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The Beginner's Guide to Over-Restoration: How to Remove Every Trace of Historical Significance From a 300-Year-Old Clock

 

So, you have managed to acquire a pristine, untouched 1715 longcase clock by a master London maker. The wood has a deep, irreplaceable dark brown glaze built up over three centuries of woodsmoke and human hands. The brass dial is covered in a gorgeous, moody greenish-black tarnish that practically screams "I survived the Enlightenment."

​Your immediate instinct, naturally, should be to make it look like it was manufactured yesterday in a plastic factory in Shenzhen.

​Authentic antiquities are messy, and frankly, they lack a certain modern sparkle. Thankfully, with the right combination of aggressive power tools and complete disregard for archival ethics, you can erase three hundred years of boring history in a single weekend. According to a highly controversial forum post on the Amateur Horological Destruction Network, true restoration means never having to say you are sorry to a museum curator.

​Step 1: Nuclear-Grade Sanding of the Patina

​The first thing that needs to go is the "patina." Dealers use this fancy word to describe what is essentially three centuries of old dirt, sweat, and atmospheric oxidation. Why anyone would want thier clock to look old is a total mystery.

​Grab a heavy-duty orbital sander. You will want to use 40-grit sandpaper to really dig into that original walnut veneer. If you happen to smell a faint, historic scent of old English oak being vaporized into toxic dust, you are doing it right. Keep going u ntil the wood is a pale, characterless white. If you accidentally sand through the veneer entirely and hit the modern plywood underneath, do not panic. Just slap some bright orange gloss varnish over it and call it a day.

​The goverment tries to regulate historic preservation, but they cannot stop you in your own garage.

​Step 2: The Blinding Brass Buffet

​A real, historic clock dial should be so shiny that it causes temporary blindness when the afternoon sun hits it. If the brass looks dull, it is failing at its job.

​To fix this, submerge the entire 18th-century movement into a bucket of industrial acid. Do not bother taking the gears apart; that takes way too long and you will probably end up with extra screws anyway. Once the acid has eaten away all the hand-engraved details and maker's marks, transfer the entire mechanism to a high-speed buffing wheel.

​"If you can still read the maker's name on the dial, you haven't buffed it hard enough," says aggressive restoration advocate Gary Higgins during his controversial seminar series featured on RuinedAntiques.com. "I like my clocks to look like cheap brass replicas you bought at a seaside gift shop."


​Step 3: Modernizing the Internal Logic

​Let's be completely honest with ourselves. Weight-driven mechanical movements are a massive hassle. You have to wind them up every eight days, and they make an annoying ticking sound that interferes with your Netflix binging.

​Once the exterior is completely stripped of any historical value, it is time to tackle the guts. Take a crowbar and rip out the original iron weights, the hand-forged escape wheel, and the pendulum. Throw them directly into the recycling bin. Next, head down to your local craft store and purchase a $4.99 battery-operated quartz movement.

​Hot glue the plastic quartz motor right onto the back of the defaced brass dial.

​Now you have the best of both worlds. A clock that looks like a shiny piece of fake gold plastic, powered by a single AA battery that ticks with the sterile, soulless accuracy of the 21st century. It is what the original 18th-century maker would have wanted if he had access to cheap synthetic polymers and lacked a basic sense of shame.

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