Antiques and Ghetto Maintenance

Here's a few little things I've been working on lately.

Coming up out of last weekend's scrap run, comes this lovely set of fireplace tools. They looked like hell when I picked them up, but a few turns of a screw driver, a little Brasso, and no small amount of elbow grease and they are good to go.



They are just the right amount of tacky to appeal to me, and since my fireplace is flanked by Rohan-style swords from Lord of the Rings (Eomer's and Eowyn's, to be exact) they fit the decor pretty well.



Now this fan isn't exactly SteamPunk, but its Diesel as all hell. Also, totally unsafe to operate at any speed! I replaced the old, dry-rotten power cord with something less likely to burn down my house, but I still don't trust this thing any further than I can throw it. At least now its OK safeish to run if you are in the room, and safe to leave plugged in, where before it was a fire waiting for a place to happen.



Even now, its no force to ignore. It pushes wind unlike any modern fan I've used, and those Bakelite fan blades will chop hell out of anything wandering through that nice, open safety wire. Man, they just don't make 'em like they used to.

In the Ghetto Maintenance department, I give you my take on auto body work. Almost two years ago, neighborhood hoodlums carved "dick" into my car door. They got down to bare metal, so there's no way to buff it out. There's also no way I'm repainting the car, so I've tried to just laugh it off whenever I get a funny look at the drive through. Well, I finally came up with a solution.



My dad used to be in real estate, and had a set of those magnetic signs you see on car doors. He had no further use for them, so I took them for my own purposes -- even though at the time I didn't know what those might turn out to be. At the same time, the print shop at word had some wicked-cool scraps of vinyl left over from a truck we wrapped for a government client. This isn't normal car wrap, this stuff is thick and intended to be laid out on cement floors at trade shows. I didn't know what I'd do with that, either, but I took the scraps off their hands.



Put the two together, and you've got a very comical solution to a very stupid cosmetic problem. I'd like to fassion some fake bolts to "hold" it in place, but for now I'm happy with it.



And, as a final teaser, here's how that Guitar Hero controller came out. I'll be taking proper beauty shots this weekend, but I figured I'd post the preview shot I sent to the owner.