Old School Desk, continued: Working on the Drawers

 Hi Everyone,

Well I hope everyone here in the US had a good holiday and everyone else in the world had a good week.

Ok, back to the desk.

I finished the desk top and now it's time to get the drawer faces cleaned up and finished. I took the smallest drawer first and worked on that. Here's today's photos:



Here's the desk top:

Here is the face of the drawer and you can see it's beat up like the rest of the desk. I wanted to replace the handles on the drawer and it looked like these just screwed on. It turned out that it was glued and screwed on and it didn't readily come off:

So I gave it a sharp rap with a mallet and a chisel and it came off. Fortunately the glue was dry enough that it came off without damaging the wood underneath. And the whole face, handle and all was finished at the same time:

This is what the handle looks like: 

The drawers were also made out of beech, some kind of laminated panel, and an unknown hardwood:

So I started scraping and sanding and this is what it looks like. I don't really have a good way to clamp the drawers down so I couldn't scrap the surface firmly:

This is a photo of the new and the old handles side by side:

And this is what the drawer front looks like with a single coat of stain gel on it. It's still a mess. The unstained part that the handle covered up is still visible so I'll have to give it another coat of stain later on:

I'm going to use that one drawer to experiment on before I do the rest of them. 
Stay tuned,

VW