AMAZING Vintage Radio Cabinet Trash to Treasure Furniture Restoration

Whether these pieces finding their way to me is serendipity or just me being a glutton for punishment, one thing's certain. I have a mess on my hands here. This is a mid-century-esque radio cabinet. It's got a bit of an art deco style. You can see the top is destroyed. We've got some areas of broken trim. The finish is clearly failing pretty much everywhere. It's really bad and there's no knobs on this. It does have beautiful wood grain and I saw the potential this right away but I have my hands full with this one. If you're familiar with my channel, you guys know that I don't run away from crappy veneer and water staining but this top is particularly bad and I think the best course of action here is going to be new veneer. As far as the guts of this piece, I don't know what works and what doesn't. There is no cord on this so I'm assuming at some point it stopped working and they just cut it off. So we'll get into that a little bit later. First things first though, let's get this cabinet smelling better and looking better. Stay tuned. My name is Angie and I refinish furniture. Sometimes I paint and sometimes I don't but I always do what I can to save old pieces from the trash. Welcome to my workroom. I'm going to be starting this project like I start every project with a good clean and an inspection. There's quite a bit of dust and cobwebs and the interior of this piece has that pretty typical old furniture musty smell. With the amount of damage to the finish and that little bit of a musty smell, I kind of wonder if this was maybe somewhere damp or had some sort of water damage at some point but I'm going to do what I can to save it. Pieces like this are a dime a dozen on Facebook Marketplace and usually you can pick one up for about 50 bucks. Even refinished, usually the top prices I'm seeing are in the 250 to 300 range and if you've ever paid somebody to restore one of these, like the components, you're going to spend at least that much just for that. So as a project to flip, these are not ideal. They're great if you want to do something for yourself or if you want to flip it without actually restoring the components and letting the buyer decide if they want to take that on. That's kind of how it goes here. I'm not in a big city or, you know, very populated province in Canada here. There's not very many people around here that actually restore old radios. There's a few but many of them do it as a hobby or they're just really busy and it is expensive these days. So the majority of these are not actually getting restored. A lot of people will rip the guts out and just repurpose the cabinet. That's not exactly what I'm doing here. I am going to clean this up and reinstall it at the end but I'm not going to foot the bill to have this chassis and components restored. It's just not worth it for me. But the cabinet itself, I can definitely save that. Even the speaker on this is pretty damaged. Often when you get punctures and tears in these speakers they can be repaired but this one has, I think, two or three fairly significant holes and I'm not sure if this one can be salvaged. I usually don't throw things away like this. Like even if I do a cabinet and I don't keep the components, I always make sure they go to someone who might be able to repurpose the parts. It just kills me to see so many of these get tossed just because they don't really have a function anymore once they stop working. So if I can save as many as I can, even if it means repurposing them, I'm all for it. Now they're not always very well made. They look beautiful from the outside but the construction of these is usually pretty skin and bones. Very basic joinery and pretty much any value these have is in the beautiful veneers not the construction. So my dreams are dashed a little bit here. I was really hoping that the speaker would be viable but it is not and I was also hoping these slats came out but they don't. That would have been so much easier to refinish them but let's see what we can do. This center piece here almost fell apart in my hands. It's broken in several places and I'm glad I had a good grip on it. Now I love this piece of glass here and I realized as I picked this up that the zero and the 120 had come off and then it just broke in half so I'm gonna have to deal with that later on. This whole section is gonna need to come apart and get glued back together properly. Until then I'm gonna keep deep cleaning here and trying to get as much of this grime and stuff off as possible because I do have some repairs to make here on the bottom. You see that the little metal pins here on the bottom of the feet are really rusted. You know what I think? We had some pretty bad flooding here a couple years back. Not this year. We're in a drought but a few years ago a lot of people had some significant water issues and I'm wondering if this piece was one of them. It's not uncommon for a piece to have water damage on the top or you know one side but it's the entire piece so I don't know. I'm sounding a bit curious about this. Once I have the surface dust all cleaned up I'm gonna go in with some cleaning vinegar. It's stronger than regular household vinegar. It smells pretty bad. You want to make sure that you're well ventilated when using it and I'm using this full strength here and I'm basically just going to wipe down every area. Fun little tip here if you use an orbital sander and you want to help preserve the life of your sanding discs get yourself one of these little rubber blocks. It does a really good job at removing the debris from your sanding disc and you can use it for a lot longer. This is the shelf that the radio components were sitting on. It was pretty gross so I wanted to clean that up and also the glue blocks had failed so reattaching those with some hide glue and actually this piece was missing