More Watchmaker’s Bench Press

At least it's stained now...

So you know your bench is old when….

I finally got the watchmaker’s bench out of the back of the Mission studio, and took it home to finish refinishing it. Here’s where it sits now.  All the basic sanding is done, and the first coat of stain is on.  I ended up staining it with what should have been a very, very light “Light Pine” stain.  And on new oak, that’s just what you get, a pretty generic light golden oak look.  On this stuff?  It turns this wonderful warm redish color.  I discovered this by accident, and decided I liked it better.  The only real fun part is mixing up a custom stain to get the modern parts of the bench (like the top) to match the antique wood.  Or at least to get close enough.  I haven’t messed with the rolltop itself yet, beyond starting to strip it.  Let’s hope it reacts similarly to the main body of the bench.

Now all I have to do is hand sand the thing (yet again), stain it (again), then start three coats of finish, with hand sanding in between.  Then I have to put it back together, nickle plate the hardware, and finish building (and finishing….) all the extra drawers.   Yeah.  I figure sometime around say 2020.

As you can see, I finally figured out what to do with the left leg of the bench, left empty when someone removed the treadle lathe’s flywheel rig.  I turned it into a bunch of small drawers.  The upper ones are sized to be just the right size for burr trays.  That’ll finally let me get them off the top of my bench, where they seem to be dust and crud magnets, not to mention managing to flip over every time I looked at them.

It has a sort of slot in the back where the rolltop drops down inside the back of the case.  There’s a wooden panel on the front side of that slot that walls it off from the foot-well, and keeps one from kicking the rolltop when it’s down.  Down in the bottom of that slot were a century’s worth of dust, and a few bits and scraps of paper.  One of these pieces of paper turned out to be an instruction sheet for a “Morse Clarifier”.  Apparently, some sort of add-on widget for old Gramophones.  No, really.  Gramophones.  Even has instructions on adding them to the ‘new’ Edison machines…  Seems the thing only sold for a couple of years, right around 1910.  (Which is right where I had it pegged, mentally.  Nice to know my evaluation was reasonably close.  So the bench is at least 100 years old, if not older.)

Yeah.  Intellectually, I knew it was probably at least 100 years old.  This really brought it home, hard.

Now, back to sanding….

Instructions for Morse Clarifier

Tagged as: morse clarifier, Rossberg, watchmaker's bench