Antique Teddy bear repairs

This is an antique Teddy bear who has a few issues.

He is missing his eyes and parts of his nose and mouth.

Most of his felt paw pads are gone.

You can see what he is stuffed with here....this product is often called wood wool.

Because I can feel a voicebox inside his torso I want to get it out and see if I can get it working again.
That involves opening up his back seam and rummaging around in the wood wool.

Here it is. A rather petite voicebox.

The cloth that forms it's bellows has disintigrated which is why it no longer works.

Here are the parts of the voicebox and a strip of cuckoo clock bellows fabric that I will use to replace the bellows.

It takes some inventiveness to deal with that spring while waiting for glue to dry.

Success!
Many Teddy bears have growler voiceboxes.
I gather some had squeakers too as this is no growler......

And now I need thread to do some serious sewing on this teddy. But the one fabric store in town is closed due to COVID.

Canada is not well supplied by online businesses.....the shipping costs are nasty!

So I wait for a store to open that might have the thread I need.......

And finally the store opens.....only to find empty slots where my favorite thread sat!

So, back to online ordering. Thread found. Order done....wait, wait, wait. Poor old Canada Post takes 3 weeks to get me a packet from a location that is a 2 hour drive away. Things are still very abnormal out there....

But, finally, progress is made.

Teddy's squeaker is reinstalled and he is midway through getting his paw pads replaced.

And then poor Teddy is done!

He has new glass eyes, new wool felt paw pads and a filled in nose/mouth.

Restringing issues of some smaller composition bodies

Here we have a little antique doll made by the G.Heubach company.

He needs to be restrung.

His body is original to him.
But his body was made cheaply with no allowances for future restringing.
Things were made cheaply and quickly back then too!

There are no stringing hooks.
The body was put together by fastening elastic into the limbs with glued in pegs.

On the outside the ends of the pegs and elastics were painted over.

Someone has tried to tighten up the legs using wire.

The arms have had some repairs and then have been attached to the body with string.











To restring a doll body like this I carefully drill out the old elastic. This leaves a hole through the limbs as the elastic was fastened from the outside by the pegs.

So one option for restringing is this:

This is another doll with the same style body.
The new elastic is threaded through the holes and simply knotted.
If you don't mind the knots this is a decent option that leaves the doll as original as possible.

As the other doll had damage on the arms that I was going to repair, I went in another direction and installed stringing hooks.

The holes where the old elastic was got filled and painted to match the body finish.

So the end result is this.....no knots.

Eye problems of a hard plastic doll

This doll was made by "Pedigree", an English company. It likely dates from the 1950's.
It has an eye issue to sort out.

In humans, this drooping eyelid is called ptosis and is often caused by nerve damage.
But what causes it in dolls?

This doll has interesting eyes in that they open and close and move side to side.

After the usual "off with her head" start to doll repairs, I can see the eye mechanism.
Someone has tried a repair previously. There is old yellowed glue on the dysfunctional eye.
What is worse is that the bracket that holds the eye in and that is supposed to slide out to release the eyes has been solidly glued back in place.

Here is the good eye showing the pivot that allows the eyes to move side to side.

Here is the dysfunctional eye.
The lower pivot is broken off and the eyelid no longer coordinates with the eyeball.

After several failed removal attempts and much grumbling about the person who glued the eye bracket in......success! The eyes are out.
Now to recreate a pivot....

Here are the eyes ready to go back in.
They have new eyelashes and a spruced up paint job on the lids.
The new pivot can be seen on the right.

Keener eyes than mine might notice a problem here?
The eye with the broken pivot was the doll's right eye. Here the repaired pivot will be on the doll's left eye.
I installed the eyes like this and only noticed I had flipped the eyes when I was poking around wondering why they weren't fitting on properly :-)

After a bit of fussing over the eye fit and a refresh on the mouth paint.....she is done.

Mattel voice box repair

Well, I have been asked by several folks about repairing pull string talkers so I decided I needed to try my hand at one.

"Drowsy" is my experimental patient.
 She dates to the early 1960's and is supposed to say several phrases when you pull her string.

Like many talking dolls of this era, Drowsy's voice is silent.

All these toys have a seam that needs to be picked apart to access the voice box.
Drowsy's seam is in her.....well... in her derriere.

The first sighting of the dysfunctional item.

Out comes the voice box.

It's other side.

After some careful sawing along the seam that was well glued shut, the insides are visible.

The majority of silent voiceboxes have a broken or melted o-ring which is supposed to act as a drive belt between all the bits. This one's o-ring had disintegrated.

A new o-ring gets placed,the voicebox is taped back together and stuffed back into Drowsy.

Drowsy talks again!
Here is how she sounds:

Toy piano repair

This is a cute little Schoenhut toy piano from the 1890's or so. The Schoenhut company made piano's from the 1870's to the present day.
This style of piano works with a xylophone type mechanism.
This particular piano was fully operational before it got mailed.
It was not properly wrapped for shipping and the postal system was not gentle to it's box.

The innards flapped around during shipping and were in quite the state on arrival.

One chime had lost its nail and was askew.
One hammer had torn from its mount. Several other hammers had partially torn.

With a few nails gently pulled out, the whole glockenspiel type mechanism can be removed for repairs.

The hammers are simply made with pieces of cardboard covered with cloth and stapled to the underside  of the chime board. The hinges then are just cloth. Wooden knobs are glued to the one side of each flapper to strike the chimes.

 Here is the detached hammer. The top cloth tab had ripped off at the hinge area.

 Here is the hammer repaired. I have used an antique cotton of a similar weave to recreate the top tab.

Many other hammers have partially ripped at the hinge area so I will replace all the damaged hinges in the same way.

Here all of the damaged hammers have been replaced.
The hammer on the right was not damaged but it had an old repair where someone replaced the wooden knob with a square chunk of wood and then glued the tab back instead of stapling it.
I might as well revise this before I put the piano back together.

Here is the previously repaired hammer. It worked but doesn't look like the original.

Here it is with a knob carved from a vintage wooded clothes peg and a rebuilt cloth tab.

Success!
All the hammers have been repaired.

While I was at the repairs to the hammers, I decided the torn harp and leaf logo should be repaired too.

And then, why not replace the cloth inserts on either side? The piano arrived with bright red synthetic cloth inserts. Those were not original.

So they got replaced with antique velvet inserts. A bit more suited to the age of the piano.....

Celluloid doll repair

This is a very large celluloid doll who has arrived to get it's arm fixed.

The inside of the arm that holds the elastic has broken out.

This is the other arm showing how the broken area used to look.
Recreating this in the broken arm will take some inventiveness!

After plan #1 with a metal washer was not working out, I have arrived at plan #2.
This involves using the bottom cut out of a plastic bottle with a hole drilled into it, a plastic washer from the hardware store and the toggle that the previous handy-person had used on the doll.

The altered bottle bottom gets epoxied into the arm.

Once the epoxy adhesive is cured, epoxy sculpting clay can reshape the socket.

The toggle and washer get put back on to the end of the elastic and then, with breath held, The elastic knot and toggle get stuffed into the new socket.

It worked!