In today’s episode, they restored a toy gunboat that was over a hundred years old and had been dragged out of the sand at a beach. The thing was actually made out of metal, had brass trimmings, and an honest-to-God steam engine! After tinkering with it and showing how the boiler and piston worked, they actually got the propeller running and launched it on the pond near the workshop. My God, how that thing moved across the water! I would have loved to have had a toy like that when I was growing up!
The BBC have, I think, shown it here in half-hour and full-hour versions, so whether or not you get technical explanation may depend on which version you’re getting. Lucia’s painting restorations seem to come with a fair bit (and miraculous results).
Agreed, I love the technical details and the historical details even more so. It’s amazing how one object can illuminate the fine details of the lives of our ancestors. Just the little shit like their equivalent of turning off and on the router to get the internet except its a player piano toy or something you never knew anyone ever neeed.
Hi, fellow nerd. Yeah, I would like a higher tinkering-to-sentiment ratio in the footage too.
To be fair, though, it probably works out better in the weekly-show format as originally designed than for us bingers consuming one episode after another on a streaming service.
I do wish that they would be a little less interrogatory about the owner’s emotional state; obviously having people deliriously excited or in floods of tears is good TV, but it is trying for the naturally stiff-upper-lipped.
Also, I’d like to see other interesting plans for the restored object besides “we’re going to keep it as a cherished family heirloom”. I get that the Repair Shop doesn’t want to do free repairs for collectors or folks who are just going to turn around and sell the restored object for a better price. But I’d like to see, for example, an occasional owner hunting down a small museum or National Trust site or something and agreeing to give or bequeath the object to them, so that its story can be integrated into history that more people can experience.
True, and the museum that got the old factory’s statue of Hercules. But what I’d like to see are some more instances of individuals releasing a privately owned object into a larger environment of historical artifact.
The only such example I can remember is the guy who bought an old coin-operated telescope and had it restored so he could donate it to the seaside resort he used to visit in his childhood, or something. Share that amazing history and craftsmanship!
(Also, does anybody else worry that the highly publicized televised stories of these sometimes quite valuable objects could end up being lures for burglars?)
The Repair Shop guys couldn’t fix the coin-operated mechanism, so they made the lenses permanently open and made an inscribed plate stating that money collected would contribute to the future up-keep of the telescope. Is that cool, or what?
I started watching yesterday on Netflix and it’s interesting, but I wondered what those repairs would cost if the owners actually had to pay for them. Some of the repairs clearly took many many hours. For example, in one of the episodes available on Netflix, a woman brought in a music box in the form of a Swiss chalet dollhouse, with what seemed like hundreds of decorative pieces that had fallen off over the years. And that one guy spent what must have been a long time figuring out where each bit went back and glued it in place. And then they brought it to her house, where she promptly invited her grandchildren in to put their grubby little hands on it. I was wincing, because that thing seemed really delicate.
BTW, the program has a YouTube channel, so for those of us not in the UK, we may be able to watch parts of episodes not available on Netflix.
Plus, he (Will Kirk) had to hand carve a small wooden dog to sit on the front near the doghouse, approximating the look and size and color. A real nice job.