Restoration Of A Vintage Art Deco Radio Cabinet

Just brought home my latest find. This is an old Philco radio. I think it's model 37-610, and I did not pay $18 for it. I paid $10 for it. If you've been watching my channel for a while, you may have seen me do another one of these, the same model, maybe a few years ago. This one might be in even worse shape than that one was. Well, that's not good. This is the power cord. I guess I won't be using that. And I'm not sure yet what my plans are for it. I know I want to restore the cabinet, but I'm not sure if I want to get the radio part of it running again or do something else with it, like maybe put a guitar amp in there. I did that with a floor-standing radio cabinet a while back, and it worked out great. Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is take all the insides out. So if I remember correctly from the last one of these I did, I think I just need to remove these screws to get the chassis out. This one's already gone. And I also took the nuts off the speaker mounting thingies, because I'm going to have to take that out too. Okay, got that out. It's pretty easy, and it's pretty crusty. But let's see how the underside looks. Also pretty crusty and dusty. So there you go. Crusty and dusty. There's not much finish left on the cabinet. There's a little bit on the front and the sides. Nothing much on the top. So I'll need to remove that. But before I do that, I think I'm going to work on the veneer patches. See what I can do with those. I'm going to start with this back here. This whole layer is coming off. So I'm just going to put some super glue down there. Spray it with some accelerator. Okay, so that's stuck. Got some loose veneer over here. And this piece is also a little bit loose. So I'm going to glue this up, this veneer first, and then do this piece separate, because it would be too hard to clamp it, the two at the same time. So just get some glue in here. All right, let's see how this looks. Well, that's funny. I put this the wrong way around. This wax paper was supposed to go on this side. Oh well. Well, it didn't stick anyway. I mean, the veneer stuck, but the board didn't stick to this. I noticed over here, this whole top layer has come loose and is lifting up a bit there. And if you look in the back, you can see where it's come loose from the corner block that's inside. So I think to fix this, I'm going to drizzle some hide glue in there. Just clamp it up, and that should take care of that. Okay, I realized this would be a lot easier with a syringe, so I ran and got my glue syringe. Got some more loose veneer up here. I think I should remove this dial bezel here before I try to do that. Unfortunately, the glass is missing from this. There's supposed to be a piece of glass in here. So I'll have to figure out what to do about that. There's some really small screws holding this in. Really easy to lose. So this is where the tuner dial would be in this little window here. And you turn the knob and the different stations would go by. Music, news, drama, comedy, sports, education. So I was going to wait until I did all the veneer repairs to take off the finish, but I changed my mind. I want to get a better look at the veneer before I put more work into it, just to make sure that it can be saved. I think the finish might be shellac. So I soaked a paper towel with some denatured alcohol and put it on the finish. And if it is shellac, that should dissolve the finish. Okay, so it does seem to be taking the finish off. So it probably is shellac. So I could remove all of the finish just by laying some alcohol soaked paper towels on it. But this is such a small surface area, quicker way is just going to be to scrape it off. It'll come off really easy. Well, the front looks good. This is definitely worth saving. So I'll move ahead with the veneer repairs. All right, so the top, it's not as nice as the front. It's probably going to need a little bit more help, but it looks pretty decent. So I'd say this is also savable. So that's good. Time to patch this spot here. I'm just going to straighten these edges a little bit first. Okay, that's good. Glue that in. this patch here. I already cut out a piece that I think is going to work. And I'm just going to trace around it now. Okay, some time has elapsed and I've removed the clamps. Let's see how it looks. I think that's pretty good. There's, uh, obviously the color is not the same. I'll have to deal with that a little bit later. Next up is this little chip here and the edge on this is pretty ragged. So I'm going to clean that up and I already cut a little piece that should work. Since this is so small, I might as well just use some super glue. That's good. Okay, next up is this one. Last one, actually, is this one. And I already cut this out. I thought that I had the camera running, but I didn't. All right, so I just did the old, uh, rub the pencil along the edge trick to get the outline. Put it on a piece of veneer, taped it on there, and then just cut the piece of veneer out. And here's what we've got so far. It's really close, but it's a little bit large on this side. I'm going to try to cut through both layers of veneer at the same time where it's, uh, overhanging. Now there's a little piece right here that's in the way. Okay, so the veneer patches are all done, but obviously the color is not a match. So I've got some of this stain here. The color is called Gunstock, and it's a really, uh, kind of reddish-orange kind of stain. And I think it might help these blend in. So let's see. Okay, I think that's a start. I'll let that dry and come back to this. I feel like maybe it looks too red in this spot. I should probably be doing this like this. Well, I'll leave