Antique Gun Cabinet Restoration in Fort Collins

Some projects arrive looking like a lost cause. The cabinet is locked and no one has the key. The glass panels are original 1/16 inch stock that would shatter under any real contact. The finish has worn down past the point of surface restoration. The interior felt is compressed and tired. Everything about the piece says it has been sitting in storage for a long time and the people who owned it were not sure it was worth saving.

This 1960s hexagonal pine gun cabinet was exactly that project when it came through our doors. The before photos tell the story clearly: a heavily worn two-piece cabinet, the glazed upper display section separated from the hexagonal base, sitting outside with a finish that had seen better decades. Looking at it objectively, most people would have walked past it.

This project was more involved than a standard wood refinishing job. It required coordinating multiple trades and specialists to bring every element of the cabinet up to a standard the original construction never reached. Here is what the full scope covered:

• Lock picked and a new key fabricated from scratch by Red Rocks Locksmith Denver, our trusted locksmith partners who handled the original lock without damaging the cabinet
• Original 1/16 inch fragile glass panels replaced with 3/16 tempered glass throughout, handled by our partners at Black’s Glass, improving both safety and optical clarity over the original
• Old fluorescent T8 tube lighting removed and replaced with two 12-inch COB LED strips with color-changing capability and a remote control
• New wool felt installed throughout the interior of the upper cabinet section
• Full wood restoration and refinish on both the upper glazed section and the hexagonal base, addressing the worn surface, scratches, and finish deterioration across the complete piece

Before the process, the piece deserves its own attention.

Hexagonal gun cabinets of this type were produced by several American furniture manufacturers during the 1950s and 1960s, built from solid pine with glazed door panels, interior display hardware, and a separate storage base. The form is distinctive: the angled facets of the hexagonal profile give the cabinet a presence in a room that a standard rectangular wood cabinet does not have, and the combination of the glazed upper section with the solid paneled base creates a two-part piece that reads as architecturally considered rather than purely utilitarian.

The cabinet arrived locked with no key. That is not an unusual situation on a piece that has been sitting in storage for years, but it does mean the first step is getting the piece open without damaging the cabinet or the lock mechanism.

We work with Red Rocks Locksmith Denver on projects that require lock service, and they handled this one correctly: the lock was picked without any damage to the surrounding wood or the lock hardware, and a new key was fabricated from scratch to work with the existing mechanism. The original lock was retained in the cabinet rather than replaced, which preserves the period-appropriate hardware and avoids the aesthetic and practical issues that come with fitting modern lock hardware into an older cabinet.