Antique Brass Postage Scales Restoration & Repair
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- Опубліковано 25 чер 2024
- A lovely old set of antique (Edwardian, as far as I can make out) brass and wood postage scales, sadly neglected. It was time to give them the care they need!
After stripping everything down, I stripped off the old finish from the base before sanding, staining and applying shellac to recreate the original coating. I had to learn how to do french polishing as I went, but I'm fairly happy with the end result!
With the base finished, I turned my attention to the brass scales themselves. After cleaning the old patina off with tomato ketchup (yes, really!), I polished all the parts with various polishing compounds.
Once all back together, it looked great, just as it did when it was new!
*Chapters*
00:00 Intro
01:18 Disassembly
05:58 Stripping & Sanding the Base
09:28 Making a New Foot
10:49 Staining & Coating the Base
13:14 Cutting new Baize Pads
14:04 Cleaning & Polishing the Brass Parts
17:54 Making a New Beam
18:55 New Brass Weights
20:02 Reassembly
22:13 Outro
#Restoration #Rust #ASMR - Розваги
Beautiful restoration
Those are really nice scales. A fantastic restoration job 😊
Nice job. I trained as a scales mechanic 50 years ago and worked on many old brass scales and this is one of the nicest jobs i have seen, Well done. Only thing you didn't do was to sharpen the knife edges and polish the bearings. That would make it much more sensitive and accurate.
Great to hear! I'm really happy with how it turned out!
What weight do you need. I have dozens. Actually hundreds.
Beautiful 💞
Thank you! 😊
When the title screen came up about restoring the brass, I said to myself "now if it was me I'd use brown sauce", so pleased that I wasn't far off.
Excellent restoration.
Awesome! I haven't tried brown sauce, but I can see it would work. One to remember if I ever run out of ketchup! 😁
What a beautiful piece!! well done, she looks awesome.
Thank you very much!
Spot on my friend looks great!!!
Thanks! 😁
Lovely work and close attention to detail.
Thank you so much! 😀
Beautiful object well done.
Thank you!
It looks great and you did a wonderful job restoring it as well!!!!
Enjoyed the video and I gave it a Thumbs Up
Thank you! 👍
@@OldtoNewRestorations You're welcome!!
A beautiful piece. You did excellent work there.
Thank you so much 🙂
Wow, nice work!👍
Thank you! 👍
What a beautiful finished project 👍 great job it looks like a new one.
Thank you very much! 👍
Greetings buddy, cool project, great restoration and beautiful result 👍
Thanks! Glad you like it! 👍
@@OldtoNewRestorations you are welcome!
That ornate stand looks like two Christmas trees.
That was the first thing I thought when I saw it!
Beautifull result ! I didn't know about the ketchup beeing such a good brass cleaning substance... Thank you for the tip !
Yeah, it's surprisingly good at cleaning up old scale like this!
Very well done; nice job. Regards from Canada
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it! 👍
Excelente trabalho. Parabéns 👏👏👏
Obrigado! 👍
Nice job
Thanks! 🙂
Excellent restoration. You may not be 100% satisfied with the end result but the little flaws that remain give the scales some of the character that shows it's age. Hope someone, somewhere has a large weight for you to make the scales complete.
Thank you! I'm going to keep looking for that one elusive weight; it took me a month to even find the ones I did! I may just live with the imperfections; we'll see 🙂
Excellent restoration my friend. Congratulations. I'm already your subscriber.
Thanks for the sub! 👍
The author of this educational video said that this antique brass postage scale must have a 1919 patent date! I know that it's so easy to head down the path of uncertainty these days. 📅 ⚖️ 😳 🤣 👏 😆 🙄 ⚖️
Very interesting. I'm in the process of doing the same however I'm having some issues. Namely finding a good cleaning product for the brass. Also finding suitable screws for the two weighing plates. Any ideas/recomendations would be appreciated. Thank you for the video. Very informative
Ketchup (yes, really) works great for getting rid of heavy scale. Just leave it soaking for a day or two. Brasso is probably the best cleaner I've found for hand polishing, but if you have the equipment, machine polishing is always better - you can get polishing pads for drills if you don't want to buy an actual bench polisher.
Screws are trickier - it's often just a case of carefully measuring the old ones (if you still have them) and browsing google for conversion charts to find the sizes you need. eBay is a good source if you just need a couple of screws.
Great restoration, that scale is older than me and I'm older than dirt, lol.
Haha, at this point it's older than almost everyone! Glad you enjoyed it!
Nice result but since you asked no that's not French polishing that's more of just a shellac finish application not that it's a bad thing because the original manufacturer wouldn't have gone to the trouble of French polishing it themselves it is after all a utilitarian workplace item.
Shellac will give you a nice gloss finish however you choose to apply it, wipe it on with a rag or brush it, it's a very forgiving finish material.
French polishing though is a process and time consuming which is why I say the manufacturer wouldn't have gone to the trouble for a mass produced utilitarian item.
Thanks - I realise it wasn't polished like that to begin with. In fact, a few imperfections aside, I'm happy with the finish - it's about what I'd expect to see if it were new. You're absolutely right on that! 👍
And all the metrologists wince when I polish the weights :D
To be fair, this isn't exactly enough of a precision instrument that a little polishing would make a difference. 🙂
But that made me curious, so I just measured all the weights. Apart from the 8oz weight (coming in at 7.9oz), they're all accurate to at least as far as my digital scales can make out!
👍🏼💙
👌
I restore old timber telephones and I try an avoid sandpaper they are shellac coated as well I use different grades of steel wool dipped in methylated spirits and a lot of elbow grease
Interesting; I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the advice! 👍
Has postage weight gone metric in the UK? Grams instead of ounces? Very nice restoration.
Since some time in the 1960s! 🙂 Although imperial measurements are still hanging around, it's a bit of a muddle here. These scales definitely predate metric in the UK though, so those metric weights shouldn't be part of it.
Glad you enjoyed it! 😁
I knew most every measurement had gone metric ages ago, I just wondered if maybe postage for letters might have been a holdout like pints for beer. We're still resisting metric here in the USA, although those of us in the science-oriented professions have to deal in both systems.
@@pfadiva Ah yeah; no, postage has been metric for as long as I can remember. I think pints of beer and miles (for road distances) are the main holdouts now, pretty much everything else is officially metric.
There are still people resisting change here, even fifty years after we officially changed! 😆🙄
Yes, same thing here in Canada, but kilometers are used for distance on highways. However, I go and buy an eight foot 2×4...
I can't remember who but I told someone about using ketchup
It's honestly pretty decent at getting rid of scale and heavy tarnishing.
@@OldtoNewRestorations Yelp and if you watch the show Moonshiners you would have seen they have used it since prohibition times the 1920's and I'm sure longer than that
Great job. It looks awesome.
But PLEASE invest in gloves.
Thanks!
Don't worry, I have plenty of gloves!