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.

Alabama Junk Day

Some days, its good to live in Redneckia.

I don't know what they call it, but once or twice a year the city says it will haul off to the dump anything you can drag down to the street in front of your house. Maybe its got something ironic to do with Earth Day. At any rate, there are piles like this one every few houses on ever road in my neighborhood. Its like a big drive-through thrift store that encourages five-finger discounts! After work I just drove around, filling my car with other peoples discarded treasures. I filled it twice. Some highlights:

• two turn tables
• three TVs
• 5 cassette decks
• two VCRs
• three DVD players
• a guitar
• several brass lamps
• two sets of fire place tools
• toy guns
• Darth Vader mask
• old clock
• old fan
• sewing machine
• folding desk chair
• tool box full of old tools
• giant rusty old trunk
• plastic rocket sled
• ionizing air filter

So, its gonna take me a while to break it all down for parts, but its like bringing home a gold mine. I feel like this must be illegal or something in other, more progressive regions, but right now I'm happy to profit from Alabama's good ol' boy tendencies.

There is one thing about it that is still sort of appalling is just how much of this crap still works. Some of it, like the air filter, looks like its never been used. Undamaged, almost unused stuff, just tossed out to the road. No wonder out economy is fucked -- these ass holes are borrowing money to buy expensive shit they don't need and then chucking it in land fills instead of any other method (recycling, selling, donation, etc.) of getting rid of it. I mean, some of this stuff has nothing wrong with it at all other than it doesn't play Blue Rays. What, you ain't got a second TV down stairs? Maybe not, if that's where all the TVs came from.

So it was a gold mine for me, but it really started to bother me towards the end of testing as I realized just how functional most of this crap is. While picking it up I'd just assumed it was all broken and that I'd strip it for parts. Now, I'm wishing I'd picked up the remotes, I could sell this crap!

Junk Shoppin'!

So we've been hitting pretty much every Thrift store, garage sale, junk shop, and scrap pile we can find lately. For the most part, there's not much to blog about in the "we went antiquing again," category, at least not for a Red Blooded American Man like myself. But there have been a few little gems. For one, I can tell you now that Huntsville is an undiscovered SteamPunk gold mine. Makes sense, all those old NASA sub-contractors, staffed by retiring former rocket scientists who never could throw away a box of old vaccuum tubes... But enough of that! I don't want our secret stash getting out just yet.

No, mostly I'm making this post just as an excuse to post these two old phone cam pics. I found these at an antique store -- seriously, not making this up -- two doors down from my local game shop. They are never open when I'm over there, so I never went in. Well, turns out its about the manlyiest antique shop I've ever seen. Like, old coppies of PlayBoy stuck in between old rusty syths and old steel Coka Cola vending machines, good condition 1950's cap guns right next to giant gold clocks. Fancy stuff. These two sort of sum up the best, at least in my eyes. The picture above is a 1940's battery tester, held over what I think is some kind of circuit tester, also 1940s vintage. The battery tester feels like a piece of farming equipment, with that heavy old wooden handle and big steel teeth. It feels like it still works.... daddy want!

Here's the other noteworthy item:


Its about 250 pounds of beautiful, functional, polished brass manufactured in 1904 by the National Cash Register company, later to be known as NCR. This is the company who made my first computers in the 1980s, where my father worked as a tech and salesman after he got out of the Navy, where my grandfather was a MainFrame tech back when he got out of the Navy. I grew up going to company picnics in the company's sprawling private park in down town Dayton, Ohio as a kid.

And these folks, right next to my FLGS, have a working 1904 Nation register. If I had $350 burning a hole in my pocket... (well, OK, I'd probably buy a gun, but still!)