Restoring an Old Steering Wheel – An Incredible Transformation

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is one of my favorite videos. I've always been fascinated by English sports cars and over the years I've worked on quite a few on the woodwork of quite a few cars not just sports cars but Rolls and then Jaguars, MGT series, Triumph as you'll see in this video and I've also worked on quite a few Mercedes-Benz. They have a particular problem with the wood that surrounds the interior of the windshield. What really stands out in this video is the level of detail and the transformation itself. With each coat of varnish on the steering wheel the color just develops, gets deeper, the glow of the wood starts to come through and you know it's like the character of the wood just keeps revealing itself layer by layer. You know the varnish doesn't just protect the wood which it does really well but it just adds this color and depth and this kind of richness that you just can't rush or fake. I know I probably have too many before and after shots but I just couldn't help myself. If you like this video hit the like button, subscribe, share, I'd appreciate it. This is the steering wheel of a 1965 Sunbeam Tiger number 36 in production. It was originally sold at the World's Fair in New York in 1964. In Britain these cars cars were called Alpines and they were considered to be underpowered for the export market. So the manufacturer Roots had Carl Shelby in California design modifications to the car so that it could fit a 4.3 liter Ford V8 engine, a four-speed transmission, and of course the appropriate suspension. The cars were then manufactured in England with the Ford parts and then exported to the U.S. and the rest of the world. This particular car was found in California. It had been stored for 50 years. The steering wheel is in usable condition. Even this hub seems to be okay to me but I'm only concerned with this actual steering wheel itself. I'm going to tape off the hub and tape off the spokes and they can be dealt with later but they they just need to be cleaned up I believe. Obviously there's problems with the finish. It's all cracked. It's flaking off. There's a crack here I'm assuming that's like the original joint of the wood, probably steam bent wood, but then I noticed it continues here. It's like this. So that's a patch put in. Hard to know what that is. It still could be from the original, could be from the factory, and that patch could have gone over the original joint. That joint seems to continue over to here and as you can see there's a piece of the inlay missing. There's also numerous openings like this. Clearly the steering wheel was made with two pieces of wood here and here and laminated together. So the first step will be to tape off the hub and the spokes. I want to clean this metal a bit first. I just want to see what kind of condition it's in. I'm just trying to be really careful. This brown seems to be superficial but I'm not sure. If these bars are solid aluminum it's no problem but sometimes these things are plated and I'm trying to determine if that's corrosion of plating or it's something on the surface. Yeah I think it's coming off. I wouldn't use anything harder than a thumbnail. I suppose maybe a credit card. Yeah it works well. It's not like magic though. You still got to work at it a little bit to get it to come off. Yeah the back side too. Okay that worked well. I'll finish these up and then start taping off. I'm going to try out some stripper in a small area here. Let's see what it does. I'm gonna let that sit. I'll keep checking on it every 15-20 minutes or so to see if it starts to loosen up. Okay I've let this sit for a couple of hours now. Okay it's loosened things up a bit. Let me get a regular hook scraper. So what I'm going to do is brush a little more stripper on that area and instead of scraping I'm taking this coarse steel wool. It's number one steel wool and I'm going to scrub it. That's coming nice and clean. I'll put more stripper on there. It's important to just let the stripper do the work and really try to minimize the scraping. But I realized I still need to test one thing first. I need to see what happens with this inlay on this side. I don't know what the inlay is made of. So I've got some stripper here in this area on the inlay. I'm going to scrub it a little gently here and see what happens. I'm still a little unsure what's going on there. I'm going to take just some plain water and a scotch-brite maroon pad and just scrub off the stripper. I think it's okay. I'm going to let this dry and even sand it a little bit so I can see what I've got there. Okay this is a little 150 sandpaper. It seems to be sanding up okay. I'm still not sure. I think it's not wood though. I think I'm going to try scraping down the finish on the top outside of this wheel. You know over the inlay. See if I can get down to the wood and then maybe I can tape off the inlay. But the finish is awfully thick. Well that's a bit of work but I like it. I didn't like getting stripper on this material over here. I don't know what it was. I think I'm going to go ahead and scrape this down and then I'll make a decision. The underside with the finger grips are not going to be easily scraped. I think I might scrape this down, tape it off, and use stripper on the rest of it. The grain direction is tough to deal with. It's changing constantly throughout the circumference of this