Old Art Deco Radio Cabinet Gets a Jaw-Dropping Transformation

This video is sponsored by Careof. Today we are stepping back in time and I'm tackling a project that took way longer than I expected. I'm talking weeks longer. This art deco radio cabinet slash turntable. To say it needed a lot of work is an understatement. Every surface that had a finish on it needed to be redone. There were a lot of structural repairs I had to do. Some choices I needed to make. And this is one of those pieces, when it's finished it looks amazing and everybody's like oh my gosh thank you so much for saving it. But these pieces just don't sell for that much money. So up front, full transparency, this piece took me I don't even know how long. It was spread out over about a month and a half. Obviously it wasn't a month and a half of work, but that's just how long it took between waiting for things to come in and figuring out what I was going to do. I will never recoup that. So this particular project is a project of love, a labor of love, and I hope you enjoy this transformation. Go grab your snacks because this one's a little bit longer than usual and I'm excited to get into it with you. 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. Finding old vintage radio cabinets on Facebook Marketplace is actually fairly common and they're usually not that expensive. But they're often in pretty rough shape as is the case with this one here. If you're able to see past that and see the potential in a piece, these could be great projects. Radio cabinets from this era tend to have a lot of beautiful veneers, burls, and other types of figured wood. The problem is they don't often sell for a lot of money, even completely restored. But if this is a nostalgia factor for you and you're doing this for yourself or as a commission piece for a client, these are great pieces to work on. There are some people who buy these cabinets with the sole purpose of bringing them back to their original condition, including the components. There are others that buy them to repurpose them and make them useful again. In this particular one, the components are especially bad. The wiring is completely shot. The speaker has a hole in it. There are always going to be people that work in their garage on these old pieces and say, oh it's fun and it's easy to redo these old radios. It's not and you have to be really, really careful. Tube radios from this era can have as much as 500 DC volts in the circuit and the safety standards back then just weren't very good. The last thing you'd ever want to do if you buy a piece like this is just take it home and plug it in without having a look at everything first. You could be electrocuted. You could be killed. You could start a fire. These things are dangerous, so just be careful. Do some research before you tackle something like this, strictly speaking about the component and wiring side of it. So if you haven't already guessed, no, I'm not going to be restoring the tube radio part. I am still going to keep the chassis and have a working switch with a light and I actually bought a new turntable to put in this along with new speakers and of course I'm going to be restoring the cabinet itself. Some of the audiophiles are immediately going to turn this video off and that's okay. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube about how to restore these old radios and I know because I watched a bunch of them and every single one of them terrified me. It just wasn't a risk I wanted to take and because these pieces don't sell for very much money, to go and put, you know, several hundred dollars into this, it just doesn't make financial sense when I might get 400 or 500 for the piece when it's done. That's here where I live. It may be different where you are, but without replacing nearly every component on this chassis, which would cost a fortune, by the way, because I can't do the work myself, to me it makes more sense to keep the intended use of this and have it play music, just in a more modern way that is safer and is going to appeal to more buyers because this will be a very pretty box when it's done, but if it doesn't do anything, its usefulness and lifespan is probably quite limited. So the question is, how do you know when something like this is too far gone to restore? Some of it's fairly obvious. We have a melted transformer. The capacitors are gone. The wiring is shot. No idea if the tubes work or not, but considering there was at some point a catastrophic failure, safe to assume this is toast, but just to be sure, we decided to bring in a professional. Time to get to work on restoring the cabinet itself. I'm going to start as I do every furniture flip by removing the hardware and assessing what repairs I need to make in any finish issues, and I wasn't kidding when I said in the beginning that pretty much every finish on this was completely shot. Some of the things I need to deal with regarding the cabinet are these decals. I have to somehow figure out how to refinish without losing them, or if I do lose them, how to replace them. As I mentioned, I do want to put a new turntable in, but the space where the turntable goes is so small that I had a really hard time finding anything that would come close to fitting, and even then, it