or why the veneer is often missing or all buckled on the bottom of your machines...... Take the time to lay them down and shellac the bottoms of them. Pooley was TERRIBLE about that and they didn't even bother to put finish on the bottoms of the cabinet doors, Victor didn't always do that either. As cheap as Edison could be, I've never run across his door bottoms not being finished! Shellac will wick up into that old dry wood and help keep the veneer from eventually popping loose down there. It will help keep the core wood from shrinking & cupping as well. I always shellac the whole inside of the cabinets when I have them apart and give the bottoms of them a couple of coats as well. (Except your Credenza horns, those are not supposed to be finished) All of the veneer and moldings around the bottom of this 10-70 were loose and look at how far this thing is from the floor! Enough on that subject. Haha.

Well, I have this one stained, the grain filled and ready do give a coat of shellac to as soon at it's dry enough. This is where it's at right now. It doesn't look much different now than it did out on the back yard, and that's kind of what I wanted. It is darker of course, but I really tried not to wash the stain out of the wood. I used some glazing for the stain, and added some of the glaze to the grain filler so it would be the same color. I think this one is supposed to be finished more like your 9-25 and will topcoat this with lacquer. There aren't many pictures of these things out there, but the one's I can find, kind of show them having a sheen to them, so that's what I'll do. Furniture lacquers in those days didn't dry to a high gloss, so they were a little bit on the dull side unless they rubbed them out.

[Henry]

Earl, that is really gorgeous! Congrats on a super job.

How'd you like to do over my XI?

[martinola]

Very nice, Earl! Could you explain what you mean by "glazing"? I'd like to replicate a later style finish like this, but parts of the process baffle me. I do appreciate your taking the time to show us what you're doing.

Martin

[EarlH]

Earl, that is really gorgeous! Congrats on a super job.

How'd you like to do over my XI?

Thanks for the offer, but I just don't have the time to take on any more projects. I have several people a little rattled with me on stuff they would like me to get finished up with as it is!

[EarlH]

Very nice, Earl! Could you explain what you mean by "glazing"? I'd like to replicate a later style finish like this, but parts of the process baffle me. I do appreciate your taking the time to show us what you're doing.

Martin

Marin,
It kind of depends on what your machine had on it in the first place. But on this one I wasn't really sure how Victor "highlighted" the lighter colored areas on the cabinet because it was stained first. Glazing is a kind of thick, translucent medium that you can add color to and then go over your cabinet with. If you look at the carving and other places on the cabinet it's been rubbed lighter. Usually a cabinet would be stained and overall color and then the glazing would be darker and if you are a bit artistic (which I am not) you can get some really satisfying results that way. Especially is it's done on carving. I think the people at Victor were just trying to make a machine like this look a bit care-worn. Plus, there was a good chance the high end machines were going to find their way into homes that had other very expensive furniture in them, and this would be in competition for a place in among those goods as well. So Victor had to be in a sort of "happy medium" if that makes sense. I just decided that this machine was stained and then the high spots were rubbed lighter with steel wool dipped in light colored stain. I bought a large roll of bronze wool a year or so ago at an estate sale cheap, and I really like how that works over steel wool. It seems to polish the wood better.

Anyway, on this cabinet as well, most of the color stayed behind after I stripped it and on most of the blended or shaded finishes I've encountered, all the color was in the topcoats and after the remover was used, the wood looked almost like it must have when the cabinet was freshly glued together at the factory. If you look at that Panatrope picture from a few years ago, you'll see what I mean. All the color is in the finish in that one. Which is fine, unless you scratch the finish. The other picture shows how it looks with the color topcoats on it. I just used trans-tint dye in lacquer for that.

I don't know if I've done a very good job of answering your question, but it does kind of depend on what you are trying to duplicate. So far on this Victrola cabinet, I've just added some Minwax Walnut get stain to some brown grain filler and gone over the cabinet. On the legs and where it's carved, I just used the gel stain, it's simply too much work for almost no results trying to use grain filler on carved areas. The areas that were lighter before, I just rubbed down with bronze wool and I'll find out when I shellac it, how well they will stand out. The other thing about the gel stain is, it doesn't penetrate the wood much, so it's relatively easy to rub lighter in places.

