The old tanker office desks have always been interesting to us and while we’d love to have a couple for ourselves, I don’t think there’s any way we’d be able to get one of those beasts into our upstairs office. Sooooo, we’ll take some vintage tanker style accessories and deal with those instead 
We decided to get started with a tape dispenser. We jumped out to Etsy to see what our options were and we weren’t really seeing too much variety except for some that were cast iron, kinda art deco style (which were still cool but not what we were looking for). We almost gave up and then we found one from Etsy seller TomLaurus. It was cast iron and had that industrial green textured finish on it (which we planned on hopefully sanding down). What we liked about this dispenser was the “fastback” look it had. The slanted angle of the body gave it a sleek modern look and we knew this was the vintage tape dispenser for us!
Here’s how it looked when we got it. Green, textured, dirty, nasty sticky tape (probably as old as the dispenser itself) and oh yeah, it weighed a TON!
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Hitting it with the sander made pretty quick work of the texture. As you can see, we didn’t quite get all of it off but that’s okay:
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Next we needed to update the plastic core piece. Enter wood and stain. After cutting out a 3-inch circle from some scrap wood, and sanding it down until it fit snug inside a new roll of tape we stuck a dowel through it and hit it with some of our favorite color MinWax stain (Special Walnut) and gave it a coat of semi-gloss poly. We also replaced the nasty black rubber bottom pad with some white Fun Foam from Michael’s. Some of the sheets they sell are adhesive-backed and that’s what we picked. Traced our shape, cut it out and stuck it on!
Of course, we couldn’t leave the tape dispenser in it’s cold metal condition. A new coat of paint was definitely in order and we decided to give it some pop with a few coats of Rust-Oleum Sun Yellow, followed by a few more coats of clear gloss.
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One last little detail…..after using some Goo Gone to remove some old tape residue, even the teeny tiny screw that holds the cutting blade in place got a makeover in the form of a glossy coat of aqua spray paint
We hope you enjoyed seeing this project come together. It was a lot of fun doing it. Be sure to stop by TomLaurus’s Etsy Store. He’s got a lot of cool stuff and I’m sure we’ll be making another purchase from him eventually. Till next time!
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