would have to be a bit of a retrofit. The other problem is that there were no knobs that I could see on this piece, but I did find one. Now, there are some people that are anti-paint, and that's totally okay, but I often see people lose their minds when people paint pieces like this because from the outside, they look like they're so well made. It's craftsmanship. It's artisan work. Most of the time, it looks like this. It's fairly poorly constructed. It just happens to look beautiful on the outside because of the veneers that they picked. No, don't worry. I am not painting this. So many of the joints on this piece were loose, and these were often put together with hide glue, so that's what I'm going to be using for the majority of the repairs here. This was kind of neat. I went to pull this off, and a knob popped out. I'm still three short, but at least I have one, and how I'm going to go about remedying this fact remains to be seen at this point, but I guess we'll see later on. Because I'm going to be re-gluing these in place later on, I need to make sure I get rid of all the old glue, and hide glue is very crusty and can sometimes be a little bit difficult to get out. You can heat it up, which does help, but this is so dry and brittle that I was able to just fairly easily chisel it all out. Just before I start tackling this beautiful burled front panel, I want to take a minute to say thank you to today's sponsor. Sponsors like this are actually what makes it possible to do these long videos. Everyone is on a slightly different path when it comes to personal health, and what Careof does is help you find yours. Nutritionists, formulation experts, in-house naturopathic doctors, they all put in the work to create a supplement routine that is perfect for you. Each of these little pill packs has a daily quote, or joke, or some sort of inspiration on it, which I love, and one of my favorite products is the plant-based protein powder. I'm going to make myself a little shake, and I have a new product here. This is Macca. Just adding a little bit of milk, giving it a shake, and it is smooth and delicious, and I really love this stuff. I've been using Careof for a while now, and I do have some things that I specifically love about it. First of all, if your plans or needs change, you can retake the online quiz at any time and change your products. Taking the quiz is super easy. It takes about five or six minutes, and they just ask you some pretty basic questions about your health and your lifestyle, what your goals are, and builds a recommendation for you based on that. While this is set up as a monthly subscription, you can change it at any time. You can postpone deliveries when you need to, when life gets crazy and you get a little bit behind, it happens. They're super flexible and easy to work with, and even Andrea is still using the products. I love that their pill packs are compostable, and even the boxes I reuse, they're perfect for sending gifts this time of year, and I'm all about reusing. I've posted a few links down below, and you can use my code to save 50% off your first order. It's a hectic world, and this is just one step to help get your health where you want it to be. So starting to get into the real nitty-gritty fun work of restoring this cabinet, you can see just how brutal and flaky this old finish is. It scrapes off super easy. There's no need to use a stripper. This is the original finish. This doesn't appear to have been refinished at any point, but time has not been kind to it, for sure. Speaking of original finishes, I just want to say something, because there's a misconception that once you alter a finish, you have destroyed the value of a piece. That's not always the case, and I think sometimes we watch a little too much Antiques Roadshow and take some of the things they say too literally. If an old piece has a damaged, failing finish, it needs to be repaired. Even museums repair their finishes, because once a piece's finish is not intact anymore and is failing, the longevity of the piece is compromised, and the value goes down. The value does not go down by making those repairs. You lower the value of a piece when you refinish it, that statement should really be altered and amended to say a piece with an intact original finish is more valuable. Damaged one, not so much. And not everything that is old is valuable. So what I'm doing here is I'm taking some photos of those golden decals. The reason I'm doing this is because I'm not 100% sure that I'm going to be able to save these and successfully refinish the front of this piece. I'm going to try to work around them. This is a shellac finish, so with the scraper I should be able to kind of cut down into the shellac and make almost like a box around each one. But I'm concerned with how that's going to look with a new finish on it. There's going to be different levels, and I'm just, I'm not sure. So I wanted to make sure I had good clear images in case I needed to reproduce these, or order them, or hand paint them. Whatever I needed to do, I just wanted to make sure I had a good record of what exactly they look like. The top of the cabinet is in two sections. We've got one section which is stationary. It's fixed, you can't move it or open it. And then the other one is