Thousand Dollar Supercar's vintage radiogram drinks cabinet

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

I'm going to attempt some cosmetic refinishing of parts of the cabinet, for example the upper surface of the lid was pretty rough:

The rear edge of the lid was chipped (see RHS of photo), so I bought some coloured wood putty and tried to strip/sand/fill/varnish the lid. Results not great so far. Character marks still exist under the varnish, surface of the varnish is still rough. Haven't given up yet.

I also wanted to improve the original plastic radio knobs, but this is AFTER cleaning and trying to polish them on a bench grinder:

The plastic still looks oxidised / dirty, but it doesn't want to polish to a shine. I may substitute new knobs with blingy brass trim.

I've been refitting various panels to the skeleton of the radiogram, untangling wires or cutting corners and bodging things until they fit. One of Barry's 100-year-old radio faceplates now helps cover the hole for the main magic eye, while also providing a viewing window:

I may try to tidy that up further. The important part is that you can see the valve doing its thing:

For the last ~2 years, my control panel has been floating loose so I can flip it over and do some wiring, then balance it on its side to operate the switches, hoping nothing shorts out..

Exciting update - it's finally mounted back in place, which wasn't easy. 

And even now that the control panel is full of messy electrical stuff, nothing gets too munched or shorts out when the actuator lowers it down flat!  (this was mostly good luck rather than good management)

Aaaand when you open the lid of the radiogram the controls raise up automatically OMGmylifeiscomplete.

Yuss.   

[Stu]

This is really cool! Can you take some photos or a video of the whole thing?

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

12 hours ago, Stu said:

This is really cool! Can you take some photos or a video of the whole thing?

When it's finished. 

The radiogram has been stranded on top of a table in my back room for the last half dozen years. I literally cannot move it - I live by myself, it's heavy and too big to get my arms around. I can't really take good exterior photos of it in its current location, and the exterior isn't changing much anyway. I'm trialling various badges above or below the display window, and I'm considering ditching the original knobs in favour of these shiny ones:

I've cut more pieces of mirror to line the backs of the booze cupboards (originally there was just a single piece of brown chipboard over the whole rear of the cabinet). Over the years I have bought a couple of decanters (for class) and various skull-shaped vessels (what class?). No genuine old crystal decanters though, in case the lead leeches into my booze if I use them for long-term storage. I must hunt down some decanter tags.

One day when the project is done, I'll bribe someone to come and help me carry it out to its designated spot in the living room for some beauty shots and videos. Then before I get the camera out, I'll celebrate by trying absinthe for the first time....

....turning on whatever tunes seem appropriate...

.... getting hammered and tripping out to all the pretty lights.  

 

[63Ragtop]

This thing is so cool, I would love to have such a device in my lounge! Music, drinking, functional steampunk!! Even the noise the panel makes as it raises is cool! 

[BlownCorona]

i was watching a british classic car buy/sell show thing the other day and they wanted to add a shift knob to their alfa that matched better than the aftermarket one it had. 
the went to see a guy to wood turned things but who filled in the cracks of wood with metals and smoothed them off, it looks amazing. they did pewter for the alfa to match the steering wheel spokes. pewter melts really easily and i rekon that a bit of that here and there on your cabinet would look amazing. 

oh i actually managed to find a clip that included the whole process

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=349276389564132

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

49 minutes ago, BlownCorona said:

i was watching a british classic car buy/sell show thing the other day and they wanted to add a shift knob to their alfa that matched better than the aftermarket one it had. 
the went to see a guy to wood turned things but who filled in the cracks of wood with metals and smoothed them off, it looks amazing. they did pewter for the alfa to match the steering wheel spokes. pewter melts really easily and i rekon that a bit of that here and there on your cabinet would look amazing. 

oh i actually managed to find a clip that included the whole process

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=349276389564132

Interesting.. Someone needs a bollocking for the subtitles saying 'Alpha Spyder'.  I have sanded the cabinet's top lid back again using an electric sander this time, and today I was planning to skim one or two more areas of the lid with the coloured wood putty. I think the remaining chips and dents are few enough in number that it would look weird filling them with pewter instead. It would be like I accidentally splashed molten solder onto the cabinet and couldn't get it off again.  

