Sunday, October 2, 2011

UPDATED:A pair of metal lawn chairs to join the red rocker!

My boss has been following my blog posts recently, and after she saw the post about the red metal lawn chair I restored she happened to see a couple of chairs just like it on the side of the road in her neighborhood.  She quickly snagged them and sent me a pic asking if I wanted them.  Heck yes I wanted them!  Thanks boss, and thanks boss's husband who moved the chairs to their house until I could get them!

What's that?  Yes I know, I do already have enough projects  -- but how can you not save stuff like this?!?

Here are the before pics - gobs of white paint that started to peel and rust underneath.



Stripping the heavy paint off of these chairs took a lot more work than that first chair I did.  I really dig this orange gel stripper though.  Used properly it will break up paint very well.  But then you need to scrape, and scrape, and scrape, and sand, and scrape, and scrape, and use more stripper, and scrape, and sand.




I like to use a razor blade scraper, but even that is slow going.  I think I put in about six hours to strip all the paint off one chair and got a good start on the second one.



Here's chair number one minus at least one coat of white, with some original-looking lime green showing underneath.

Tommy Two-tone was not impressed with my hard labor. He didn't even glance at my work while making his rounds.


As I got more of the gobs of white paint off, I spotted this marking on the lower back of one chair.


The B inside the circle is accompanied by a stamping that reads BALCRANK Cincinnati Ohio.  Pretty cool to find it on both chairs.  And these chairs were built to last - probably fifty or sixty years old and only a couple of rust holes in the bottoms where they contract the ground!

I mentioned POR Paste in my other post on the first chair I restored.  To fix the rust spots, this time I cut some fiberglass screen window mesh and taped it over the spots where the holes are.  Then I broke out the POR Paste and a popsicle stick and spread it around.




This patch is on the bottom of the leg so it didn't have to be perfect.  After the paste hardened, I pulled/cut the blue tape, sanded the excess and primed everything.



I won't bother showing you another photo of a chair coated with primer, so instead, here's the nearly finished chair.  I like the yellow and red together.  They look a lot alike, but I don't think these chairs were made by the same company.  No stamp on the red one.  The ribs on the back are slightly different, the seat bottoms are not exactly the same, and the yellow one is not a rocker.



I still have to finish stripping the other chair, which I'm leaning toward painting green or blue.

UPDATE:  I decided on green for the third chair, and here it is with the other two.


I like 'em!  Thanks again boss!!!


7 comments:

  1. I would definitely say it's worth all the elbow grease. What a great boss you have. Score!

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  2. I agree, she us great - but I'm going to try to keep the steel chair count at three just the same :-)

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  3. Sweet. I'd like to have a boss like yours!

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  4. Heck yeah! Curbside finds are the best. Special thanks to your savvy boss. The red and the yellow side by side look like ketchup and mustard. Maybe you should open a hot dog stand. You always do such a great job on your restos!

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  5. Thanks Amber - the hot dog comparison makes me think the third chair should be the relish

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  6. Please email me at thomas3452@att.net when you have a chance. I want to show you my chair collection. Just finished a Balcrank, that's how I found you.

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  7. Love these chairs I just picked up two Balcrank chairs was worried how I was going to fix the rust spot. Thanks for the Dyi is there any way you can add a pin button so I can pin this to pinterst thanks you Diane Haggart

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