Rusty Ornate 1800s Drawer Pulls Restoration | Random Restoration

Welcome! Today I will be restoring three awesome rusty old ornate cast iron drawer pulls which were manufactured by Reading Hardware in the 1890s to the earlier 1900s. This is the Windsor design, which first popped up in the early to mid 1880s. I've featured the Reading Windsor design in previous restoration videos, and have a few more future hardware restoration projects planned in the same design.

Unlike most of my restorations, these antique drawer pulls didn't require any disassembly. Paint stripping was the first step with this project - I used an aerosol Aircraft Paint Remover, which I find to be most effective of all the new paint strippers I've tested in the past. After most of the paint was removed it was time to remove the rust. This was a pretty rusty restoration compared to many of my recent projects. The rust removal method I chose is in liquid form, and efficiently removes rust from every exceptionally hard to reach area.

Now with the hardware rust free it was time to move onto sanding. These drawer pulls had a pretty significant amount of pitting from rust, and as a result needed a lot of careful sanding - I didn't want to lose any of the details, but also needed to repair as much as the pitting as possible. I sanded these pulls from 220 grit up to 800 grit, though admittedly that was a bit too much sanding considering they were originally only sanded to about 320 grit.

Next up in the restoration was polishing. I used a fine polish on one of the pulls, as I wasn't going to paint the recessed areas, and unpainted examples of ornate hardware like this was almost always finely polished. I used a coarse polish on the other two so that they weren't a mirror finish. Hardware with painted recessed areas were almost always lesser polished since it makes the raised details really pop in comparison to finely polished variants.

If you've seen me restore hardware in the past you'll know that I usually paint the recessed areas black. This is because this finish was the most popular for this style of hardware, so naturally I continued this trend by painting the recessed areas on the coarse polished pulls haha. With that there was one last thing to finish up the restoration which was painting the backs of these pulls. they were originally painted black prior to being chemically plated, so I also painted them black.

After a week of drying, they were finally ready to handle! Considering the state that these pulls were in before the restoration, I reckon these are the perfect example of a trash to treasure project - I can't imagine that anyone else would have purchased them and unfortunately they likely would have slowly rusted away over the next several decades. It was great fun giving them a new chance at life!

Time Stamps:

0:00 Welcome!
0:28 Paint Stripping
1:10 Degreasing
2:09 Rust Removal
2:56 Wire Wheeling
3:35 Sanding
4:41 Polishing
5:31 Paint Prep
6:18 Lacquering and Painting Pulls
8:22 Hardware Catalog Stuff
8:50 The Collection So Far
9:17 Before and After
10:08 Thanks for Watching!

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