First vintage handle restore and lessons learned.

I'm not a particularly "handy" guy. I'm willing, I've just never had much experience, nor a real interest in much that required it. One day I was poking around on eBay and came across vintage brushes, and thought "man, those look fantastic!". I sent my wife a link to one, and received it as a Christmas gift. I've posted below some photos of the handle with the new knot.

Lessons I learned -

Sometimes they used vulcanized rubber to secure knots. Vulcanized rubber melts.

Use less epoxy to fill cracks, or don't use epoxy to fill cracks.

Five minute epoxy is really five minute epoxy. Five minutes goes by quickly.

Buffing wheels on a dremel get hot, heat melts bakelite, don't leave the wheel in one spot to long.

You need more epoxy than I originally used, but less epoxy than the amount I ended up using.

Those are all good lessons, lol. Is that the Maggard black synthetic knot?

It is. It's really nice. Very soft and feels a little more firm. Definitely holds more water than the non black knot.

Cool, I think I'm going to grab one of those to put in this horse hair brush I have. The hair is way too scritchy for me but I like the barber style handle it has. Anyway, your brush looks good man, I really like the handle.

Thanks man. The mistake that bothers me most is using too much epoxy. I'm not super please that it's visible around the top of the handle.

Yeah, oh well. It's a good learning experience like you said. Maybe you could come up with some kind of trim ring to hide it. When I made a brush, I wanted to have one on it to spruce it up a little bit. I found this website that sells different types of metal rings. Check it out!

Congrats!

Congrats, I recently did my first vintage knot replacement with that Maggards knot, they're super soft and whip up lather well