Boldly venturing into woodworking.

[Electronic M]

Some years back I cot a Coronado Tombstone for IIRC $10 in a donation auction. It would have been cheaper but someone else wanted it for the knobs, and we struck a deal of you can have the nobs for free if you let me have the rest. The set had been basically painted DARK brown, and a lousy job at that. It can be seen in before state here below the pay here sign. http://warci.org/may-22nd-2016-meeti...-carousel-4028

I ended up stripping it down. The piece of wood that makes the center bump in the top was split front to back and the top under it was also split side to side and loose. I ended up taking all but the front bottom top board off and carefully gluing it all back together. Where the top board met the sides on that angled area there had been wood fil that the top work displaced which I refilled. The two kinds of wood did not match and the fill complicated matters so I decided to paint the small angled corners of the top brown so that area would have even color. Using enamel brown on those two small patches and letting it dry but not cure was a wise move its incompatibility with the toner lacquer was just enough to create some surprisingly woodgrain like pattern on those strips. I did not get the toner lacquer or clear coat spray perfect (especially given some spots on the top that were resistant to adhesion of the lacquer) but the results are pretty decent for my first radio cabinet refinish...

DSCN9715 by Tom Carlson, on Flickr

I've also got a completed TV cabinet that I'll post about soon and a couple more radios in the works.

I can finally check wood refinishing off the list of resto techniques to get started in.