Badly damaged crank-style phonograph cabinet

hi guys this is trina from john's furniture repair in the shop with another new project so what we've got today is a antique victrola radio cabinet and it's in pretty rough shape and we're doing a complete restoration and making it into a little bit more of a storage cabinet instead of a victrola because that doesn't have the radio anymore someone has at some point done a little bit of carpentry to make it useful for them uh the story was that uh this customer's father used it as a tool bin in his garage so he did a few things to make it useful for him and now she wants it to be kind of put back to the way it was but with shelving instead of the victrola unit so let me show you what we're going to be doing so both of these tops here um are are removed on the original pieces this top is supposed to be affixed and only this one comes up for the victrola so this top was removed at some point and you can see inside here that there's just all the blocking and everything that was removed on the interior and kind of ripped apart and there's uh you know shreds of wood and stuff left in there so what we're going to be doing is removing the hinges back here that they put on and re affixing this top so that it does not go uh up and down or removed for opening or anything like that it will just be back the way it was so that will be glued and screwed down this top on this side here though we will be putting back on the piano hinge so it still has the old piano hinge back there that it's going to be reattached to and then we're gonna add a stay so that when she lifts the lid up it'll stay where she needs it to get whatever she's getting out of here and then uh even have it open if she wants to for a while and then put it back down so it'll still have that interesting kind of victrola well it's not a victrola it's a mclaughlin from heinzmann but uh they'll still have that kind of operation like they used to so other than that uh both of these doors here are in pretty bad condition um one of these doors would have never opened in the first place but he's made uh made so that they both do come off so this one folds down uh and they would have had the record storage unit in here you can see on the side all of the marks from the old shelves for the record storage unit so this one um works fine but it doesn't actually hit where it's supposed to it's dropped so i've got to look at what happened there i think the hinges have worn out on the sides and everything's kind of dropped you can kind of see there's a lot of movement there so that'll need to be repaired and then this is the same thing it's kind of dropped down from the inside here nope so anyways we're going to make this so that it also opens um it's just hand in there right now i think there's something holding on to it so we'll get into that when we do and then the base here uh has completely broken off i think that's part of the problems with the door being dropped and everything so that needs to be repaired and rebuilt other than that we've got all four legs missing uh their cheeks so i'll show you here we've got uh the cheeks of the legs missing so we'll need to add wood onto those and recarve the little button foot that you can see over here on that side [Music] so uh those are the major things that we've got going on um there's other things that are pretty serious like the veneer repair that needs to happen everywhere and we'll have to be uh splicing in some new veneers on the tops and some of the sides the drawers and doors they all have issues that way and uh we're going to be leaving this little hole with this suction here um just as a throwback to what it was and we're going to be filling this hole here so that's the other thing and then we're gonna be adding some shelves just uh two shelves on the interior of this thing so other than that a complete refinish into uh a little bit more of a darker um kind of a little bit more like it was on the interior there uh kind of like a dark mahogany color okay so i got the chest on the side here and these uh hinges that um these doors open and close with are underneath this whole mechanism here which i've never seen before so i'm gonna remove these brackets which i think they slip into the frame here as just a little slot yeah so those are just keeping those all together and i think this is one of the areas that this piece is having issues with because that whole frame is dropped swing those out and that should just pop out with the hinges yeah so they've got a whole board here that hold the hinges in place and then these brackets just slip into grooves these guys that just swivel and slip into groups in this groove right here in the frame that hold it there i've made blocks out of alder and one block's gonna the front block is going to have all the the green going that way and then uh this block will go this way so that i don't have any end grain showing so i'll just glue up this one good so that'll sit overnight i'll do the other three legs and then i can start carving the leg again so the legs are all in clamps while that is drying overnight i uh put in this board back here the victrola had a gap back here i think i'm not sure why maybe for flow of music or whatever but um we don't need that anymore for the shelves so i just