Trouble Starts with What's That!
I was junk shopping, and I saw a fan with a very large motor on it out of the corner of my eye. The motor was excessively large for the size of the fan blades. Also, the blade guard is thick and sturdy and appears to be solid brass. The fan weighs just slightly over 22 pounds! Over the years, I have learned that engineers strive to use the minimum amount of resources to create…
Read More
While perusing a pile of photos at a local antique store, my wife came upon a vintage picture of a woman wearing a flower upside down. It was striking due to the large size of the flower backed by an equally large fern leaf. There are few things more exciting than finding something you can’t explain. Why would someone wear a large flower upside down and look so happy doing it? As it turns out,…
Read More
Having a pendulum kitchen clock puts you into an exclusive club. It’s like having your name in a phone book or having a Facebook account. There are literally tens of thousands of these out there, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fun to clean and get into top notch working condition. They are particularly interesting since they not only chime the hour and half hour, but actually have an independent alarm with a separate winding mechanism….
Read More
While pursuing a pile of old pictures, I happened upon a coat of arms with the family patriarch’s name written in flamboyant script: The Right Honourable William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, Viscount Lewisham and Baron Dartmouth of Dartmouth. This is EXACTLY what my wife hates me dragging home. I was just about to walk away when it hit me the print had a heavy impression around the edges. That only occurs when an impression is…
Read More
It is hard for many of us to grasp how significant a problem rodents were to our ancestors. While mice still pose health risks to modern populations, the average person in the 19th and early 20th centuries were keenly battling these vermin. This is evidenced by the relatively large number of mousetrap advertisements found in publications of the day. And who hasn’t heard the phrase, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a…
Read More
I am not sure if this piece is folk art or just a cry for help, but I found this spark plug embedded in a rock amalgamation in a San Diego tidal pool. In March of 2016, my wife and I took a trip to San Diego. One of the beaches we visited had an amazing sandstone labyrinth of tidal pools. Glistening in one of the pools was a tiny gold spec. Of course my…
Read More
I recently acquired a Seth Thomas, weight driven, mantel clock. Mantel clocks are not rare. You can walk into just about any junk store and find an old, functioning mantel clock. Where it gets exciting is when you can place the clock to a particular time period (Civil War, WWI, WWII, etc.). In this case, the clock had a distinctive eagle on the front holding the classic arrows and olive branches. The eagle’s head is…
Read More
As a native Texan, I greatly enjoy old style cowboy music. So when I purchased a badly beaten Decca record by Denver Darling and His Texas Cowhands I was fully expecting standard country songs. Instead of country music, the album is a World War II motivation record sung in the old cowboy style. Since the album talks about fighting the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy), that should put it between 1939 and 1945. Listing of Denver…
Read More
Ok, I now officially feel old. I was displaying this Qualstar tape drive in my office when one of my younger staff members came in and asked what it was. Without hesitation I told him it was a tape drive from 1988 used to copy data from mainframes to microcomputers (IBM XT, Macintosh). He earnestly asked why they would need that. Couldn’t they just copy the files to their local systems? Well, in 1988 we…
Read More
With the digital revolution and the Internet colliding, the legal use and distribution of music is a particularly hot issue. I had not considered how long some of the more nuanced aspects of music distribution had been going on until I picked up a curious looking 78 RPM, Victor Record from 1907. The record was particularly odd in that it was imprinted on only one side and the back was dedicated to a rather lengthy…
Read More
