My wife is a hair stylist at a very nice salon nearby.  She and a client were discussing their love of consignment store shopping when the client  mentioned a place she recently found that is both a consignment shop and an auction house.  It turns out to be just a couple of miles from the house, so we checked it out.  I noticed a number of tools that would be up for auction over the weekend and so on Saturday, I went.  It was my first auction, and it was a lot of fun. 

 

 

That’s the auctioneer at work.  It’s an odd profession.  But the items up for auction were so varied and fascinating!  I found myself singing “Portobello Road” in my head.   (You will watch the video and enjoy the dancing!  Now!)

 

“Portobello Road” from “Bed Knobs & Broomsticks”

 

Very unique individuals attend these events.  One particular gentleman bought a Vietnam era US Army uniform and then wore the hat for the remaining 2.5 hrs of the auction. 

 

 

This guy was soon to be the bane of my auction experience.  More on that shortly.

 

First; my spoils.  A router table!  With a router!

 

 

I won this for 60 bucks.  I’m pretty excited about this, as I’m planning to take my first foray into furniture construction soon, and this will almost certainly be a help. 

 

I also picked up a snapper riding mower, which you can just make out in this picture below.  I haven’t decided if I’ll be keeping it or not.  As my mom pointed out to me, I should try to buy something I can make money on and therefore pay for the tools I am keeping.  I can definitely turn a profit on the mower.

 

 

Also in the picture above is the band saw I went to the auction for.  I told myself I’d bid up to 50 bucks for it, and I expected it to go much cheaper.  It would have, too, if not for Captain Kreigsmarine, Bane of Auction Day.  He had bid against me on the mower, and he seemed upset that I won it.  The next item I bid on was the band saw, and he stared directly at me while he out bid me over and over.  I don’t think he even wanted the thing.  I mean, what does a guy wearing a 40 yr old Army hat who humps the air every time he bids (yes, that’s right) want with a band saw?!

 

Anyway, after he won the band saw, I paid for my spoils and went home to spend 30 minutes digging my trailer out of the snow it was buried in to go pick everything up.  Over all, I’m happy with my first auction experience, and you can bet I’ll be back.  With a wicked awesome hat.

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We’ve had our eye out for some nice pendant lights for the kitchen island for almost a year, now.  The thrifty dutch blood won't allow me to spend big money on something that is such a simple thing.  Light fixtures are not complicated!

We’ve seen some that we’ve liked in stores, but not exactly what we were looking for.  I found some online that I liked, but they were hundreds of dollars.  To help achieve the rustic themed kitchen we are going for, we want lanterns. 

I found this one online here and really liked it, but the cost barrier rises up and slaps me in the face.  So, I decided to make some.

I was at Lowes a few days ago, and saw these on sale for about 15 bucks.

  


Perfect?  No.  But they’ll do.    I disassembled one to see what I had to work with, here.



That metal rectangle is the back plate; the remaining 3 sides are glass.  The arms on the lantern come off, also.  This looked like it could work.  First, I needed to rewire the socket so the wires came out the top of the lantern instead of the side. 

  

Looking inside the socket, there are 2 screws holding on the metal flange on the back.  I removed them, took off the flange, passed the wires through the 1/8th inch threaded thing that I don’t know the name of but there’s a picture of it below, and reassembled.





I then reassembled the light, leaving out the metal back-panel.  Here’s how it looked at that point. 



I then realized that the provided wiring wasn’t going to work, because my wiring was going to be visible and wrapped around a chain, so I took it back apart and rewired it with some lamp cord, which is readily available at any home improvement store.  I also drilled a hole through the loop top piece with my hammer drill.  Here’s how it looked after the rewire and putting the loop piece back on.



Be sure to keep track of which side of the lamp cord is hot.  I did this by trimming the hot side so that when I went to wire it into the ceiling, hot would be a little shorter.
Next up was the ceiling plate.  I was able to use the wall-mounting portion of the light itself that I removed earlier.  This part is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s a couple pictures.

 

After that, I wrapped the cord through a length of black chain and proudly showed my work to the wife.  She didn’t like the chain.  So, back to the store I went and wandered around aimlessly looking for inspiration for about an hour before settling on something.  I bought a couple 3ft sections of 1/4in copper tubing, like what would be used for small plumbing jobs.  I also bought some compression fittings that would allow me to go from the copper to the 1/8in threaded nipple doo-dad pictured earlier.  The 1/4in copper needs a 3/8in compression fitting.  I bought four 3/8in by 1/4in ones; one for each end of each tube.  I also bought two 1/4in by 1/8in bushings that are needed to allow the socket inside the lamp to thread into the copper.
Since everything is hollow, I can now pass the lamp cord right through the middle of them.  Here’s how attempt number 1 looked.



Getting closer.  When I made the second one, I was able to reduce the visibility of some of the brass by hiding it inside the fixture.  I went back and did the same to the first one. Here’s how the both of them look right now.



Pay no attention to the still-unfinished range hood back there.

I ended up buying another set of the lights because I wanted some spare parts and I needed some of the glass inserts to fill in the 4th side of these ones (remember that they were actually wall-mounted lights to start, so only 3 sides had glass).  Even after buying a second set of lights, the whole project still came in under 50 bucks.  Not too shabby for some decent-looking pendant lights.

