How to restore an Antique Clock

Cooper's, the stripper who always delivers. Hi everybody, back again. Today we're working on this antique manual clock. If I can get it to stop squeaking. Clean up that little bit there, and I'll tell you all about it. Okay. Hi everyone, I'm Simon Cooper. I'm from Cooper's Strip Club. and we're coming here today from Woodville, our base camp, and I picked up this clock I recently got from Hawera and couldn't help myself. It's got this really crunchy dried old shellac. It's just really, really, really lost all of its color and everything like that. And so about five minutes ago, ten minutes ago, somewhere in that range, I sprayed our stripper on that section, and so we began this video with me giving it a scrub. So what we'll do is we'll do that again down here. So I've got this soft copper detail brush. and we just, this old shellac here has turned into something like toffee. You can just see it's all, Now we go in with our flush. We've got the red and the blue. The red is the stripper. That does all the dissolving, and the flusher rinses it clean. So this is more of a job of liquefying the shellac and it just turns into this toffee, as I say, and then wiping it off with a rag. And we'll likely do it around a second time. This piece will end up at our Home show. So if anyone is going to come to our booth, they'll be able to take a look firsthand. So these are pieces that are practically impossible to perform. In other words, We've got the shadow over there. I'm not sure about that. That's better. It's all about liquefying down there. So we'll give that another round with the Strip. So we've got most of it off the first time around. Just to show you our guide. So Usually it's always three steps. Step one, take off what's on the surface or strip what's on the surface. So what I did to start with is I put the stripper on, left it for about five minutes, and then gave I scrubbed it with the brush and then rinsed it because it was so sticky. So we're sort of Adapting the system a bit here. We've gone from part one to three, and now I've gone back. We're getting down to the bare essentials, but I want to extract the details from the core. So now we're doing Number two, and then a three again. So each project is a slight variation of the method. You kind of have to look at each job as it comes and go, okay? Well, how do we interpret it? So back to the brushes. For jobs like this, steel wool is really a waste of time. And the felt pads—these soft copper brushes are perfect. They don't scratch the wood. They dive straight into all those carved areas. And then as it becomes nice and somewhat less sticky as the first time around, on with the flush, clean rag, and that's all, you can see how it's all flying off with that flush. And we're getting to see into the bottom of the carved parts, all the little stamps they use, where they stamp it when they carve it, and so on. They have these tiny stamps with those impressions on it. So that was all invisible before. If you go over to the Before the side, I mean, you can't see any of that detail. That's all on its way out. All just light hand work. So of course this can be used on the old, good old-fashioned sewing machines, all those types of projects, anything with these carvings in, the bentwood chairs with all the pressed carvings. And again, It's, people look at those carvings and think, how am I ever going to deal with those? Now our The stripper is virtually pH neutral. Therefore, no damage is being done to the wood. It does not It doesn't matter whether it's a veneer or, in this case, solid timber—we're not causing any damage. It's just working by dissolving, then the flusher rinses and cleans. So once more, if you have any friends around the world who might be interested in looking at this, we air freight our products worldwide. And so they're available to anybody. Anyone's got any questions, any projects they are interested in, and how our product would be useful to them. Just leave a comment there or email us. Visit our website, which is coopersstripclub.com. There are countless videos, photos, pieces of information, and all sorts of other content. Enjoy the live stream because we never know exactly what's going to happen. I've been doing This has been going on for nearly 40 years now. So down again, a curveball comes at you. Let's have a look at that. I reckon a little bit more stripper will just improve it. And the bottom of those Bits, there's still a bit of sticky stuff. So no harm in going back a step. You're not going to lose its patina. You can just work that stripper in. Does anyone know this old sound? It's like the beginning of a Pink Floyd song. Actually, I'll show you a little trick. My brush is getting a bit sticky. What I do is I clean them up. Stripping, you usually put it on and leave it on for a certain amount of time to Do it dissolving. Flusher, you don't. You spray it and scrub it simultaneously. Of course, we've got them color-coded—the stripper and the flusher—to go with the guide. So three times around, there's obviously plenty of the original shellac there. And that'll dry off. Now, while it's wet with the flusher, this is the color it would be if you applied a clear finish to it. That's a pretty massive difference. And some people would think, okay, We have to put a dark stain back on it and refinish it that way. And other people can, They'll say, no, I prefer it more the way it's stripped back. That's all personal preference. I'm sure there are all sorts of schools of thought. We have our own finish, which would again look quite good on it. You've probably seen it on other videos. This is our moisturizer in my messy bottle. And this is like a skincare product for wood. a blend of gum, oil, and wax. Now, normally you would leave this to dry, But since it's a live stream, you don't want to wait half an hour for that. So I can show you how it would look. You just apply the moisturizer. This is, As I say, it's a little bit like skincare for wood. The wood just drinks it up, and this has been sitting on top of a mantlepiece. Probably why this has become so dry is because of the fireplace. So the wood is going to be as dry as a bone. And this will just keep feeding, feeding, feeding. Now, what we do is we usually leave it for a couple of days. And let it break away. Whenever it seems to need more, just slap on more on top. Once you decide it's no longer necessary to drink, wipe off any excess. Now, if you use moisturizer, You can't apply another finish to it. You can't polyurethane it or shellac it or Any of those kinds of things. When you go down the moisturizer trial, that's where you are. But when you see this finish, you won't want any other finish. So once again, two days later, Thanks for hanging around. And it's fully absorbed and all that. And then you just simply buff the excess away and it produces what we call a mellow glow. And you can mess around and Go into the nooks and crannies if you like. And we'll be fine. We're done. So that's a quick once-over. Pretty amazing difference. And you can let your mind wander to other places where you could use it. Any paint, any varnish, any surface. And I'll wrap it up with my nice cheesy line. Are you looking for a stripper? A stripper that Really gets it off. Coopers. A stripper who gets it off every time.