got that held in with wedges and glued to this shelf piece but not the back panel so that's going to dry in the meantime well that's all there i've got the front piece off here and you can see it's all broken out on one side and uh broke it in more places than so some pieces missing here i have one piece that i'll put back in but uh i think the rest of it's there mostly and then we got our little medallion here that's missing a piece that we'll have to fill in but what i'm gonna do for this repair is uh cut this off so that it's a flat surface and i'm just gonna i made this block out of pine i'm just gonna add this on the back here and uh once that's dry and redrill the the dowel and then we can reinstall that piece so i'll get to cutting it figured out why the drawers had dot dropped these pieces i looked a little bit more closely and where the hinge mount inside they're all broken here so i need to repair these before i put the hinges back in so i think what i'm gonna do is um get some epoxy the size of that bad for that type of thing but this side here you can see it's all just broken out i think i'm going to get some epoxy into these holes and just squish them right shut with a really good clamp and re-drill and keep that down that way so i might use slightly longer screws as well so i can get more into uh the meat of this board just because you know being just right here and everything weighing on it that's where it's going to rip out again so maybe if i can get down uh a good two and a half inches maybe uh into that board then maybe that'll help keep everything together as well so i'll get these all glued up and see where we're at all right this next morning with uh everything i've just gotten these guys out of clamps so they're all glued and ready for carving here and i also did some work on the bottom of the veneer while it was upside down so those can come out of clamps now too and we can get to patching the veneer side we've got the little hole patched down there so that can get carved out too and we got the front of this guy glued back together here because there was a big crack the other things that we did we did some gluing on these pieces um all of these uh hinge mounts were uh broken here the the veneer was lifted and then uh on this side these were all cracked up so the veneer was lifted on here and then this was and glued and then this was cracked here and we got that all backs on both sides and same thing on this one um big cracks that ran down here where the hinge had lifted it and cracked it off on both sides so that would have been a major reason also why these doors were dropped down from the frame so the other thing we did yesterday was get this sky all together i just did a veneer line over the butt joint here just for extra protection and nobody's going to see that it's going to be in the back of the cabinet and got these little pieces glued back on so those are all good this is ready for some stripping and a little emblem here that goes on i've added some epoxy putty too because it was broken and so that needs to get sanded before i put it back on there and shaped it's actually not that nice of a piece of wood i thought it would be nicer when i stripped it but nonetheless we'll put it back where it goes so uh also these two guys that hold the hinges on the bottom we got all these glued in and so these are all sturdy now for the hinges to uh be re-drilled back in there and they won't drop anymore so both of those were repaired as well and uh yeah so i'm on to carving legs and repairing veneer on these guys these are the two lids so there's some pretty serious veneer damage underlayment is loose and missing in p in places so first i have to glue down the underlayment and then add pieces that are missing on the underlayment and then i can glue the the top layer of veneer and add in some missing pieces so that'll be a process and the little areas that i'm finding where there's veneer missing like on the edge here there was just little chips i'm just going to use epoxy putty because it doesn't merit putting a new piece in there same thing over here just little pieces that were missing and it wasn't loose around it but this area here is loose so i'll glue that so kind of a double uh method just to you know small pieces will get the the putty and bigger pieces like this will get patches so that you've got walnut where you can see it all right so i'm gonna get these clamps off of these guys first and uh start carving off some major meat on these legs and start getting a shape going okay so figuring out a shape for these legs uh i kind of have to make it out myself because there's no leg here all of them are missing these chunks and uh it's not a circle it's an oval and then there's this bun here that ends and then the front of the foot kind of comes over that so what i'm going to have to do is kind of eyeball you know where the bottom of this piece is going to come mark off a line how thick that is and then on the second area here um it's going to have to be larger than this base so it's going to be kind of tough it's going to be kind of like a two uh two method procedure here so what i'm first gonna do is just kind of eyeball where this bun foot looks like it's supposed to come too naturally and because it's an oval i can't really use a tool