wheel. So still my intention all along to after scraping still tape off this inlay and strip the back. But I think as long as as I'm in scraping mode I might as well just give it a try. I'm not so sure because of the finger grooves that is possible. Okay I've got all the finish scraped off. That was a tough process. Probably took about four hours just to scrape it. There was a a big split and a chip came off and I glued it down right away with some five minute epoxy. But more importantly I had noticed from the beginning that there's a seam that this was a lamination. The finish was so thick it didn't move. But now that I've scraped it down and of course handling it you can see a lot of movement in this joint. From the start I had seen this line around the perimeter on the inside of the rim also and of course it was no secret this was lamination but that finish was so dark and thick I couldn't tell if it was actually supposed to be a line there. Now I can see that there's not. I've got to go everywhere that there's a space. I got to clean this stuff out and I'm going to get some west system epoxy in there. I'm going to glue the first section from here to here. I'm going to do the other side also. I sort of feel like if I worked hard enough on this I could probably take all the wood off of the metal rim inside. I do not want to do that. I'll do it section by section. I feel like I've got as much of the old glue or finish or whatever it was out of there as I can. So I'm going to use west system, the 105 epoxy resin, the 206 slow hardener and a syringe. I won't use any thickener. These pumps are calibrated to the correct proportions. So this is denatured alcohol. Okay let's see what we've got here. I knew the epoxy would leave a dark darkness, you know, where the excess epoxy was. But I still haven't I haven't sanded the steering wheel yet. I think it's going to sand up just fine. I still need to fill these cracks anyway. The other half of the steering wheel has got the same problem. Not to the extent of the other half, I don't believe. Although when I start digging a little bit it might loosen up. But even after getting this area well cleaned out I'm not getting any movement. Yeah, nothing. But I will still fill this area with epoxy and any areas like that and clamp it just to make sure. This area appears to have not been previously filled or glued but luckily it's got plenty of movement here. I'll be able to get the epoxy in and clamp that up. I'm going to glue up this off camera because it's the exact same procedure that I did on the other half yesterday. Okay I'm going to take these clamps off. Then I got a bunch of sanding to do. I have places to do some filling. Let's get started. I've got a few places that need to be filled. The most obvious is where the inlay is broken away. Also note here that the damage also is where the original boards were glued together. And a lot of the places that need to be filled are in that category at the joints where they were originally joined. The second section of inlay which needs to be filled is here. And there's a crack here though that is not where a joint was. So there's a few of those and then around the joints. For the filler I'm going to use Mohawk epoxy putty sticks. I just recently learned that they are good for exterior use also. And for the where the inlay is I'm going to mix it with some black powder stain. I've taped off around those spaces of missing inlay. I don't want any of the black putty getting into the grain. Now I'll use this walnut epoxy stick you know without obviously without any stain in it for the rest of the cracks. Okay I got all my putty applied and now it's just a whole lot of sanding. And I'm sure along the way I'll find a few more places to putty. Here are some areas where there's material missing from this inlay. It's still black so I don't need to mix up black putty. But what I'll do is fill it with clear five minute epoxy. Mix the epoxy for 45 seconds no less. Your putty lines need to be distinct. The putty doesn't feather out. You can't spot sand either. You need to take down a large area here slowly and carefully. I finally counted up how many of these finger grooves there are. There's 28. See all those fuzzy areas? That's end grain. They got a lot of grain changing going on in these grooves. But those areas will sand up well with the lighter grits. Back to that five minute epoxy. All right I'm good sanding with 100 grit and before I go any further I'm going to give it a treatment of oxalic acid. This wood just looks dark to me and now that it's all sanded I'm going to give see what the oxalic acid will do to it. So I've got oxalic acid which technically is not a bleach. I can't weigh it. I just use this measuring cup. It's like one ounce you know like 30 milliliters liquid measure. I use two of these. I'll use hot water just from the tap. Three quarters of a liter of quart. Measurements aren't critical. Tap water runs pretty hot here. I get about it's about 55 degrees centigrade, 133 fahrenheit. It's a beautiful color. The back of the wheel looks very dark. I take it back. It's pretty similar to the front. All right this looks good. It definitely is a little lighter and yesterday evening off camera I came in took this to the sink and gave it a good rinsing to get all that oxalic acid off. So now I can resume my sanding with 150 and then 220. Back to the old finger grooves. You know all that fuzziness that's due to the