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.