so that kind of looks like where it would come to there and then i have to um kind of look at where this piece ends here how wide this is so it looks like it's about 5 8 thick so if i come down here can make a line at 5 8. this one's sticking up a little bit so i'll have to go a little bit farther down i'll just draw this line across so that will be my line [Music] i'm just watching to see how far my blade is going in i want it to come to about right here [Music] stop a little short so i can get a better eyeball then i'll come along this way okay so that has essentially split this carving into two sections so now i can break down this top section to start forming this bun so i'm going to take off quite a heavy chunk and then start getting a little bit smaller pieces to bring it and it's obviously gonna need to be starting to be curved in so what i'm gonna do is bring my uh just about an angle and start carving it in right next to my foot i'm gonna try to stay at the same distance all the way around and just make that first cut okay so now that i've carved out the general shape i'm gonna take my japanese um files and i'm just going to start working down some of the high spots i'm getting that rounded shape [Music] one twenty paper [Music] and just smooth everything out [Music] okay so that's that half of the the carving so before i flip every one of these over to do the rest of the carving i'm going to be adding on because to do that the other carving i'm going to mostly do the work from the top so i'm going to add my foot before that right there because when i turn this over i don't want my feet dragging all over the shop it's kind of one of the first things i do when i have something in here so um now that this piece is finished i can start marking out for this piece so it's going to be kind of like a uh a queen end leg that comes to a point like a teardrop so i'm going to kind of have the shape a little bit proud of this bun and then it's going to come to a point in the center which might be around here somewhere like that and this will kind of curve up from the bottom and then curve down from the top so what i'm going to do first is get rid of the meat on this leg i'm gonna make sure i come a little bit more proud than this i don't want to go too close i'm gonna go more like that same thing here i'm gonna go a little bit more proud i can always make it smaller kind of hard to make it just bring it all the way to that point there so that'll be kind of the shape it's a little bit too big i kind of want the end to stop right here so i'll just kind of keep working along my line here to bring it in to where i want from the bottom [Music] so i'm just going to always be aware that i have this point this point this point and this point all lined up [Music] huh a little bit off that side so i'll just bring it back over here [Music] good there so i'll sand the bottom here while it's upside down that edge there so we've got a nice point in our oval here and i'll do this to all four legs before we turn it over [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so i've got the uh cross piece here all sanded and repaired our repair on the back now i cannot get this cabinet apart a lot and so for that reason i'm going to only be doing a dowel joint on one side and then i'm going to be doing a pocket screw on the other side to get this back into where it's going to go uh it's the only way possible without ripping this whole thing apart which i do not want to do so i'm going to just put the dowel in first and then i'm going to let this come back together and i'm going to find where this screw is supposed to go so this lines up and then i'll know exactly where this needs to be it looks centered so i'll screw this down and then i can put in my pocket screw on this side all right so that's all flush looks like it's in the same spot on both sides so we've got that piece back on uh the other thing that i got to do to this piece i've sanded and fixed the little emblem here got a little bit of epoxy putty just on the edge so i'm going to nail this guy back in place put a clamp on it i can drive that little nail and then these guys get glued on here they were nailed as well um but because the whole cabinet has shifted the nail holes are in a different spot so i'm going to glue them first and then brad them on when the glue is dry okay so i've got all four legs carved on the bottom and the gliders in and i've got some veneer splices in there looks pretty rough let's do some color there we've got the front brace on and i've added some corner blocks to the back of it just to give it extra strength there's our repaired side this side i just had one major veneer repair there so we're ready to flip this thing over on its feet and uh start addressing stuff from that side okay guys so i've got the uh cabinet flipped over here on a cart and i'm just working on the shape of the top of these legs so i'm giving it kind of a an overhang and kind of a scoop out this way i was kind of fiddling with the shape here trying to get it to look right each leg will be a little bit different just because this is a hand carved job so i've got two more left to go here on this side and i'll show you guys how we get that shape okay so the first thing i do is just make some marks um to reference for my coping