the lid which housed the record player. Both of these have almost no finish left on the top. Tons of water damage and staining, and a bunch of veneer chips and scratches that I'm going to need to work out somehow. This section is kind of weird. It actually looks like veneer edge banding, but it's not. It's all just finish. I've seen it a few times, but yeah, it's finish. It just flakes right off. It's not veneer. I'm choosing to remove it because it's completely damaged in so many areas. Now this section is the underside of that lid that flips up. So when you open the lid to play the record player, this is the side that you'd be looking at. So naturally it's the side that is in the best shape, but even so you can see how fragile it is and flaky. Now obviously on a curved surface like this, this flat scraper is not really going to work. But you can actually get scrapers in different shapes, and this teardrop shaped one is one that I use a lot for details just like this. It's got a fairly large rounded part on one side and a very sharp point on the other. And between the two you can get into a lot of tight spots. Structurally this piece is in fairly rough shape, and a lot of that is because there's really not much for framing. You've got a framing system on the bottom and on the top, but the sides there's just not much holding it together. It's basically just ply and veneer. So one of the things I need to do is bring those separated joints back together in numerous spots on this piece. I am pretty good with a scraper. This is not something I'd recommend someone just learning how to use a scraper do, and that is scrape around a curved edge like this. You see them a lot on those 30s and 40s waterfall style dressers. If you're not careful, you can gouge the wood. But this finish is so flaky, and like I said, I'm very comfortable with this scraper. I'm not really worried about anything like that. I'm excited though to get this cruddy old finish off, and look at that beautiful walnut wood grain underneath. In typical Art Deco fashion, the wood on the bottom here is a different type of wood. It's not walnut. So I'm going to be staining the bottom section. There's a good shot of just how crappy this old finish is, and it doesn't matter how bad it finishes, I always get someone that says, oh, just throw some oil on it. No, ma'am, this is way past the point of just throwing some oil on it. This finish absolutely has to come off. There's no saving it. Not to mention all the dings and scratches and chipped veneer from almost 100 years of use. I just wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you to everybody for your continued support in what I do, whether it's watching and liking and commenting on my videos, sharing them with friends, engaging with me over on Instagram, using the Buy Me A Coffee app or the Amazon wishlist. Every day you guys make me smile and you sometimes hear me complain about haters and it's not that I'm complaining about them, they kind of make me laugh actually, but the reality is you guys have become like a family in a way. And I actually have a little project coming up kind of along this theme and I'm excited to show you what I'm going to be doing. When I said this wasn't constructed that well, you can see here that beautiful piece of burl in the front is only held up by these very thin little slices of wood. All right, so let's get this piece fitting back together properly. You can see it's separated there, it's separated here, in fact we've got some broken dowels and this whole corner piece is bowed out probably because of the broken dowels. So I'm going to remove this center board temporarily, drill out where the dowels used to be, put new ones in and clamp this all back together. I also had to make some decisions about this shelf, obviously whatever new turntable I get it's not going to fit this hole, but I'm opting to leave that in for now and deal with it later. So this glued up really nicely overnight, now I need to focus on getting this curve back to more of 90 degrees and that board with the dowels is going to help with that. I just use a drill guide so that I could squarely drill into those holes and drill out those old dowels and I can apply some hide glue to some new dowels and put that back together. Each side of the back has a screw which is super weird to see but they do look like they're original to the piece. I'm assuming it's just for some added stability at the back here but I hate that it shows through the veneer. So as far as that board that was cracked, I'm opting to use actual wood glue for this. This is something I want a really really strong joint, it doesn't need to be reversible, I want this to always stay together. Construction or wood glue is the best for that. I was working as much glue as I can down into that joint, there's multiple ways to do this, I have glue syringes but I was too lazy to take them out. Sometimes they can be a pain to clean the tips and I was able to get at all the areas I needed to get at just like this, so that's what I did. Now these are the slatted boards at the front that are directly in front of the speaker and basically at the front they had brown wood grain but the tops were stained in this very dark pretty much black stain so I'm going to be doing