a lot of glue blocks which you'll see here shortly takes and this piece was no exception to that. There were so many things that had to be re-glued and in this case nails put back in once things were glued down properly. The first two days of refinishing were actually just getting the piece shored up again making sure everything was tight and solid and here's where those blocks were missing so I just grabbed a piece of scrap wood and made myself three or four new glue blocks to put on. Now for this top initially I was kind of hopeful and was considering patching this but she's pretty bad and in addition to all of the which may or may not come out with oxalic acid it's just rippled and it's a mess so I'm choosing to remove the veneer here. Now there's going to be people that say when I remove this and you see the wood underneath why I don't just refinish that wood and the reason for that is when you put veneer on one side of solid wood you always want to have veneer on the other side so there's kind of a trend of people that remove veneer from a piece whether it's damaged or they just don't like the veneer and they find nice wood underneath sometimes it's oak sometimes it's poplar and even though poplar is not an overly expensive wood it has beautiful grays and greens and purples sometimes and people like that but what happens when you do that is you have an imbalance and one side is better able to draw in moisture and it encourages warping down the road so honestly it's probably almost better to remove veneer from both sides rather than just from one side just something to think about. I'm just using a scraper here to get off any little veneer chips that didn't come off and to remove as much of the residual hide glue as possible. Now this here around the edge is not veneer this is a type of finish that's painted on to look like some sort of exotic edge banding but it's actually not it just flakes right off because it's not actually out a chemical stripper and make a mess it just flakes right off with the scraper here. A question I get asked a lot is when I choose to strip and when I choose to scrape and what the parameters are and generally if something is not lead-based so like a lead-based paint or if it's not very well adhered I generally prefer to scrape it's fast it's effective and I don't have to worry about any chemicals. If something is really intact or is lead-based or has a lot of delicate areas like carved features I'll use a chemical stripper because it's just safer for the wood that way. Now you might notice these cracks up at the top and think well let's just stick some glue in there and try to clamp that tight. Unfortunately in this case that's not going to happen these are failed glue joints where the hide glue has dried up over the years and then the wood itself has shrunk away from its original seam. Sometimes if those gaps are large enough you can stick a sliver of wood in there or a piece of veneer they're not quite that big in this case and I don't want to make them any larger so I'm just going to be using a little bit of wood filler in there. Now sometimes you'll get those and they actually are movable in which case you can definitely add some glue and try to clamp them but in this case 100% those are not moving. Now you notice I'm changing direction here with my scraper depending on the wood that I'm scraping. You always want to move with the grain so if you've got grain like this on a diagonal you want to try to move as close to that diagonal as possible. Being really really careful here at the edges it's super easy to chip a piece off. These big seams need to be re-glued so I will do that as well as soon as I am finished with sanding. Now this beautiful wood on the outside might look like maple or birch but it's actually butternut and unlike maple which turns yellow or slightly yellow when you put a clear coat on it butternut turns brown and it's sort of a cousin to walnut and it's used fairly often on these sort of art deco style pieces. To tackle all those small gaps I'm putting some warm hide glue into a glue syringe and this will help me literally inject glue into those places that would be really hard to reach otherwise. Now all of these weird seams on the front are because of the way they built this to give it that curved look without using bent wood like plywood but they're kind of a pain in the butt because I never really want to lie flat so what I found works is putting a little bit of glue on there and then sanding it. Some of the sanding dust will mix with the glue and be kind of like a filler and it's not going to take it away a hundred percent but it certainly does help as you can see. Now as I was sanding this here I noticed a little piece of wood that was very soft and I took my screwdriver in and just kind of poked around and this whole area here is looked like it may have had at some point some sort of bug infestation like something that bores through wood. There didn't appear to be anything active there and the wood wasn't wet but clearly something had happened here at some point so I just scraped away as much of the wood as possible and made sure there was nothing in there and I'm going to use a little bit of this quick wood epoxy to fill that rather than a wood filler. It's going to dry super super hard which is important because this is on the bottom of the piece. I don't want anything that could possibly crumble or break off. It's not literally structural otherwise I would have had to look at possibly replacing a but I did want to fill that with something. I'm getting ready to apply the new veneer to the top. I'm giving the substrate a sand here. Now this isn't a sanding the same way that you would do to refinish something. All I'm doing is making sure that there is no residual hide left on this. So this is that center console that holds the piece of glass with all of the numbers on it and it's