Restoration and transformation techniques for your loving items.

All people have their beloved items. It ranges from superhero comics to sports collectibles. It does not matter whether that is from childhood or your later years. What is important is that they bring out a certain emotion in you and they hold tremendous sentimental value. People may offer to purchase them off from you, but you will be hard-pressed to accept that. The item can be as simple as the toy truck that your parents bought you for your seventh birthday or something grander like your first car. But you do not expect them to live forever. Even if they are material objects, they are still subject to wear and tear, and they will definitely start to deteriorate at one point. I still have various stickers of Batman, Superman and Hulk in my old bag. The creative graphics of it still attracts. 

Plastics will become discolored and warped, metals will form rust, and printed materials will fade. You will not be able to reverse these natural occurrences, but the good news is you can perform restoration on them. It might take a lot of time and effort, but that can bring your favorite things back to how they looked like before.

New finish:

There are people who consider their pieces of jewelry as valuable assets. They are also meant to be fashion items, but you cannot deny the prices they command at the market. Over time their shine or luster can fade away. So if you plan on selling them online, you should present them the best way that you can by hiring digital artists who can do commercial jewelry retouching. This is where they use photo editing software to make subtle enhancements like sharpening the facets of a diamond or adding a bit of shine on a gold band. This digital manipulation should not be overdone, or else you can be called out for false advertising. You can use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, GIMP or any other tools to do this job. Right now, there are so many online tools are also available for the same purpose. 

If you want your jewelry or any old item that you have to look new, you can perform refinishing on them. There are substances that you can use to polish precious stones like sapphires or rubies to make them shiny and looking brand new. Metals, on the other hand, are prone to oxidation. Cleaning solutions for materials like gold and metal are available, and you may have to do a little sanding or buffing to bring the sheen back to their surfaces.

Harvesting spare parts:

There are old items that still have a healthy market for spare parts. Car enthusiasts, for example, are able to source brand-new bumpers or tail lamps for vehicles that are from the 1990s or even 1980s. This is mostly the case for products that have enjoyed immense success during its active years. The companies that manufactured them may have either have produced excess supplies or have not yet ceased support for those older models. You can search online for such businesses who deal with such type. 

You will not find a similar spare parts market for smaller items like toys, but there are easy ways to get around that. For example, loose action figures and bobbleheads are usually sold cheap on flea markets or conventions. You can then disassemble them and pick out the parts that are in the best condition and rebuild a new figure out of them. If it is done, again you can cherish your toys. 

Replication:

Vintage items can sport technologies or materials that have already been forgotten by time. This makes it difficult to source replacements. The only way for you to get those would be from fellow collectors who are able to preserve their classic stuff in good condition. Eventually, that well will soon dry up. But the good thing is there are ways that you can replicate parts that you can use for restoration. They may not be authentic, but they can get the job done.

For example, large-scale and high-quality printers can churn out decals for a sports car from several decades ago. Or for electronic items that have little plastic parts, you can search the internet for dimensional data on those and use a 3-D printer to make duplicates of them.

Repairs:

The restoration will not be complete if you are unable to get things back into working order. You should be able to identify faults in mechanisms or circuitry and do the repairing yourself or hire someone to do that. There are a lot of old products out there that can easily be restored to full functionality with a few simple fixes. Electronic items are great examples of this. A lot of them do not power up, and it can be due to dirty contacts or bloated capacitors. Thorough cleaning for the former could do the trick, while some soldering is required for the latter. Either way, they are quick solutions that could get your classic gadgets up and running again.

Seeing your favorite items restored back to their former glory is an exciting thing. That can give you the same sense of joy when you first saw them. You can also see this as an opportunity to capitalize on its value and sell them to those who you know will appreciate them as you do.