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I recently bought an Edison machine with a very broken grille. Fortunately, the seller had retained all the pieces that had broken off. With a little glue and a lot of patience, I got the grille reassembled yesterday.

I'd like to figure out a way to reinforce this so that it's less likely to break again over time. The glued joints are holding up well, but there are weak spots in the remaining sections that I fear will break easily.

Any ideas are welcome. Thanks in advance.

You could mount stiff metal grill mesh behind the cloth .

ALVES wrote:You could mount stiff metal grill mesh behind the cloth .

HMV did exactly that with their table Model 130 and it worked very well, but be careful how you attach it. HMV used small tin tacks, but a fragile grille which has been repaired may not take kindly to hammering.

How about taking some small aluminum rods to use for splints. They could be cut and bent to shape and epoxied in place. Jerry Blais

How about fiberglass cloth and resin? Strong without adding bulk.

How about some nylon packing tape - cut it to the proper size and razor blade for final trim. Light, strong, easy to work with, and not visible. Cheers


Bill K

dutchman wrote:How about some nylon packing tape - cut it to the proper size and razor blade for final trim. Light, strong, easy to work with, and not visible. Cheers


Bill K

We may have a winner here...

I had thought about sheet metal scraps, but simple packing tape is much simpler, and probably much easier to reverse if desired.

Thanks, all!

Well, it turns out that the best reinforcement for this grille was actually - glue! The grille is made of layers of veneer that are glued together. Over the last 100 years, a lot of that glue has dried out and the layers are separating. Simply regluing the layers back together, as required, made a huge difference in the overall strength of the grille. I did put nylon fiber packing tape on the back of some of the joints as a safety measure. Small missing pieces of veneer were touched up with furniture markers. I also replaced the patterned cloth with a bright red one (the pink and orange color in the photo is just from lighting issues). This is of course not a correct cloth, but it is easily changed. I thought it came out quite well overall. Still not perfect, but far better than when I got it.

Thanks to everyone for advice and input.

I'm glad you stabilized it. As a last resort, you can take a ⅛" Birch wood piece and if you have access to a scroll saw, cut the exact pattern out and either glue the backing to the grill or use the Birch as the new piece. Of course color matching would be the next hurdle.

a12548 wrote:I'm glad you stabilized it. As a last resort, you can take a ⅛" Birch wood piece and if you have access to a scroll saw, cut the exact pattern out and either glue the backing to the grill or use the Birch as the new piece. Of course color matching would be the next hurdle.

I basically do as recommended above, but use popsicle sticks, cut to shape, (or slightly smaller so as not to be visible when viewed from the front), and glue to the backside. You can paint the "brace" flat black to also hide it when viewing the grill at an angle.