end grain in these finger grooves does come out with the 150. Any remaining little fuzziness will I'll get with a 220. You know earlier I said I'm going to sand with 220 and what I really should have said and what the real term is is that I'm going to sand up to 220. By that I mean I've done the heavy sanding with 100 grit and I can see sort of scratches and a little bit of fuzziness in here. I need to sand all those 100 grit scratches out with 150 until there are no more 100 grit scratches. They've been replaced by 150 scratches. Okay that looks good. Looks a lot better. It's still a little fuzzy but remember this is a figured wood cut on a curve like this. It has all kinds of crazy grain patterns. Now I'm going to try to sand it with 220 and get rid of all the 150 marks. Okay that's looking good. I'm going to put a little alcohol on it. Let's see what it looks like. It looks good. There's no point in sanding higher than 220. At that point you're just burnishing the wood. In fact most finish manufacturers tell you to stop at 150. Okay finally ready to start the finishing process. I'm going to blow this off with air and then this is the finish I'm going to be using. Waterlox marine varnish and first I'm going to seal it with this sealer that they recommend. Now per the instructions I'm going to wipe it down with paint thinner and then let it dry for about 15-20 minutes. So now once again following the directions I'm going to apply a coat to this and keep it wet for 15 minutes and then wipe it off completely. All right I'll do some cleaning up while I'm keeping an eye on this keeping it wet for 15 minutes. Okay actually more than 15 minutes have gone by and now I can wipe it off. All right let this dry overnight and I'm going to take this oily rag outside. All right off camera I put a second coat of the sealer on. I did it 24 hours after the first coat as per the directions but then I've let that coat dry for 44 hours you know almost two days. So I'm going to go over it lightly with a scotch brite pad just looking for any problems making sure it's nice and smooth. It's not necessary to sand between coats. Then I'm going to do I have touch-ups to do and then I will apply the first coat of varnish. For the touch-ups I'm going to use some dye stain brown mahogany dye stain. I got to get this in a better position here. Often it'll take two coats of the dye stain over this finish which is a oil finish. It takes a while to to start to soak in. Once it goes in then you can go back and it absorbs better. That'll do it. Okay ready for the first top coat. All right 24 hours has gone by. I've had the heat up all day. It's just a little cool outside and it looks good. I'm going to go over it with a gray scotch brite pad and then put another coat on it after the gray pad or sanding. You should go over it with some paint thinner. I'm not using paint thinner but I'm using a similar product this Mohawk wax wash remover. Okay I've let this second top coat dry for two days. I've kept a little portable heater on during the daytime and it's nice and dry. I think I can cut this back again with the gray pad but a little more aggressively this time. As the finish dries and begins to shrink you begin to be able to see the grain again start showing up and so I'll need to cut this finish back and recoat it as many times as it takes to fill that grain in completely. I'm finding I have enough finish on here to sand a little bit so I'm sanding with 320 being very careful. It's easier to sand through with sandpaper than with the gray pad so I feel like I'm cutting it back a little bit more with the 320 and then I go after it with the finish it up with the gray pad. Okay now I'll wipe it down again with the good old wax wash remover and a clean cloth. This will be the third top coat. It's been 48 hours since the third coat and I've kept the shop heat up to 72 degrees or like 22 degrees celsius and I'm going to sand it now with 500 paper 500 grit paper and I hope that this will be the final coat. Okay I've let the steering wheel dry for seven days and we had a few cool nights and I turned the heat up on those cool nights. I think it's ready for the final step. The steering wheel looks good but it could look better. I'm hoping you can see here a little bit of graininess a little bit of orange peel very very fine and a difference in the sheens. I'm going to use some 1200 grit wet or dry paper. This is black paper. I'll use water as a lubricant. I'm applying very little pressure. Okay I've just done one quarter of the wheel and just the outside rim. I want to try out figure out what the next step is. I have some medium grade compound here. I'm going to put some in a cup and add a little water to it. These are 3M white pads. They don't have a lot of abrasive quality by themselves but they're great for compounding. A little more water and I keep adding water to the pad as the effect of just you know it's less and less compound each time. The next step I'll use this compound. It's extra fine. That's a bit of a jump from the medium but on a small object like this it will work. All right I'm liking that. Okay well that's uh that's a small section there. I just gotta go all the way around, insides, the finger grooves. There you go. Steering wheel of a 1965 Sunbeam Tiger. I've got about 30 hours in this job and I use these tools and materials. If you like this video please hit subscribe, like, and feel free to share it on other platforms.