Victrola

Sorry for the radio silence on my end… I was a little tied up helping put on a little show down in Tampa.

It was a fun time as usual, but entirely too long to be away from Janey & Gavin. Missed them terribly. I was quite happy to hear Janey met a cool new friend to help pass the time.

I’ll write more about my Florida adventures later, which will include descriptions of the crazy flu I contracted on the way back home. Not sure when I’ll get to that… don’t hold your breath.

Nope, not going to write about all that today, because I have something WAY cooler to write about: Victrola!

My whole young life, my dad has been an avid listener of talk radio. Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, there was always an radio on AM blasting the news of the day or opinion of whoever was at the mic. Incidentally, this habit has been passed to his son. While I did complain as a young lad, I’ve been a talk radio listener since high school.

Surprisingly, weekends (at least in my memory) were wonderful for talk radio. Instead of news and politics, we heard gardening shows, Car Talk, and if we were lucky enough to be listening Sunday evening, old time radio dramas. I have great memories of hanging with my dad in the garage while he changed the oil on his fleet of vehicles, the AM radio blasting so loud you could have heard it down the block. And it’s that radio in the garage that’ll connect our story for today.

The radio that has lived in my dads garage for the entirety of my 27 years on this planet was housed in an old wood cabinet. It had two record players set on pullout tracks. It’s always looked old. It looked old when I was tiny and used to pull at the record player arm until it broke off. What’d I know. It was a radio, and I wanted to play with it.

Fast-forward now to yesterday when Janey & I were visiting my parent’s house. My dad asked if we’d like to take that old radio cabinet home with us. It looked to be perfect size for a changing table for our little poop machine. He made sure to let us know that the radio still works perfectly, it’s just been sitting in the garage forever, so the cabinet looked pretty crappy.

As we cleaned up the cabinet to get it loaded, I just got so damned excited. It’s an old (I don’t know how old) Victrola cabinet with 2 built in turntables and one 12″ speaker behind a fabric panel. The inside of the cabinet is pristine save a bit of dust, the outside was pretty hashed. It was really just as I remembered it with a few more sub-freezing winters under it’s belt. The veneer would just crumble to the touch. But it’s built like a tank and I was sure I could give it a second life.

We got it back to my little workshop, and I went to town on it. At first scraping by hand, being very gentle… and later borrowing a vibratory sander from my brother in law to work out some real rough spots.

In the end, I got the whole thing stripped revealing a cabinet made of beautiful solid wood. My next job is to get this sucker stained and she’ll look like a million bucks.

Here’s a few more photos of work as it was happening.

I’m so excited to shine her up and let her come join us in the house!