I wonder how the pewter thing would look on my Jag's centre console veneer which is riddled with cracks:

I'm hoping that what I learn from mucking up this radiogram cabinet can help me tackle my great grandfather's piano next. It's burr walnut underneath heavily darkened varnish, and it could probably look great if I just paid thousands to someone competent...

[BlownCorona]

1 hour ago, Thousand Dollar Supercar said:

it could probably look great if I just paid thousands to someone competent...

you and i both know the way to go is to spend twice as much and do a worse job yourself. 

[h4nd]

Oooh, ooh! Jaycar has naked bulb green and blue neon indicators now!

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

On 16/07/2023 at 21:30, h4nd said:

Oooh, ooh! Jaycar has naked bulb green and blue neon indicators now!

"Would you believe it? After about 100 years of orangey-red neons we now can get blue and green ones! You'll buy one out of curiosity!"

HOW DID THEY KNOW? 

I was not aware of these and my project does not incorporate any. =(

This weekend I've been doing a terrible job of refinishing the cabinet. Life would be easier if I was Renaissance Man, but unfortunately I am easily defeated by some bits of wood. I should have just put some wax onto the original finish to hide the scratches and called it a day. Instead my house is all full of dust and the cabinet hasn't been improved. 

I kept finding that I hadn't taken enough of the old finish off before recoating. I think the old finish contained a bit of stain, so when I went over the wood with waterborne clear varnish, it looked blotchy:

The clear varnish also isn't quite dark enough to match the front panels, and I don't want to touch those because of the knobs etc sticking through them. So I've sanded that side panel again to have another go. It's OK to keep redoing the sides of the cabinet over and over because they're thick, but the top lid's a different story. It's thin and the wood is damaged from the sun, so I can't keep sanding it indefinitely. It's also warped because it's hollow / not solid wood, so when I hit it with my electric sander, the stain doesn't get removed from all the low spots:

If I try to put clear varnish on it from that state, the dark patches look even darker. (this is me developing the art of furniture restoration myself from scratch by trial and error, because there's no such thing as the internet or night classes)

I've attacked the lid some more to try to dig down to clean wood, and now I'm trying a solvent-based oak-stain-urethane on it. Who knows if it will match the original finish of the front panels. Who knows if it will even match the front doors, which I've already given several coats of waterborne clear varnish. =\

On the upside, I've been able to start fitting castor wheels underneath the cabinet by precariously hanging it over the edge of the table it's sitting on.

On the downside, the vibrations from my sander caused a decanter to fall out of the cabinet and spill Wild Turkey all over the floor, and I couldn't do a floor suck because of all the sanding dust. 

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Hey, it's THIS thread. Still. 

For years this poster has been looking back at me from the hallway while I work on the radio cabinet:

It's appropriate that it says 'ELECTRIC FUNERAL', and that beside 'THE END' you can see the reflection of the bottle of absinthe which I'm not allowed to open until the project is finished (or at least back in the living room),

Cabinet restoration is not my friend. I decided I needed to refinish the internal shelves, but when I tried to do that, it was too hard to sand right up to the shelf edges. When I tried to varnish the shelves and the inner walls of the cabinet, it was hard to get the varnish to sit nicely across the edge gaps without runs. Any patches where I hadn't removed all of the original stain stood out, and the more I tried to access them, the more damage I did with the sander.

So I just bought some pine edge mouldings and covered those areas up.

You'd never know they weren't there to begin with. 

I put the refinished doors back on, but this highlighted that there was now too much colour mismatch between the doors and the upper front panel:

*sigh* so I sanded and re-stained that upper front panel to match. This created even more dust, and I did a bit of collateral damage to the viewing window surround with the sander. =(

After spending time making more bits fit, and adding another hidden switch for some more icicle lights which I've stuck to the back of the cabinet, I'd had enough.

I decided it was suddenly imperative that the cabinet get out into the living room for the final touches so I could get on with other projects. The problem was that there was nobody around to help me lift the stupid thing down off its table. Even my neighbours were away. So I thought about it, lifted up the table one leg at a time, and put felt pads and a rug under its legs to protect the floor. Then I put a ratchet strap around the legs so I could lift one end of the table and drag the other end along the floor without the legs collapsing. So far so good. Onward, to victory!

