I have been working on a few French comtoise clocks lately (see below), and as part of their refurbishing, the movement cages needed to be stripped and repainted. I decided that it would be a good time to finally finish the grates while I had the stripping chemicals out. Since there were mostly just a few stubborn paint spots and drips on the grates, I decided to slather them in stripper, cover them with cling wrap, and leave them to "stew" while I worked on the comtoise parts. This ended up working nicely, and the paint and grime came off nicely with a bit of scrubbing.
Here's the comtoise clock I'm currently restoring (more info on the clock blog):
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5Y4zeEqyphkQ2KLbb-JGUG_czwOKic6A01DxSQxH5TFoZtvxUlLbQJSZaH5pevaZy0-4mV5HxhUP8btf0nknyOS1XgxH-AmYmZuG5dgFsoE7nXdGBN8u0mOaEgaRSA0H6KbAfAuKTMhEW/s800/P6200517.jpg)
Here is how the grates turned out. I am pretty sure they are cast iron, but they seem to have a copper plating on them. These were originally quite dirty, grimy, coated in paint, and I thought they were originally just rusty iron. They turned out looking quite beautiful, and the colour blends in nicely with the painted floor. I didn't photograph the second grate, but they look pretty much the same.
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wTxr2sev-CE/VZs6JgAFNLI/AAAAAAAAKE0/pmjvDf3tp0Q/s800/P6260001.jpg)
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-CB7smJhVK2M/VZs6JzQjcII/AAAAAAAAKE4/fj6EenyzlzA/s800/P6260002.jpg)
Here's an older "before" photo of how the grates looked before cleaning/stripping:
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-j2eALIBmHs0/T72H9n4ETcI/AAAAAAAAA2A/8dzY7lXJexM/s800/P5140865.jpg)
And here's an OLD original photo from when I first bought the house:
Beautiful, may I make a suggestion? Painting that silver metal under the grate black would look much better than the raw metal. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, but then I'd have to do all the vents in the entire house. Black would also show the dust a lot more.
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