So if you've got the parts, everything is disassembled, and you've rewired your socket, here's the assembly steps:

1. Widen the holes in the top of the lantern and the wall (now ceiling) plate to accept a 3/8in nipple.
2. Thread the bushing into the compression fitting, then put the threaded part of the fitting through the lantern top.  Insert the copper into the compression fitting, and thread onto what should be sticking out the top of the lantern.  Make this as tight as possible.  A vice helps out here.
3. Do the same thing to the mounting side, now, but minus the bushing (it's not needed here).
4. You should now have your pendant sans light socket.  Feed the wire into the opening in the bushing in the inside of the lantern until it pops out of the ceiling plate.  Pull the rest through, and then thread the socket into the bushing.
5. Reassemble the rest of the lantern, insert glass, etc, and you're good to go.

I’m planning on buying some kind of spray product to smoke the glass with, as they don’t offer much spot-lighting as they are now.  I’ll post some shots after I do that.


So how about it?  Any opinions on how they turned out?

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I spent Christmas and New Years in Chicago with the parents this year.  Various surgeries, sicknesses, and car issues contributed to making it less of the joyous holiday season we had hoped for, but as Perry Como croons, there’s just no place like home for the holidays. 

 

As is my fashion, I go from shop to shop to see what various members of the family are up to.  Most of my family does blue collar work of the type that screeches to a halt when winter arrives.  A quick aside: this fact has lead to the phrases “I’m not even thinking about that until the snow flies” and “I’ll do it this winter” being commonly heard throughout the branches of the family tree.

 

Anyway, I present two of the shops I visited on this trip: Dad’s and Uncle Terry/Cousin Bret.

 

My Dad’s Shop

It’s odd to look at pictures of this place.  It’s been part of me my entire life.  Some of my earliest attempts at writing my name are on a few of the shelves in here. 

 

 

Although it may be a little bit of a visual overload, Dad’s shop is highly organized.  I think we’re on revision 5 of the layout.  Any surface capable of having pegboard adhered to it has been plastered with it.  Everything is labeled.  Hidden in those rafters are large quantities of valuable commodities that Dad doesn’t want anyone know he has.  Like a lot of work gloves.   Apparently, they don’t make them like this anymore.  Which, for Dad, means that Menards doesn’t sell them anymore.

 

 

Dad had a new knee put in the week before Christmas. Moved by pity, Uncle Mike bought him a big bag of Mike and Ike’s, which Dad took a fancy to.  The confusion of Mike giving him candy called ‘Mike and Ikes’ combined with the Vicodin he’s on post-surgery had him calling these things “Mikey Likeys” for a few days.  That just never got old.

 

 

Note the labeled drawers in the back, there.  English, metric, steel, stainless, machine, wood, etc.  Everything sorted.  Insane.  I wouldn’t have the patience for that.

Incidentally, I have no idea why he has a dryer vent on the bench.  He really has a thing for that style dryer vent.  When he helped me put in the range hood vent, we went through a couple different ones until we found one just like that.  So I suspect he just bought this one when he saw it in case he needed it. 

 

 

Dad used to fix vacuums on the side until they all became so infested with plastic that they were barely serviceable.  Charting the death of the small-time vacuum repair industry would make an interesting commentary on the shifting economic climes of America.  When I got engaged, Dad gave me a commercial vacuum that is so heavy it may have been forged whole.  But I’m pretty sure that it will probably work until I’m dead.

 

 

Tape is very important.  We should have a lot of it.

My Dad’s mantra is “If some is good, more is better”.  I should have said that in the first sentence, and then I could have just stopped typing, because it explains most of the rest of the pictures. 

 

 

Organized; yes.  Spelling Bee champion; not so much.  When I asked him about it, he responded with something along the lines of “I can find the antenna parts, can’t I?”

 

This clock has been there for at least 15 years.  At one point the battery died, so he put that digital one under it.  I can only surmise that the digital one died, so he put a battery back in the analog one.  The bulletin board has, to my knowledge, always been empty.  When Dad saw me looking at it, he said “That’s where people are supposed to leave their name and what tool they borrowed”.  I think he’s the only one that knew that.

 

I’ll wrap up the tour of Dad’s shop with a list of some of the things I made in here during my younger days.

• Pinewood Cars
• Bottle Rocket revolvers (shot 8 bottle rockets in 10 seconds)
• Robots (out of old RC cars.  They didn’t work.)
• Overpowered Super Soakers.
• Slot-car tracks
• Crossbows (Mom confiscated them)

 

Uncle Terry/Cousin Bret

Terry and his son Bret haul loads of mostly aggregate around locally using their dump trucks.  That’s the part of what they do that is easy to explain.  When they are not doing that, they are busy buying, fixing, and selling things.  As is typical of the family, everything they own is for sale.  For the right price. 

Seriously, if you see something in these pictures you want, you can probably buy it.  They love eBay.  They like to buy Quads and Snow Mobiles and Jeeps, have some fun with them, put some money into them, and turn it around for a bit of profit.  Here’s the current winter projects.

 

 

Terry found a 1940s(?) Chevy with a restored interior that needs some TLC on the exterior.  He’s decided he’s going to replace the rotted out wooden bed, tune or rebuild the original engine, and put some new wheels on it, but that’s it.  He’s going to leave the paint as is.  I like it.

 

 

 

Bret’s project is a Jeep Wrangler TJ.  He’s put the LS1 engine and computer out of a corvette into it, long arm suspension, acme transfer case, transmission cooler, and a lot of other stuff.  It’s on the rack because he’s regearing it. 

 

 

 

Bret has offered on numerous occasions to do my dream car, pictured below,  for me.  We’ll see.  We’ll see.

 

 

 

This concludes our shop tours.  I hope you had fun.  Share some stories or links to pictures of your shops; I’d love to see them.

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