Featured Replacing Ivory on a WMF tea set.

I will not buy another piece of silver-plate
I will not buy another piece of silver-plate
I will not buy another piece of silver-plate
I will not buy another piece of silver-plate

Tell myself that every auction but it just doesn't work. Keep buying these wacky
Victorian / art nouveau / art deco style sets and I know that unless they are
seriously art nouveau or deco in style they wont sell well if at all. Ended up with this “WMFB” lot recently and as usual failed to notice the white insulators in the handles. Sure enough it's ivory with the schreger lines blindingly obvious to anyone with at least half an eyeball. Was about to chuck it in the “roundtoit” box when I looked in the lidded sugar bowl and WOW it was gob smacking beautiful. The gold plating was superb. This set had clearly never been used in the hundred and twenty years or so as the internals are pristine. Of course they were almost polished to death with some loss of plating around the BG or GB monogram of the owner who ever that was. So I decided to try and replace the ivory with high density plastic rod cut to fit. It is not ideal as the plastic starts to get a little iffy at 110 Celsius but with two pins and some glue it should be ok. I first tried to make the bits using a drill in a vice as a rough lathe
but my drill couldn't handle the 12mm and 16mm rod so I had to form the pieces using a large hand held drill similar to a dremel tool. This turned out to be quite useful as the pieces had to be slightly curved to fit the pot handles correctly. Getting the pins out was a little awkward as they were peened over both ends and I also didn't have a small 1.8mm pin punch so had to use an engineers scribe . Managed to bang them out but without a proper jig to hold everything the ivory shattered making it easier to do it. Fitted the new bits in with some araldite to initially lock them in although the glue doesn't do well at temperature it filled the miscellaneous spaces between everything. Drilled through the plastic and hammered the pins back in to finish the job. I made one mistake in that I didn't clean the silver before replacing them and the silver-plate residue has stained the white surface a little as you can see in the photos. A little fine sandpaper should whiten them up again.

All up I think I'll give myself a pass mark but with the note “Could do better”.

Cheers
Stephen

 

Looks great!

 

Perfect, Stephen, great job. And a lovely set.
There is silverplating liquid available, which handles like silver polish. That would work for the spots where the plating is worn. I use it on old plated keris sheaths, after a few applications it looks fine.

I give you a 10 out of 10.

 

Yeah, GOOD JOB
Nice to see other's "kyratisation"

 

Fabulous job.

 

A very lovely set, Misc. But, what am I missing - were the original insulators damaged or broken before you replaced them? Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, if they weren't.

 

It was very obvious they were ivory and you can't sell anything with ivory in it on eboo so they had to go.

 

Well, I would venture to guess that there are plenty of such things that still manage to get sold there. But I applaud your pluck to even attempt replacing them.

 

GREAT JOB on what I would consider a VERY TEDIOUS JOB!!!!! WAY TO GO @Miscstuff !!!!!

 

Any Jewelry, Could you please tell us which brand of slverplating liquid you use and recommend? There's a plethora of different ones out there. Thank you!

 

I use a Dutch brand, I am in the Netherlands. I don't know if it is available in the US. If you can't find it, I'm sure there are good American brands as well.
Their website, in English:
https://www.hollandhallmark.com/en/home/
I have a small bottle, 50ml, bought it years ago, I can't see it on their site now.