held on by these blocks of wood and this metal piece which looks like wood grain but it's not. It's actually metal with a painted grain on it. This little section actually has a lot that needs to be repaired. There's several places where the wood has split so I need to glue all that back together. All of the felt is gone so I'm going to have to replace that and clean up some of the glue blocks. In addition, one side of this has a piece of wood that had split off and you can see it from the front of the cabinet when the console is in place. So I actually have to cut a little piece of wood I absolutely had to clean it but I wanted to be super careful because these metal pieces with sort of painted on or baked on wood grain it's really easy to scrub that off so you want to be super careful. I'm just using a very gentle cleaner and a non-abrasive pad to do this and once it was clean I gave it a bit of some rust proofing because there was a little bit of rust starting on the bottom there and then once that had set up for a while I actually gave this a couple sprays of lacquer. So we're looking pretty good now. I've got the cabinet all stripped and sanded. Now these I'm going to be staining brown but the areas in between the slats as well as these posts were stained black and I'm going to be doing the same thing. What I'm not going to be doing is having the sides dark. Normally I like to do that but I'm just going to be staining the bottom which is actually popular and the trim around the edge at the top this water-based stain in the color American Walnut and I'll be using the black water-based stain for in between the slats and then the sides are just going to be clear coated with Orizoil just like the front. Now the reason I'm opting to use a water-based stain versus oil is because I want it to be a little bit opaque and it's pretty easy to do that with this water-based stain. I don't mind if a little bit of the wood grain shows but I want most of it obscured. Again this has nothing to do with the sides or the front. This stain also has a fairly matte quality to it when it's opaque like this which I think will be a nice contrast with the wood grain with the Orizoil. Now initially I considered using this Figured Walnut that I have here but then I remembered this. Now this actually is a side panel from another radio. I wanted to save the veneer because I knew eventually it would be good for something and you guys I couldn't even believe it when I pull this to the very back line it up and check the front there is about one millimeter of clearance so this just fits and I'm super happy that is going on another radio cabinet. But first I need to cut it. Now you can see I roughly drew a line there. I'm going to go slightly outside of my line because when you're placing veneer it's always important to have a little bit of overhang. So I'm going maybe three or four millimeters past my line. Now when you're cutting veneer it's important that you don't try to cut through in the first stroke or two. It's wood fibers not paper and especially when you've got wood like this that is sandwiched. Now this layer on top here is running in one direction but the veneer on the bottom is running in the opposite direction. So it might slice nicely as you go with the grain on this side but on the opposite side you're cutting across the grain. So you want to do several shallow cuts just until you get through. You can actually hear the fibers breaking. If you try to force it you will absolutely tear the veneer underneath and it won't be a good day but this was in fact a very good day because this actually fits. I'm going to be adhering this with hide glue and I'm going to be applying the glue to both the veneer and the top of the cabinet. Now hide glue tends to gel up pretty quickly depending on the weather so I need to move fairly quickly with this. The good thing about hide glue though is that if for some reason I take too long I can actually just take an iron and just put a towel under it and heat up the veneer. That wood glue will reactivate but to move quicker I'm just using this little squeegee thing to kind of smooth it out but you do want it to be as uniform as possible. Once I have the glue spread I quickly put this on top that it positioned by taping it at the back and then you want to use a squeegee or a veneer hammer it's called. I don't have one but basically what that does is it helps squeeze all the glue so you don't have lumps and bumps. It doesn't adhere by pressure like the 3M veneer that you've seen me use. It's a little bit different. What I'm doing instead of trying to press it to adhere I'm literally like I said squeezing the excess glue out. I'm going to use tape all around and then use a couple of pieces of plywood with some weight so normally you would clamp this down with cauls. I don't really have a good way to clamp this because of the shape of it but there's over 100 pounds of weights on there so I'm pretty confident that this is gonna be okay. Once that set up overnight I came back in and pulled off all of the tape. Now I can get to work with trimming and I just used a sharp knife and my sander to get those edges. Now that top if you recall had some damage to it. There's a couple of spots here where the veneer was a little bit on the thin side but I don't think that's gonna matter too much. Nothing about pieces this age is perfect so something I had to learn a long time ago when I started doing this. I'm applying the first coat of Ori's oil here and I think this was absolutely that were patched. The reason I used a non-colored wood filler is because initially I was going to stain the sides but I decided against it but I'll use a little graining marker later on to blend that in. So like I said I am going to be putting the components back in. They are non-operational right now and whoever ends up with this can decide if they want to restore