the exact same thing but I'm going to clean these up a little bit. I'm going to be using two water-based stains on this piece, I'm going to be using Ceman Black and American Walnut. I'm opting to use these stains because they're more opaque than oil-based stain. Antique Walnut would be that strip in the front and then the sides I'm going to stain black like it already was. This is the same stain that I'm going to be using on that fluted base as well. These sides were originally stained black as well but as you can see they're super beat up and gouged from just years and years of use so I'm going to clean this up as well. When these radios came out they were a big deal and not everyone could afford them. It wasn't that they were super expensive it's just it was a different time. Much like we all hover around the TV today people would hover around these radios and I just think that's so cool. Let me know in the comments below if you grew up with one of these or had one or always wanted one. I'm curious. I remember having a record player growing up but it was a little bit more modern than this but I do remember my grandmother having one probably from the 60s or 70s and I used to think it was the coolest thing. And the repair work continues. That little strip at the bottom was loose so I just pried it off and I will glue it back on later. I also have to get at some of these veneer sections that are loose. Taped it down and just stuck a couple little spring clamps on there. The side panels had completely come loose from this framing here. Yeah it was a mess. So onto the space plate now. I'm trying to sand as carefully as I can around those decals. I kept going but at this point I remember I wasn't super happy with how they looked but I wanted to get the odies on and just see. A little window framing the radio dial. It's a different type of wood so I'm just taping it off here and I'm going to use that same Ceman water-based stain in American Walnut. Same as I did on those front slats and the base. Wipe that off and once it dried I was able to go in with my first coat of odies oil. Now I'm opting to use odies oil on this versus more shellac because one I just like the product better but odies isn't going to chip and flake like shellac or lacquer would. It does a really great job of bringing out the beauty of the wood and I want to try something a little bit different with this. The face plate here and the flat burled panel that attaches to it obviously had a bit of a glossy finish because of the shellac and normally with odies it's more of a subtle sheen but I decided I wanted to try to get a more of a glossy sheen almost like a mirror finish. Maybe not quite that extreme but definitely glossier than the typical odies finish. So I do that over the course of several days and I use a couple different products, different layers and a lot of really fine sanding so you'll see that coming up soon. After letting my first coat of odies oil sit for about a day and a half I came in with some odies wood butter and basically it just has a little bit of a higher wax content. Little did I know that eventually that would bite me in the butt because at this point I hadn't decided to do the high gloss finish yet and I hadn't removed the decals but I'm gonna do that and you'll see why. This is the underside of the stationary part of the top and even though no one's gonna see it I still wanted to clean it up and patch that veneer. I also need to make sure I remove any of the dried up glue because I am going to need to glue this and screw this back down. Whenever I see a veneer top with chips I always go around with my fingers to make sure there are not other areas that are loose and 99% of the time there are. This one is a little bit trickier and I always hate cutting across the grain like this and doing patching it can make it difficult to blend in. I've already accepted the fact that this piece is old and it may not be perfect but obviously I still want to try to do the best job I can. I'm going to be putting in a triangular patch here because generally patching on an angle is better than patching at 90 degrees and I'm also just like I mentioned going along the edge here and finding little spots like this one that are loose but maybe aren't immediately visible and then I can start to work on this triangular patch. First to pick a piece of veneer that will match it as closely as possible. We're talking about nearly 100 year old wood here so any modern veneer is going to be a slightly different color but I'm just trying to get as close as possible. Anytime you do veneer patches like this you want to make sure that you clamp it really well and now just to deal with the rest of the little patches. I went ahead and gave the two top pieces a first sanding at I believe it was 150 grit and then I'm going to assess what I'm working with. They both had a fair bit of water damage on it and there's you can see some splotchiness in the so I'm just applying a little bit of oxalic acid to see if I can even that out a little bit. This will stay on until it dries and then be thoroughly rinsed with water dried again before I do anything else with it. The sides of the cabinet are coming along nicely. I'm just giving this my second light hand sanding and then I'm going