need4art wrote:You make me feel very. very guilty-I have phono projects all over the place but customers art seems to always take my time in front of my own projects. Funny how paying the bills gets in the way...
I seem to spend a lot of time filling dents with putty before I get ready to finish and I am still working on speeding up the task, Once I fill I use a scraper or 600 w/d to shape. Then I try to pre stain those areas with shellac and trans tint colors. That seems to take forever. Yah I know... don't get machines with dents but that's not always the way it works out. I used different types of putties with varying results. They all work fine when I am restoring frames but with the number of them and expanse of a cabinet I am still looking for that silver bullet. What do you use?
Abe
That dent filling is a can of worms isn't it? I honestly don't try to get too extremely fussy about all of tiny dents and that sort of thing unless it's worth going the piano finish route and then there isn't any choice. I've also pretty much given up doing work for other people unless I really know them or if they work with their hands. So many people now claim they have restored this, or that, when all they have really done is write the check and they have expectations that are impossible for me to meet. Plus this is a hobby for me and in real life I'm a UPS driver and really don't have a whole lot of spare time to take on projects.
I know one guy that had a re-finisher do his dining room table over three times because of real or imagined defects in the finish. THEN when he was satisfied with it, he vacuumed the top of the table with one of those hand held carpet cleaners with a beater brush in it denting the top all up. Now he can't understand why they refuse to do business with him anymore!
I usually use stick shellac though and use auto body filler sometimes if it's really bad. Stick shellac works really well, and will take NGR stain. If you let lacquer get thick you can use drops of that in dents to fill them and then scrape them off with a cabinet scraper. It can be kind of slow to dry though unless you have a little bit of heat on it. If a corner or edge is banged up unless it's so bad that a piece of wood needs to be fitted in, I just leave it alone. It's too easy for the filler to come back out and then it really looks bad. Probably all the same stuff you are already doing though.
I've re-veneered the sides of a couple of cabinets, but you couldn't justify doing that on very many phonographs anymore, they just aren't worth spending another $200 on for a nice piece of veneer. Sometimes the dents will steam out with a soldering iron and some water, or an electric iron. But that will really change the color of the wood sometimes as it will draw all of the old stain out. And if it's veneered it almost never raises back up with steam. This 10-70 only has one bad dent-scratch on the left side and it's down low so I didn't do anything with it. It's down low enough where it's hard to see and I figured anything I do might make it show worse. I'll probably go over it a few extra times with some sanding sealer and sand it down to help level it up but other than that I'll leave it alone.
As far as I'm concerned, this stuff is old and it should look nice, but a few battle scars should be expected. I can't believe the bun feet are still in once piece on this 10-70! They almost never are and they might be from one block of wood. They are and were stained so dark, I couldn't tell when I was trying to see about that. I wanted to get them off and remove the stretcher, but they are on too tight. And it wasn't a big enough deal to mo to bust them off and put new dowels in. However, some would have since there is a flat piece of walnut directly above them that has chunks missing on some of them.
If all else fail, a nice satin finish (or at least dull) is in order. This 10-70 will be dull, but it was finished that way originally. You know what amazes me on that point is, how many will complain when they see an extremely shiny phonograph (or anything for that matter that's been refinished) on ebay and go on and on about how terrible the shiny finish looks and I usually agree. But the things that I've gone the high gloss route with ALWAYS sell first. It seems like the more garish it looks, the faster it goes out the door. But having said that, a piano finish on mahogany is amazing, it will look pretty glossy in a photo, but in person it's really hard to describe. It's a tactile finish as well, and it makes you want to touch it.
I know what you mean about the "magic bullet" for dents and I don't have one. I wish I did. Sort of like that "adjusting screw" I've had player piano owners tell me that need to be turned and then their piano will play again.... (Or the bag leaks) We keep looking though. Haha!