it, add a bluetooth speaker in here, be easy to add another little shelf if they wanted to do that. That's not something I'm going to take on here. What I do need to do though is come up with some knobs. So I've got this little piece of walnut. I'm just going to run it through the planer make sure that we get everything smooth and flat and I'm actually going to make my own knobs. Now I've done this before with another radio cabinet and I'll link to that video if you like this video. You'll probably like that one so I'll link to it below and I actually used my laser to literally create the knobs and engrave on them in that last video. Doing it slightly differently here I'm actually going to cut the knobs out and make them out of one whole piece and then I will engrave on the top of them. So I mean it comes down to style and size. Now this is a knob that came off an old radio. Obviously it's a bit smaller. This is the one that came off the other radio that I had and this is the replacement knob I made for it. I'm going to do something a bit different. Size wise I'm thinking I like these larger ones so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use this size right here and I'm going to try to position it so that all the knobs basically have the same sort of grain running through them. I need four for the radio but it's always good practice to make at least one extra one as your sort of guinea pig test piece and that's what I'm going to do so I'm going to make five. So after cutting these out on the bandsaw I went to turn off the recording only to realize it never started to record. So this is the aftermath of cutting them all out. Sorry I don't have the footage but yeah. Now because I didn't have a smaller blade in my bandsaw I couldn't get a perfect circle so I basically cut as close to a perfect circle as I could but it needs some refining so I'm going to clean off my sander here and push the knob right up against this rail which will help keep it from wanting to fly forward on me and basically just sort of sneak up to that reason I have this shoved up in the corner is because I'm going to have the laser cut out a little circle that I can use as a template and if I do it in the middle the chances of this staying straight are pretty slim unless I clip this down. You know you got to take the knob out and it moves and then you're kind of screwed for the next one so I like putting it up here. It's a fixed location and it makes batch engraving really easy. So I'm just basically cutting out a circle the approximate size of the knob. I'm going to select the material that I'm using and the laser is going to cut a couple of circles for me. So again you can see I've moved this but because it's fixed I can put it right back and it's the exact same position. So now I just need to test a knob and then grab this one and it actually didn't fit in either. These are slightly different size holes so I'm gonna have to cut one more that's just the slightest bit bigger and this one actually does the trick. So this is the actual radio cabinet as was advertised in the catalog that it came out in and you can see the buttons here they have these stripes on them they look like this. Now I've made that sort of jagged edge before with the laser but I'm not going to keep the knobs fairly simple for this but I am going to engrave three stripes here on the top. Now this is my tester piece and this is why you should always have a tester piece. Depth looks good but you can see here after putting a little bit of the Odie's dark oil on it which is what I used on the rest of the cabinet by the way these three lines aren't perfectly centered so I'm going to have to make a small adjustment the next time. You can see one side is just slightly bigger than the other and once I hone that in to do is deal with the missing fabric. Now I don't have any speaker fabric but I have some fabric and this is the back side of it so you can't really see the color right now um but it's fairly dark it's got some reds and browns and black and it's gonna have to do. So I'm just using some spray adhesive and I'm making three separate panels. Now the reason I'm doing this is one because the inside of the radio cabinet is curved it's going to make it easier to attach these rather than trying to bend a piece of thick cardboard um but also that middle panel if somebody wants to replace the speaker or make a shelf and put a bluetooth speaker there they don't want it obstructed by this piece of cardboard so they can pop out that middle panel pretty easily but from the front you can't really tell that there's actually three panels. It's so hard to go back and look at what I started with now this took quite a bit of time it was over a week start to finish and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. As you just saw this went through quite the transformation there was a lot of damage initially and it just looked pretty rough so I'm super happy to bring it back. Now the one thing that didn't get done in this video which you might remember from earlier are those decals on the front and I have to give it a couple days for the Orizal to cure before I put these on or they're not gonna stick. Now in the previous radio video that I did I actually made my own decals using silhouette and some gold vinyl um when I made those decals I actually made extra Viking is a very common radio brand here in Nova Scotia so I knew that these would eventually come in handy again so I made extra so these will be added on before selling it. I can't thank you enough for sticking with me through this whole video again if you like this sort of thing don't forget to subscribe I now have channel membership set up so you're welcome to join if you want even more perks but as always your comments likes and shares are the most important thing and I am so grateful for them. Enjoy the review guys and I will see you next time.