saw and i just kind of make them from the side here to this point to make sure that i'm following a line it's not super easy to cut a curve like this up so i'm going a little bit heavier on and leaving some some wood to be kind of shaved off later so what i know is that i want my point to be the same on each one which is about a quarter inch so i'm marking that first here that's how wide i want my point to be and then i'm just bringing my line just eyeballing it to that point there just as a kind of a rough reference for my saw i'll do the same thing on this side most of that i'll leave so i'm going to take my little coping saw here and i'm going to try to uh take it off on that line [Laughter] i'm watching both sides at the same time oh there we go so that's got most of the meat off of it there and the general shape and then i'm gonna take a file and just kind of get the little bits off of the end there and then i'm gonna take a sander a detail sander this guy and i'm going to scoop out the wood coming down here because i want a little bit of a curve [Music] so i'm just going to be really careful and very gentle with how the angle i come i need to come this way on this one and this way on this one so okay so that's got the uh general shape down pretty good now i can work on uh detailing with the file this side looks pretty good this side looks a little bit fat right here so i'm just gonna take off some now this point is a little bit too far out i'm going to bring it back like the other one so i'm just going to hit that edge a little bit [Music] good do a little bit of shaving off on and then we've got all of the general meat taken off we're going to use a 120 sandpaper and give it a thin [Laughter] uh good so you can see how it looks in generally good shape needs another sand with the 180 at the end of it but that's how i get that shape it's kind of a classic heinzmann piano leg actually uh if you're familiar with that um but anyways i've got one left to do and then these guys are all ready all right so now that all those legs are done i'm going to take my attention to the inside of the cabinet uh the victrolas weren't usually very nice inside just because they weren't meant to be used as cabinets for storage and this would have been covered and a piece of fabric behind it um with a screen but we're going to be putting some shelves in here so i'm actually going to be finishing the interior so you can see it's just pretty rough wood so i'm gonna sand that all down as well as in here same kind of thing these are the old shelves that are missing now so we'll just need to give everything a good sand so i can make it all even and smooth inside so i'm just going to get my festool sander going with the detail sander so i can get into the corners and see how it looks all right so i've got all the putty in there drying put a dowel in the inside of that big hole that we filled from the outside and there's a big chip out there as well as that corner so that's gonna need to dry for a while but next i'm going to deal with these guys so we were uh going to uh cover these hinge ones up because this side is going to be totally uh mounted in here permanently so these blocks are going to get screwed back into the piece on the top so i need to make some pieces to fit in here i'm just going to use a piece of pine that i've got here i'm just going to cut it to fit in there and then glue it down all right so i've got those guys repaired so the last thing or the next thing i've got to put in are these blocks that are not here anymore for the top to get screwed down to so i just got a couple of pine blocks here again and i'll just glue them and clamp them on so after these are dry then i will take my drill and drill out the holes screw the top down too okay so i've got uh two shelf sticks here so i'm going to measure up where i want the shelf to sit on so i'm thinking let's go about eight and a half and then the shelf will sit on top of that so i'll make my mark at eight and a half here [Music] good super sturdy so i'll just recheck it to make sure it looks good yep perfect so that'll be good and sturdy place to put the shelf i'll do the other side and then we'll get to making shelves all right so i've got one shelf in here let's do a little notch out for here just using a half inch ply and on this side i've got another one cut to go in and i'm only using eighth inch ply on this side because it's got pretty beefy um it's got pretty big hangers here so i don't have to worry about that you don't see the front edge of this shelf so i don't need to use half inch ply and wood is so expensive right now so the other thing that i noticed uh when i was working on taking these clamps off and looking at everything is that this whole center of the cabinet had dropped in the back and so what i've got here is a clamp that's coming from the bottom which is hooking up to the shelf on the bottom and pulling everything up here so that it's level and then i've got a clamp coming from the back to the front to keep it in the joint so the corner block they had in there right here was super tiny and really not hanging on at all but i mean when we do put the top back on this piece uh the top is gonna hold everything uh nice and and uh level so when he did remove this top he kind of took away some of the