A luxembourgish amateur, lover of beautiful things, sends us the pictures of the trunk above ...
- Bloated canvas
- Leather corners dry, burned or missing
- Dead lock and not original
After a few exchanges of mails from a distance and an on-site visit of the client with his trunk, the decision was made to make the total restoration of this trunk.
It's the different steps that I want to show you
The first step was to dismantle all the leather angles of the trunk, taking care to preserve and recover the small nails of origin (2 nails per centimeter ... 2800 nails approximately).
At the same time, we went to a tanner, to choose sufficiently long skins and good quality, to cut the future angles and leather cover belt.
As disassembling lines, we take care to deposit also:
- The 8 corners fixed by 7 nails each
- The 18 squares of lath
- The 4 lid squares
etc.
The next step is tricky because it involves disassembling the metal surround of the lid.
At Goyard, mark of this trunk, the work is particularly neat.
The thick metal surround is leather-wrapped, partly wrapped before laying and partly wrapped after the fastening of the perimeter.
The periphery is then re-sheathed from the inside, for sealing the lid.
A narrow cardboard compensates for differences in thickness, so that the male part of the toads is square with the female part, thus acting as centering.
N ° 1 cleaning of brasses
The cleaning of the breasts is done in 2 steps and in 2 parts.
On the one hand, we clean what is not dismounted and, on the other hand,
we clean all the spare parts, nails and points ...
This cleaning is done after a wet cloth
on the trunk. Once the trunk is completely finished (inside and outside), we will remake the cleaning from A to Z more finely
.
Once disassembled, the trunk is washed carefully (step not shown).
Cracked or weathered wooden parts are repaired, glued, crimped (not shown).
The original canvas is peeled off partially or completely, to be put again.
Cutting leather angles
Now arrive the most delicate steps ...
It is a question of going up the trunk: -) ... It is obviously much more technical than to dismount ... (remember your legos!)
The nails are untwisted and cleaned one by one
Spare parts cleaned and straightened
The metal surround is straightened to the ground on anvil
The leather strips are cut, prepared and then pre-drilled
every 5 mm, as original.
We use the leather corners, when they exist, as cutting template, to remake the new ones
corner angles. These corners will be partially hidden by brass ones, but it is important
that these are well adjusted, because on this trunk, the corners are 50 mm while the leather angles
measure 60 mm ... Once the corner is laid, it does not hide, on this model, the connections ... As they are visible, it is therefore necessary to make them perfectly squared.
The only leather angles require about 20 hours of full work, to be pre-drilled, adjusted, glued, pointed.
The spare parts are then rested either by cold riveted nails (nails, washers and hammer, with a special tool made to measure, by a turner-miller, to the diameter of the nails of the trunk), or by turning the nails. in the manner of the trimmers (wrist strength and flexibility are required to turn the nails of the corners of the barrel !! Small abstain).
We also attack the installation of the metal surround that was previously sheathed with leather and we put again the male parts of the toads.
Finally, for this order, we had to create a custom lock hasp, taking an existing base. Indeed, the trunk of origin did not have it and we did not have the adequate room.
After a few lime, anvil ... the hasp is adjusted and set.
