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Mottled Burgundy Bakelite Telephone Restoration

Started by Bob Angel, April 28, 2015, 05:52:49 PM

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Bob Angel

My name is Bob Angel and I have just joined the Classic Rotary Phones Forum.
Although I am new to this forum I have been collecting and restoring vintage, veteran and antique telephones for over 30 years and have been developing a Bakelite repair process for over 25 years.
One of the Bakelite restoration process's in use was to re-bond the broken parts, fill the missing areas with motor vehicle type body filler, refinish and then repaint the whole part in colour matched paint. I have seen many repairs by other restorers using this process and have been very impressed with their results and can appreciate the skill required to carry out this type of repair.
However, I wanted a process that did not include painting the repaired surface; I then started down a very long road to develop an alternative procedure.
To cut a very long story short, a lot of work over the past 25 years has resulted in a developed process whereby a repair can be carried out to fractures, chips and the recreation of missing parts using pigmented resins. This type of repair allows the telephone to retain a level of originality that is dependant on the size of the damage and repair.

I have included some example photos of my work on a mottled Burgundy telephone that required many repairs and the recreation of broken and missing parts.
The process to induce a "mottle" into the resin and have it go all the way through the repair and not just on the surface took many , many hours of development and work but was well worth it to save such a phone.
I have posted a few of the many photos taken during this restoration.
Kind regards
Bob Angel   


HarrySmith

First, welcome to the forum.
Second,  WOW! That is amazing! Great job on that restoration!
I hope you will take the time and effort to detail this amazing repair process with us. We have all needed extensive repairs like this one one phone or another!
Harry Smith
ATCA 4434
TCI

"There is no try,
there is only
do or do not"

JorgeAmely

Jorge

Bob Angel

Hi Harry and Jorge,
Many thanks for your kind comments on the restoration of the Mottled Burgundy telephone they are very much appreciated.

I must admit it was a huge project, the pigment colour matching alone took around 8 hours to do and it took around 50 hours of work just to develop the variation on my normal Bakelite restoration process to incorporate the required Mottle in the resin.
Once the new process was established there where approximately 50 test samples produced to make sure the procedure was repeatable.
There was then a further 20 "test" repair runs done before any repairs were carried out on the actual telephone.
The repair time on the telephone was around 200 hours of work.
I have all the work documented and will get some information posted.
Kind regards
Bob Angel     

cloyd

You are a master craftsman!  The mottling is perfect and the repairs invisible.  With the many hours of experience that you gained on this phone, is there any hope that a hobbyist like me is going to get acceptable results?  If you are willing to share your procedure, God bless you!  The repairs that I need to make seem trivial to your mottled phone but I am willing to jump in and try.

Welcome to the forum, thank you for sharing, and I am anxious to see your other work!

Tina Loyd
-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Van Gogh -- 1885