structure of this piece so we're gonna add actually back a pretty big corner block [Music] with some fasteners so i'm just going to glue this guy in here and screw it both to both sides just to give it an extra hold while we're working on this cabinet and it won't hurt to have that joint together this way and that way and this way so there so got that guy all in there now i can take off these clamps good so now i've got this good and level with the surface this piece just needs to come off here and you know both of these surfaces meet together so i'll need to plane this repair off here where we filled in the hinges and then take off a bit of this extra stuff that was left here and then this is in pretty good shape so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] oh [Music] okay guys just an update on this piece because we've done a lot to this thing to get it to this stage so i'm just gonna show you guys all the stuff we've done so far so starting from the inside uh we completely sanded and stripped and cleaned everything in here um and cleaned up everything for new shelves and those shelves are uh in the booth getting some clear coats right now got new shelf pins down here and these guys were installed i've got the holes drilled for the top to go back on so that's all repaired again we did the repair on the back where there's a big gap here and i've added a piece of trim in here just to finish it off nicely and get that all back to good on the outside other than stripping and refinishing we did a whole repair on this base piece and you can see right there we've got our repair holding this thing nicely in place as well as corner blocks to give it a little bit extra hold strength we've carved all of the feet so those are looking good got them all shaped sanded and ready for stain this guy we've got our little pegs in that we glued the the rubber grommets onto and stripped this and sanded it as well so that fits in there nicely now those just pop in and then sits like that um there's pretty serious repairs of veneer on the sides plus the hole that was here that we filled and on this side a little bit less so but uh again lots of repair anyways uh we filled this little hole here with a walnut plug because someone had drilled a hole through here that's no longer needed and uh yeah so this case probably forgetting something but that's where we're at with this case i've stained the interior and when i finish the doors i'll stain the whole rest of it and probably spray it while it's apart before i put the top on and everything so now we're back to fixing the tops and the drawer and the door fronts so this is the top that's going to get mounted permanently and i've got these filled with epoxy putty where the old hinges were and we got a little veneer repaired here and the top we're gonna have to do a pretty serious veneer repair here plus the veneer is loose in a couple places not too too bad looks worse than it is and then this top here we've got a few little repairs on the bottom most of the veneer on the top needs dealing with on the front edge of that guy so we're going to get to that and then these doors if you remember we repaired the uh big cracks to both hinge mounts remember these doors were sitting too low in the cabinet so there's big cracks on either side here so those are fixed a few veneer repairs still needed to happen same thing on the other one and those get mounted to these slider blocks that get mounted underneath the cabinet so we fixed all of the mounting hinge mounts on these as well so we've come a long way on this piece and we've got a ways to go but it's getting there and we're going to be using brown mahogany as a stain made by gowdy and that's a pretty dark stain that's what the customer picked so it's the color that you see inside here so a little bit darker than the original we're keeping this area the original color because we're keeping the heinzmann logo uh and and keeping the as much of the old nostalgic of the piece as we can okay so working on the top here on this area that needs repair you can see there's a little bit of the underlayment missing here where the veneer is supposed to go over so we need to replace that first before we put new veneers here so i've got a piece of old underlayment that i keep from other jobs that i can pull it off from and i'm just going to slot it underneath these veneers just like that and uh check the fit and it looks pretty good so what i'm gonna do is get glue everywhere and uh i'm gonna probably cut this off a little bit so it's not sticking out so much so i'll just trace on behind where i can cut off from okay i'm going to stop right there i'm going to get my underlayment piece in here like that and make sure there's enough glue on these tips to hold it where it needs to go okay so when i clamp this there's not going to be any pressure on these parts so what i'm gonna have to do is just add in some temporary pieces that i'm gonna peel off after just so i get a little bit of pressure on that point so i'll just cut some pieces that can put some pressure on with my clamp [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] okay guys so it's the next morning everything's been in clamps overnight and a couple of things i've taken off here's the repair we did both edges so i got a ton of clamps to