Restoration of Antique Italian Coffee Grinder

In this video I'm restoring a very unique looking antique italian coffee grinder. I recieved this coffee grinder a few weeks ago as a gift from a subscriber from Italy. He sent me a picture of it, asking me if I want it on Instagram and I said yes immediately. I really liked the unique look of it and its design.
At first I thought this would be a very simple straight forward project. It would soon turn out how wrong I was. The two big wooden parts became a real challenge to restore. It would be rather easy to make new ones, but I really wanted to keep the original ones and restore them. As the bottom piece was warped a lot and was also 3mm oval I couldn't just machine it all clean right away, otherwise I would need to take off way to much material. I decided to try to bend it back flat by soaking in water for a day and than clamp it flat and let it dry. Fortunately my plan worked out and the pice got almost flat again, to my surprise it also became round again within 0.5mm. The reliefed stress made a few cracks appear. I filled them all with a mix of epoxy glue and sawdust. After that I was able to machine it nicely and didn't loose to much on its original size.
The wooden top was rather easy to restore compared to the bottom. Because it had a very loose fit in the body, I decided to machine that diameter clean and glue on a sleeve. That worked very well and then I just had to remake the slots in the sleeve with my rotary tool by following the existing ones.
The color choice was also quite a difficult task on this project. I changed my mind a few times and even repainted the body. First I painted the outside in corn yellow, but that looked very bad with the dark wood. After alot of thinking I decided to püaint it in light ivory, which in my opinion was the absolute correct decission. It matches the dark wood very nice and also works nicely together with the gold.
Overall I'm very happy how this coffee grinder turned out.

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