Pull Station Restoration Help

Hello. Does anybody here have any experience with refurbishing pull stations? I need help with repainting and polishing my Edwards 270-SPO. For it to turn out well, will I have to sand the original paint? And does anybody know how I can wash it without damaging the labels? The labels in question are the ones inside the pull station, and the one on the back. I also need to know what kind of paint to use. Thanks for any input!

Can you disconnect the front part from the mounting plate? I know Simplex pulls can. I would not get the back plate wet since it could mess with the switch and make it rust internally or gum up the workings of it.

I personally don’t have experience restoring pull stations but I do have enough experience painting stuff in general before. So take this with a grain of salt but sand everything before painting. It will help a lot with even coverage and adhesion.

Using large amounts water on a metal station like that may cause corrosion or the formation of water spots. What I would do if it was dirty is wet down an old and clean toothbrush and gently brush dirt off. Do not let water contact the labels. It will cause them to fall off.

While I can’t offer any general advice in regards to refurbishing your pull station, I do have experience with repainting the silver stripes on a 270-SPO. A few years ago, I decided to try this experiment on one of my spare 270-SPOs (the original silver paint had major chips) and obtained satisfactory results.

I started out by applying painter’s tape to cover every millimetre of the pull station (except for the stripes) and carefully sanded the stripes down to the body’s bare metal. I then applied one coat of paint and one coat of fixative, repeating this process about 6 times (which was probably excessive). Since I used a modelling brush to apply the paint, the texture doesn’t quite match the factory finish, but it is nonetheless quite attractive. It’s important to use some kind of fixative since modelling paint has rather poor durability in an application such as this one.

For the stripes and lettering, Testors 1146 silver paint is an almost perfect match to the original colour. The fixative I applied over the paint was a Krylon product of some sort, but I forget the specifics.

To illustrate the results, here’s a photo of my 270-SPO with restored stripes (left) next to an unrestored example (right):