Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Project: Refurb a war trunk How to destroy anything
How my grandfather’s old army trunk became a history lesson – and my new coffee table.
When I was casting around for furniture to take to college, I found a red army footlocker I’d never seen before. It probably came from the garage. My mom, who once bought a pick-up truck just to bring home tables and chests of drawers left on the side of the road, helped me paint and stencil it so it would match my dorm-room decor. In the fifteen years since, the footlocker followed me to nine apartments in three cities, filled with Halloween costumes, old photo albums, Christmas ornaments. Eventually I learnt that it had once belonged to my stepdad’s father, Richard Purnell, who had done a tour at Osan Air Base in Korea as an Army corporal in the early 1960s, after the
signing of the armistice that unofficially ended the Korean War in 1953. Apart from an insignia he had misplaced somewhere, the footlocker was the only artefact from that time that hadn’t been thrown away. And I’d put it in storage. I felt a bit ashamed about that, so I started asking questions.
Every antique is a catalogue of the past and, in that way, refurbishing an old footlocker is much like doing construction in, say, Rome, where you must proceed carefully lest you encounter a subterranean landmark you don’t want destroyed. I had no idea what I’d find under the trunk’s layers and layers of paint, which were so deep in places that they’d dried in globs. I didn’t want to use a heat gun and fry through wood, if that was what was under there and I didn’t want to accidentally grind the rivets flat with a power sander.
“That was a long time ago,” my grandpa said when I called to ask about the trunk’s original condition. He didn’t remember what it was made of, but he did remember getting it on the sly from a friend who worked in the supply division when he came home in 1963.
“They expected you to pack your stuff in boxes and duffel bags,” he said. “It was much simpler to know somebody and get them to give you a footlocker.”
He told me he was about to take a weeklong vacation to California with my grandma to visit my great-uncle’s farm.
“I’ll just give you a call when I get to the bottom of all the paint,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll still be doing that when we get back.”
I knocked on each of the trunk’s surfaces but, not being Macgyver, couldn’t tell what materials the sounds might indicate. Then I asked senior home editor Roy Berendsohn for help. Roy got a magnet, which was how we learnt that the corners, handles and rivets were steel. The panel and edge banding materials remained a mystery.
Roy advised taking the restoration slowly so as to catch any markings that might appear along the way, so I dipped wet-or-dry 220-grit sandpaper in a bucket of water, folded the paper in thirds and sanded away. Folding in thirds gives you three sanding surfaces to work with before you have to replace your sandpaper. You just flip or refold whenever the grit wears down. Underneath the top layer of paint, the trunk was red and then yellow. I wiped away the muddy mix of colours from the centre panel and an image of a toy soldier appeared.
My grandma filled me in: my stepdad was born in 1966, three years after his dad came home from Korea. My grandma painted the trunk yellow and covered it with decals of toy soldiers to make it a toy box for her son. In one generation it had gone from a tool of war to a container for playthings.
At this point, I’d worked through only two layers and on only one panel. I could be sanding for weeks. It was time to employ paint stripper, which I’d hoped to avoid because it’s nasty stuff that requires gloves, a respirator and eye protection. I found something much more gentle called 3M Safest Stripper, which is as thick, biodegradable and creates no fumes. They say you can use it without gloves, but I put them on anyway. I globbed it on with a metal scraper and waited.
Three hours later, the footlocker looked
like it had erupted in hives. I scraped fistfuls of bubbling paint off the panels with the scraper and used a thin steel pry bar and a pentalobe screwdriver from a cellphone-repair kit to clean the crevices around the hardware. I repeated this process again and again. There were six colours of paint in all: the light green with bronze Moon stencils I’d added before taking the trunk to college in 2001; the red my stepdad added before taking it to camp in 1976; the yellow from the toybox era; two layers of army green that came off in a slime; and a dusty reddish primer.
The biggest clue as to the trunk’s original manufacture appeared on the lid after the very first stripping. An oval stamped with “Purves Manufacturing Corp. 1948” sat above the front lock. I contacted Luther Hanson, a historian with the US Army Quartermaster Museum in Fort Lee, Virginia, which catalogues the history of the Army branch that provides soldiers with clothes, food and equipment. Hanson told me that Purves had been based in Indianapolis and had Army contracts from World War II through Korea. So even though my grandfather hadn’t been to war, the trunk probably had. It might have even belonged to someone who didn’t come home.
After four doses of the stripper, I’d hauled around five litres of soggy paint out of the workshop. Most of the trunk was a patchy green-brown, but the hardware had got down to the primer. I found that brushing the metal with a steel- wire brush removed most of the red and imparted a dull, antiqued sheen. The flexible wet-or-dry sandpaper I’d used earlier was crucial for handles and crevices where the primer wouldn’t come off. In places where the primer was thick, I used sandpaper with a rougher grit, though nothing lower than 100, to avoid scratching the metal.
The edge bandings, once fully exposed, had been crafted out of some sort of composite that was too soft and oddly coloured to leave bare. It might have been a thick cardboard or plastic. Regardless, I’d have to paint it. To remove the remainder of the paint stripper and any flakes, I sanded the entire trunk with wet 220-grit paper and wiped it with a rag. Then I sanded it again with dry 220-grit and wiped off the dust with a tack cloth.
The trunk at this point looked like it could fit in on the set of M*A*S*H. It didn’t look awful, but it would fit in at my Brooklyn apartment about as well as a tommy gun. Though I wanted to respect the trunk, I knew that if I left it a patchy Army green, it would just end up back in storage.
To make it work as a coffee table, I masked the metal hardware with Scotchblue outdoor painter’s tape. (It’s stickier than the indoor kind and won’t slip off even after multiple coats.) Then I primed the whole trunk with RustOleum’s Clean Metal primer to protect the rivets and any other metal. I taped off the trim and painted two coats of whiteeggshell finish on the body of the trunk with a 10-centimetre paint roller. Then I taped off the body and painted two coats of black eggshell finish on the trim. Finally, I protected the painted parts and sprayed an acrylic over the metal hardware. The final product looked as neat as a bunk in an Army barracks.
One of the times I talked to my grandfather about the footlocker, he told me he had worked as an air-ground liaison in Korea, watching his friends fly out over the DMZ almost every day or going out himself. The DMZ wasn’t straight, he said. The very day before he left to come home, his captain was in a helicopter that zigged when it should have zagged. It was shot down in North Korea and soldiers hauled the captain off in something called a deuce-and-a-half. I looked that up. It’s one of those hooded trucks you see in old war movies. The captain made it home, but not for another six months.
That made me think about how often luck determines who comes home from dangerous places and who doesn’t. It was lucky that my grandfather was in Korea ten years after the war and not during it. And it was lucky again that he made it home safe. I felt fortunate to have an old trunk that had been through so much. And I felt proud of the hard work that made it look this good again.
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