Remove Steam Trunk Handles

It's time to remove those old crappy worn out steam trunk handles. The one is severely dry rotted and the other one is completely broke. Once these handles are removed from the steam trunk I can finally finish sanding this thing. I love sanding :(

Broken steam trunk handle, no repairing this, this thing has to go !

I purchased a tack puller from the local hardware store. At the store I shopped at they were mixed in with the screwdrivers. The tack puller only cost $5.97 and was well worth the investment. It made removing the steam trunk nails much easier.

Basic tack puller purchased at hardware store.

 The first thing I did was find the nails on the inside of the trunk. I had to scrape a bit of the old interior away but the nails were fairly easy to find.

The nails can be found inside the trunk bent into the wood.

You then get your tack puller and gently try to get behind the nail and bend it up. Once you have the nails bent up, you can give them a little tap with your hammer to help loosen the trunk handle. Be carefull not to crack the nails, I broke two of them. Considering that they're close to 100 years old they seemed a bit brittle.

Carefully try and pull the nails out without breaking the nails, you want to save these and use them to reattach the new handle.

After the nails were tapped, take the tack puller and see if you can gently pry the handle from the trunk. Be careful not to bend or further damage the steam trunk handle assembly.

Once you have the nails straightened out a bit, give them a light tap with the hammer to further loosen them.

Gently pry the handle and loosen it a bit more.

Now take a pair of nippers, and gently pull the nails out. Save all the parts, especially the leather handle. If you can't find a suitable handle, you can use the broken one as a pattern and make your own. That's probably what I'm going to do.

Take your nippers and gently pull out nails.

Save all parts, the leather can be used to make a pattern for the new handle.

 That's it. This was another fairly easy part of the project. It took me about an hour to do the one side, mostly because I'm all thumbs and had no clue what I was doing. After I figured out the process, the other side took less than twenty minutes. This part of the project took roughly 1.5 hours to complete.

Yea, now I can get back to my favorite task of sanding and try to get this old steam trunk prepped for stain.

Project time for this post : 1.5 hours
Total time spent on project so far : 33 hours 15 minutes
Total project cost so far : $39.59 USD