Sometimes, before any real restoration work can even begin, you first have to get rid of about 90 years of smell.
One of the latest arrivals has an unbelievably strong old cigar odor — strong enough that I had to bring out the heavy artillery.
Whenever one of these old pieces arrives, I immediately open the shipping box and get all of the packing material and shipping boxes outside. Cardboard, paper, foam, and wrapping material absorb decades of odors and can make the whole room smell before you’ve even touched the equipment.
Usually, an overnight blast from a fan on the unit is enough to make a huge difference.
Not this time.
If you remember, I purposely bought some of these rougher pieces as a test to see just how far we can go restoring really challenging vintage equipment.
On the smaller unit, I already removed the meter and opened up the faceplate so I could get air circulating through the inside of the tester. That’s often where the worst odors live — all of that old cotton-covered wiring, insulation, dust, and internal material has spent 80–90 years sealed up with almost no airflow.
So this one got the full treatment:
Opened up.
Fan running.
Air purifier parked right next to it.
All before the actual restoration even starts.
Sometimes restoration is polishing brass and making old wood beautiful again. Sometimes it’s trying to convince a 90-year-old tube tester that it no longer lives in a cigar lounge.