it for now. Let it dry and, uh, re-evaluate later. All right, so I'm not quite done yet with this. I decided to, uh, try some golden oak on here and see if maybe that's a little more yellowish. It might help. Okay, the stain is dry. I'm going to spray some shellac over the whole thing just to get a better idea of what it looks like. While that shellac dries, I'm going to put some stain on these base pieces here. So I want those to be darker than the rest of the piece. I mentioned earlier in the video that I was thinking of building a guitar amp into this radio cabinet, and I'm still going to do that, but I decided instead to put it on my guitar channel, which is called Dashner Guitars. And I thought maybe I could fix up the original radio's electronics and get that running again, but I wasn't sure if viewers of this channel would really be interested in that. So instead, I decided to get a cheap Bluetooth receiver and amplifier and hook that up to the speaker in the radio cabinet just so that I could play some music through this before the end of the video. But I also want to be clear that I'm not going to trash the original electronics from the radio because they're, like, maybe, I don't know, 70, 80 years old, and chances are it could be made to work again by just changing out a few worn out components and things like that. Whereas this Bluetooth thing, I'll probably be lucky to get a year out of it. It's kind of junky. So this has an amplifier built in. This is the volume control. These are the speaker outs, so we hook up your speakers to that. So because this has an amplifier built into it, I won't need to use any of the electronics in the radio except for the speaker. This is set up for a stereo signal, so you've got the left speaker and right speaker terminals here, positive and negative on each side. But the radio only has one speaker, so that's going to be mono. So I just connected the positive and positive and negative and negative together with these wires to combine the two signals into one. Hopefully this works. I think it should. And then I'm just going to connect these longer wires to the middle here. I just took off some of the insulation. Okay, change of plans. This speaker, the original one, does not work so well. It sounds kind of garbled and bad. So I have this other speaker that works great, and luckily it's the same screw pattern for the mounting thing, so I'm going to use that. I'll just demonstrate here. I have a tone playing from my phone. So this is the original, and this is the new one. So you can see how much clearer and louder this one is. So the veneer on the face of this has some fancy figure running vertically in addition to the regular grain running horizontal. So it's got these dark figuring marks in it. So I want to try to recreate that with the patches a little bit, at least to help blend them in a little bit. So I'm just going to try to dab some stain on them. tuner dial for the old radio is missing, but I do have the glass from my other radio that's the same model. So I'm going to use this. I traced the shape onto this piece of glass that's just from an old wrong, but I think this is actually going to work. Looks like it should fit. Okay, so it doesn't actually quite fit yet, but I think hopefully I'll be able to make it fit. And once again, I'm sure this is not how you're supposed to do this. Well, after a whole lot of filing and sanding, I got it. It's not a perfect circle, but it fits in there. And the edges aren't sharp. Sure, I did it the wrong way, but there you go. Got it. Okay, time to put the decal on. And this decal is a little bit smaller than what was on here originally, but it's the one I have, so I'm going to use it. And it's a water slide decal, so I just need to put it in some water for, I don't know, five, 10 seconds maybe. Okay, so now it's just sliding right off. That looks pretty good. I'll just let it dry. So at this point, the cabinet looks great, except that that shellac is too glossy. I'm in a little bit of a time crunch with this, and I really need to get it done soon. So I think the quickest, easiest way to get a nice satin finish on this is just to spray it with a couple of coats of satin lacquer. I almost forgot about these chips in the veneer here. I have to fix those. I'm not going to bother trying to put veneer in all these little spots. I'm just going to fill it using a hard fill stick. So I'll spray a little satin lacquer over this or so the sheen matches everything else. Time to put it all back together. I am reusing the old speaker cloth with the hole in it because I forgot to get a new one. So just for now, I'm going to put this original speaker aside and put this speaker in here just to demo the Bluetooth thing. I'm not going to trash that original speaker because it might actually work with the original electronics. I don't know. So I'm going to keep it for now. And now I have to attach the Bluetooth thing to the speaker. Somehow I managed to not lose the tiny screws that go in here. And here it is, all finished. It's not perfect, but I think it looks good, especially compared to what I started with. Okay, let's see if I can get this Bluetooth thing working. I think I have some music here on my phone. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. See how it goes. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. And I think this piece kind of looks a bit chunky. I think this piece kind of looks a bit chunky. I think this piece kind of looks a bit chunky. Chunky, chunky, chunky, chunky. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. Just brought home my latest find. Want to try some oxalic acid. Want to try some oxalic acid. Want to try some oxalic acid. Acid, acid, acid.