For some reason there was gold paint on the front edge of the stretcher underneath the cabinet and that all came off when I stripped it. I have no idea if that was done at the factory or what, but I'm not putting it back down there again. It was really nicely done, so I don't know what to think on that one. And it was also done a very long time ago. This machine is coin operated, so maybe they did it at whatever location it as on. If it was done at the factory it may have been put there to help it stand out for some reason once the tinted topcoats were over it? Other crazy things were being done in the 20's so who knows on that one. Dealers did some oddball stuff too in order to make a sale and whatever company did the conversion over to coin-up might have done it as well.

If the machine you are doing has all of the color in the topcoats, it's fairly easy to do and you don't need an expensive sprayer to do it. One of those $50 detail guns will work just fine. Spray finishes as we know them today came out in 1924 and they just went mad with them. When Victor mentions in their literature about spraying varnish in 1915, they are just talking about how they got the varnish on the cabinet. It still needed to be brushed out and the sprayer was basically squirting the varnish on the surface. It still needed to be leveled and brushed out and it would have been a miserable sticky job in very overheated rooms. Those guys mostly did that in their underwear to keep down dust. That's why the Victrolas after the L-door machines have such thick varnish on them that crazes so badly. Especially on the fronts and lids. If you have to keep dipping your brush in a bucket of varnish you won't use as much.

The early lacquers used castor oil as a plasticizer and they didn't dry to a high gloss. If you look under the lid of your Credenza, you'll see what I mean. So the country was sold on dull finishes then and it wasn't until the very late 20's or early 30's when the synthetic plasticizers were developed and those finishes are the one's that get really brittle and pretty much fall off the cabinet. Phonograph people don't get into that so much, but it drives the radio guys mad..... I just refinish about everything and get on with life though. I think with care, the modern lacquers will last longer.

I didn't mean to write a book here. I've read enough of them on the subject though but I've always found the subject of refinishing really fascinating.

[martinola]

Earl,

Thanks for the additional info. I don't have a current project, but have at times considered attacking the marginal finish on my Credenza. If I'm reading your response correctly, you are saying that the glaze is a mixture of stain and grain filler? This isn't something I'd find in a can at a refinishing supply shop, is that right?

Really nice shots of the.. (is that a Panatrope?) case. I'll be very interested in seeing how the 10-70 comes out. Thanks again for sharing.

Martin

[EarlH]

If you are going to refinish a Credenza, you'll want to use lacquer. All the color is on the finish on those. This is a 2-door one I refinished last summer and there's really no other way to do a finish like that. Glazing is a regular finishing product that you can get at most good sized paint stores. I added the gel stain to the grain filler to kind of kill two birds with one stone. Gel stain by itself acts a lot like glazing will, but you won't get it to look like you want it to on a Credenza.

I'll post a picture of the spray gun I use when I get that far with this 10-70. It will be a week or two at least, from the looks of the weather here. We had a few nice days last weekend and since it got warm enough to wash the finish off this cabinet real quick, and since I had it all apart I got excited to get this thing going. I've done a lot of refinishing the last few years and I'm kind of getting burned out on it and want to get all these big projects done this summer.

A Credenza is not a very hard thing to refinish though, once you get all the prep work done. I just did that with a small detail gun I bought a long time ago for $40. They don't hold as much material as the large guns do, but most furniture isn't all that large compared to a car, which is really what the large guns are for. If you practice on a piece of sheet-rock, it won't take you long to get the hang of it.

[EarlH]

This is how the orange shellac looks on it. I usually use de-waxed shellac as a sealer under lacquer, it solves a lot of problems for me in refinishing, especially if there are some traces of the old finish in the wood and then the lacquer takes days to dry hard. This thing was stained pretty dark originally, and I haven't changed that very much. It will be a little darker once the topcoats are on it. I'm actually pretty happy with how it's turning out.