remove and check out how the glue up went all right guys i've been working away finding more little loose veneers and doing patches this is probably the third time each of them have been in clamps so i'm just going to keep working at those and getting them farther along they were in such bad shape so i keep finding more and more loose veneer that i have to deal with so in the meantime while those are sitting there in clamps i'm going to be staining this so we got our brown mahogany going look how beautiful that is on there so we're going to get the whole thing stained up uh while we're waiting for the clamps to dry [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] all right guys so everything is done on the cabinet this was a big job took me way longer than anticipated but it's turned out beautiful let's go over everything we did so when you remember uh when it was brought in um the top was completely missing and in pieces and veneer was chipping everywhere the doors had fallen off the base there was all fallen off all of the legs were missing their toes um veneer was missing on the sides of the cabinet everything was broken the interior was a mess so let's take a look at how she looks now uh so i've got the little chain in here and i match the interior to the original heinzmann color so this is the original color of the victrola style cabinet that was on it and this is where the victrola would have been in here but because they don't have it we've installed this shelf so they can store some stuff in here and access it from this lid and then down here which is where the old victrola would have uh the speaker coming out from there's just a kind of a cubby that's accessible from taking this panel off and we've got the whole interior all stained and smooth and ready for storage looks like i need to do a little bit of dusting in there but that's just accessible through this little panel if you remember this guy we had to replace the little pegs so we have our little boots there that sit into the slots and then this just clips right into place really nicely so these doors were in terrible shape if you remember the hinges were all falling out so we took everything out of here and i have it all sturdy the underside is all fixed with those tabs that slide back and forth for the doors uh and i did repair one hinge that was broken and this piece inside as well would have just had the shelves for records but we've just put one shelf in for storage and we've finished all the interior nicely so it's ready for storage we added a little bit of a a stop there with some um felts so that this door won't go too far in so you can just see how these doors kind of slide away for storage when you have it open and then not very nicely come back out i don't think they're going to need to do a lot of the sliding most of those pieces are very warped so this piece here we had a big repair on the back i'll show you that from the inside you can see that we did that big piece that we got in there and then we re attached it to the cabinet and put in some corner blocks so that's all looking really nice and sturdy and we fixed this little gem that had a big chunk missing here so that's looking really nice and pops and then our feet which were a really big job they've all been polished and they're really smooth and lovely and you would never know they were missing before so yeah turned out really good other than that we got the side here that was not too bad for veneer repair but this side here was really bad and there was a big hole here it just kind of faded into the finish for the old crank for the victrola and then this piece they wanted to keep so we just shine this up and put it back on there was a lot of repairs down here you can still see the faint triangles of veneer inserts that i've got in here and [Music] the back was in pretty great shape just needed a clean up and a refinish just like everything and yes we were finished this in a brown mahogany by mohawk by gauri and it's turned out really nice you can see the beautiful veneers kind of popping through with their swirls and burls and beautiful things that they've got going on in the tops we did veneer repairs you can kind of see there's a big strip here and a little bit of a triangle going here so just kind of fade those out these ones you can see a little bit more because they're on the lighter part but they don't stick out they're blending quite nicely with everything and there were veneer repairs too on the doors there was a piece here and the whole bottom was chipped out same with this one you can just see a little bit of what was going on so i'm really happy with the results and it was a big one thanks for joining me on this one and i hope you enjoyed it i know it's a slow process but i appreciate anyone who comes with me on the journey so thanks again don't forget to like and subscribe and check out our other videos just like this one

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 61,593

Rating: 4.9722414 out of 5

Keywords: trena, john's furniture repair, thomas johnson, antiques, restoration, shop, workshop, woodworking, stain, sanding, stripping, record player, victrola, heintzman, carving, spraying, clear coat

Id: Qasq8H-eMXk

Length: 65min 6sec (3906 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021