Dammit, the table can't make it around the corner. 

Don't worry, Mister B, I have a cunning plan to solve the problem. I dragged an old door out of the garage, pulled out the table's drawer slightly, sat the door on the lip of the drawer like so...

...and screwed the door to the table with some hinges. Since the radiogram is on castors these days, I planned to just roll it down the ramp. What could go wrong?

Nothing. 

Absiiiinthe! 

So it turns out absinthe is pretty yuck so far, and that's coming from someone who likes aniseed / liquorice / etc.  At least the radiogram has made it to the floor in the living room, so I can do a few final touches from a different visual perspective and then declare it finished. There's plenty more I could do, but I need to sell any further work as improvements to an already 'finished' project so the project doesn't turn into a running gag. 

To celebrate this milestone, I got hammered, cooked myself a gourmet meal of bacon, sat in front of the cabinet on my beanbag and gave its speakers some proper exercise. In the next few days I'll stock up the cupboards, finish a few things and take some photos. 

 

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

I've gotta throw up some photos here, so that I can post them on Facebook afterwards (oldschool gets the scoop).

A reminder 'before' shot from 2012:

The wood originally had a darker stain which did make the grain stand out more, but the HDR photographic effect is further exaggerating its stripiness.

Now (below), the external changes to the cabinet are pretty minor, and the wood is a lighter shade (which wasn't intentional - I'm not a fan of light oak).

The central panel with the knobs is the only one which still has its original finish, so it stands out as being too dark (especially after I waxed it). 

Power it up...

This 'mysterious glow' effect (basically a convenient way to use up the last of my icicle LED lights) can be switched off:

Here's another 'before' shot, with the radio and speakers stripped out:

After:

You can see my Nixie tube clock has found a new home in the top of this cabinet. I made up this clock from a kitset in 2015. I originally intended to house it inside the centre of the cabinet where the radio used to be, but not only was that an impractical place for it, the clock was also too bulky.

If you turn on the switch to the right, the gears to attempt to spin. That mostly works.

This is the upper shelf of the left side cupboard:

You can see I've covered the ceiling with some copper mesh backed with blue velvet, to hide the holes where the record player originally was. All of these photos are taken from favourable angles / there are plenty of rough edges. 

My newest purchase for the cabinet is this lighter:

It functions as either Jim Beam (with its oldschool lighter insert) or Jim Laser Beam  (below):

I haven't been brave enough to stick my finger in yet. 

More pics to come. =)

[Thousand Dollar Supercar]

Go go gadget curtain:

You can use the control panel to turn on and off various elements of my pointless box of lights to create different looks.

Here's your basic 'starlight headliner' look:

The slight glow from one of the orange neons is a bug 'feature', as is the fact that I positioned the Southern Cross constellation too close to the rear, causing its southernmost star to spotlight the 'Radion' logo above the TV. 

Turn on the analogue meters and the dancing Nixie tubes:

Add the plasma globe, the TV (which normally can't be turned off - I unplugged it for the photos) and the neons:

I deliberately positioned one neon bulb close enough to the plasma globe to show the induced glowing:

Turn the globe off, put on its blue LED, turn on the incandescent bulbs behind it:

I grabbed each variation of these vintage filament bulbs while they were still easy to come by. Now they're being replaced on the market by LED 'filament' bulbs, which just aren't the same.

A side effect of these features is that the heat production / power consumption of my creation is a bit more than ideal, just like a real valve radio.

Here's where the old micro system lives, in the side of the cabinet behind a cover that slides upward:

Its display is very dim these days. If it ever looks at me funny, I'll replace it with something which can do CDs, Bluetooth and USB. For the time being, I use an aux cable.

So yeah, you get the idea.

(hail Satan)

That's pretty much it. Slight variations thereof. I have run out of attachment space for this post anyway. I'll make a video at some point, and afterwards I'll probably only consult my pointless box of lights whenever I need a drink.

Open bar!

[Stu]

Fuck this is most excellent - can't wait to see the video. Awesome work!

[anglia4]

Well done.

So much wasted time. So awesome.

I love it.