to go and apply some saman water-based stain to the base. It's a different type of wood so I want it to be a little bit darker than it is naturally. You could leave it light and do kind of a two-tone thing but I want to bring this a little bit closer to the walnut. That walnut looks very light right now but the second you put any kind of clear top coat on it it's going to go beautiful rich dark so I want the base to match that. My two top sections are dry and getting their second sanding and there's a few little spots here that I'm just going to touch up with some wood filler. This one I'm not happy with at all. You can still see some of the scratches from previous damage and I don't love how these decals look at all so I'm hoping to start over. Instead of hand sanding this time I used a power sander with a fairly fine grit but it's just going to give a little more oomph to try to get through those scratches without damaging the veneer. And you can see after putting a little bit of safer solvent on here those deep vertical gouges are gone and I can reapply the odies oil. This means of course I'm going to have to make some new decals but hey I love a challenge right? I'm up to I believe 3,000 grit now on this and people often say they can't get a high gloss with odies. Well that's pretty high gloss to me. Takes a bit of work but well worth it on certain parts. For my final sanding here on the sides I'm opting to use a foam abrasive pad at a super fine grit and I'm applying some safer solvent just so I can see the color and that is absolutely beautiful. You can't see me right now but I was definitely smiling when I was applying that. So that needs to dry before I can add the actual odies so I'm going to go ahead and put some odies on the base here first and it's quite a difference when you look at a dried stain versus applying the top coat. And I feel like I've been waiting weeks for this part and I literally have. This project went on way too long. I had to order parts, I had other things on the go and there are multiple sections of this project I ended up having to do twice and it was just it was a time but this moment right here makes it all worth it. So this decorative trim piece at the front it's pretty rough. You can see I can literally just peel it off with my finger. It's so brittle so regardless of what I opt to do this has to be removed and I gotta start fresh. So I cleaned all of it off, gave it a light sanding and initially my plan was to recreate the same thing. Basically what they did is they stained this black, they added a veneer and then they routed out the design out of that piece of veneer so I thought hey I'll do the same thing but maybe with the laser. I'll use the laser to cut this design so that's why I'm initially staining this black but as I went looking for a piece of veneer to use to cut in the laser and I looked at a bunch of different styles but I ended up finding this burled walnut and I had two pieces that were kind of an odd shape. They were bookmatched and considering what the rest of the cabinet looks like with the bookmatched burl I thought this would actually be perfect. As you can see they're super dry and bumpy so I'm gonna have to deal with that. In the meantime let's have a look here at the radio chassis. So I'm starting to take it apart. There are some things I'm going to be salvaging and some things I'm going to be scrapping. Definitely want to keep this but you can actually see there's evidence that there was something very hot going on inside this radio and that's what makes these so dangerous. They actually scare me a bit. Obviously I want to keep this so I'm just cleaning it up and the rest of the hardware that I'm going to be keeping I'm using some of this evapo-rust on. I really like this because it's biodegradable, it's safe, you don't have to worry about it splashing on your hands and burning through your skin. So Andrew is actually having a look here at the electrical components and this is going to come into play a little bit later on because we decided there were a couple things we definitely wanted to save and this power switch is one of them. But then I saw this and I just have to share this with you. Sorry but his majesty is definitely not getting this radio back. So once we had that out it was time to go and remove the rest of the components here. Now the majority of this was toast. You can see the transform is completely melted. Most of the capacitors were gone and obviously this wiring is old and brittle and we're not going to be using it anyway. It would have been really nice to be able to restore this to working order but I'm not starting with something that is viable and it would cost quite a bit of money to have someone come in and put this all back together, order the parts, and it's just it wasn't going to be worth it. So the slots are back in their new home and now I'm going to make a veneer sandwich. So those dry brittle pieces have been soaked and I need them to dry out and I need them to do it flat. So there's a couple of ways you can do this. This is just water but you can actually condition veneer with an old recipe and you can find different recipes online for it that will make it soft and pliable and I don't need that per se. It's really handy when you're doing curved surfaces but I just need this to be flat. So the fiberglass mesh keeps the paper which absorbs the water from sticking to the veneer and obviously the two boards and the clamps help keep pressure. I'm going to let this sit for about a day and a half to dry out. It's interesting though because once you unclamp these you'll see the humidity and the air come right back into the veneer so as soon as you unclamp it you want to use it. Moving along now and starting to put some of these pieces that were broken back together. Everything's starting to tighten up. It's not as wobbly as it used to be. Now as far as the fabric goes I kind of overestimated how much would actually be seen through those slots so I actually picked out a couple of different fabrics that I thought were kind of fun and colorful but you're not really going to see them so it honestly doesn't matter and this isn't specifically speaker material. I just used some fabric spray adhesive to apply that and put this back on. I'm using some brass polish to bring this handle back and I'm just going to spin this around here so you can see the chaos that is my workroom at the moment. It's supper time and Willy is demanding his supper but you can see here on the right how much better it looks. These did have pieces of felt. I don't have any felt at the moment so I just used some soft cotton rope as a buffer. Now here's the deal with the record player. This is obviously a desktop piece but it was the only thing I could find with these dimensions. It's a very small cabinet. The problem is I was planning to cut this out and recess it so that the lid would close but I didn't account for these two screws and these two screws are what hold that pull-out drawer face on. They just screw up from the underneath so that's not going to work. So plan B is to kind of disassemble this. I don't need these because I'm not using the top that came with it. Honestly this base is pretty much useless and I'm going to take it apart. This bottom bit is just an MDF base that's been rendered out to house the components underneath the turntable and there's a couple things I'm going to have to relocate but I think this is going to fit in much better. You can see it's on an angle there but it won't be. The reason it's sticking up like that is this plug area in the back so that's one of the things I'm going to have to move. And that's the piece there. I'm just going to screw it somewhere else underneath. So the issue of the deck was that I had to remove. I'm lucky enough to have this craft room because I love paper crafting and one thing that every paper crafter loves is a silhouette or cricut and I have a silhouette cameo. So basically what I'm doing, I'm taking those pictures that I took earlier, sending them to my computer and I'm going to use this gold vinyl to recreate these. Now they're not going to be identical but I'm going to get as close as possible. Now I could go through and try to find a font that fits but I'll never find anything exactly like it. So what I'm opting to do is pop into Photoshop, trace them out and then I'm going to use that traced image as a file to send over to the silhouette and that is what it's going to cut out of the vinyl, hopefully. And that looks pretty good. I actually made the viking a little bit larger than it was initially and once I weeded out some of the letters I was able to pull this off and this is what my decals are going to look like. Now if you remember the original decals, they had a bit of a black outline around it. I'm going to try to do that with a marker. It looks terrible here because some of the black is actually off but definitely you'll see what I mean here. These bits here, these are not going to transfer. To prove that I am offering up my laptop case as a sacrifice just to show you what this would look like and when I peel it off all those stray little black lines peel off with it. And that's basically what I'm left with. Is it perfect? No. But it sure beats trying to hand paint these. Um, but here's where the problems really started to compound. So I wasn't really thinking ahead far enough and the reason the tape is not sticking to this is because I've already polished it with wood butter which has a bit of a wax component to it so it's not sticking. I decided to try the decal anyway and as you can see literally nothing stuck. Not surprising. So I used a little bit of Odie's safer solvent to try to dissolve some of that wax content to see if I was lucky enough that it would work and once again it just was not sticking. Now this stuff is usually pretty sticky. This is entirely because of the finish and what I ended up having to do was sand through the finish and then apply it to that sanded area which I will then go over again with Odie's but if I look at the original pictures the decals are actually much higher because the buttons are huge. So I had to do it again. I had to sand it all back and move it up higher. Now if I was doing this on like a polyurethane this would be disastrous but because it's Odie's you can actually get it back. Hey everyone! I offered to add new electrical components to make the old cabinet come back to life. Angie asked for a light and a receptacle for the turntable. I wanted to make sure the experience was as authentic as possible so I used the old switch, soldered new leads to it, added a receptacle for the 12 volt adapter and made sure the light would turn on with the switch. I think it turned out pretty good considering what we had to work with. You'll see this all come together at the end of the video. So it's actually been a couple of days now and I'm ready to use this veneer so I've only had it out in the open air for a couple of hours and you can see it's already wanting to curl up again. So I'm going to tape this down while I cut it and immediately get it glued. To get a perfect seam in the middle in between these I'm just overlapping them by the slightest bit. We're talking about a millimeter and just getting rid of the shavings. Once I have it glued on and applied I'm going to clamp it up and I'm going to leave this overnight. While that's all happening I'm getting the rest of the components done and you can see this cabinet is still fighting me. She hurt me. Not cool. We really are in the home stretch now. There's only a few things left to do. I need to add this flip up lid. Get that sorted and I need a shelf for the speakers. Now there's really nothing to screw into here except this board. The sides are basically just veneer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drill up through and I'm going to put a couple of brace pieces on the bottom. This is a piece of walnut shelving. I actually bought a bunch of these from a guy on Facebook Marketplace. He was a cabinet maker and he made up a bunch for a project and the people didn't like them for whatever reason so rather than lose the money he decided to sell them on Facebook Marketplace and I knew eventually they'd come in handy. Some finishing touches on the outer cabinet and I wanted to put this back but I wanted to protect it so I decided to put it in a plastic sleeve but before I attached it again I thought I'd write a little handwritten note to stick in there. Now because I haven't had enough challenges already I have to create four new knobs for this. Now there is one original knob but getting it identical is going to be very difficult. There's a couple of ways you can make knobs like this. A lot of people will cast them and make molds of them. I really want to make these out of solid wood. It's really going to test what this laser can do. As you guys know I recently got a CO2 laser from Xtool and I'm new to lasers but I'm still learning and trying to find really cool ways that it can help me in my business. So supposedly this can cut 18 millimeter solid walnut. This is 15 millimeter or so I thought. I'll explain that in a minute but it didn't seem to cut all the way through. It was very close. I could almost pop it out and there were actually a few that I could pop out. The problem is because of this design it's so fine on the edges that to cut through it it just charged so much that it wasn't really usable but then I figured out what my mistake was. When I plugged in the data I plugged in the height of the original knob not the height of this walnut. So I cut myself off by a couple millimeters which is why I didn't cut through on all of them. But then I got thinking what if I did this in layers? It might be easier. So I used a walnut ply. This one here which is only five millimeters thick and very similar to what this is. And these walnut wood sheets were actually an Amazon Wishlist gift a while back but I don't know who sent it. There was no note. I used those to make the top. So basically we've got a bottom piece that gripped piece and then the top I'm going to use with the thinner walnut and we're going to round it over. Then of course I have to engrave the images on. And this is what I ended up with. This is just my tester piece so it's not perfect but it all came together and I'm actually really happy with these. So let's make our four for the cabinet. I'm just using some super glue and accelerator to bond all the pieces together. It is super strong and I'm not at all worried about these coming apart. Once I have the base attached to that little cog-like part I'm going to add the tops. And Andrea's actually helping me out here because I was super short on time and she's basically just using the surf prep upside down and pushing it onto the handle which runs it kind of like a belt sander. This is a new addition in my shop and I'm super happy to have it. This drill press was an Amazon wishlist gift and it just blows my mind. I love finding these unique ways to use this new tool that I have, the laser. Like this would have been so difficult to do by hand. Now I know it's been a very long time since the beginning of this video so I wanted to refresh your memory with what I started with. I picked this up off Facebook Marketplace. It took me about a month and a half in total to do this between waiting for parts and everything going wrong having to redo things a couple of times. I've spent probably between three and four hundred dollars buying the piece, the parts for it like the record player products used not to mention my time and Andrea's time. 280 gigabytes of data to sort through. 14 hours total of footage to sift down into this one hour video. It's all coming together now. I'm so excited to show this to you. Enjoy the reveal and I will see you next time.