Upholstery scrap, fire hose, old cordura from camo duck hunting bag.

 Hemp base, army surplus brass D-ring padded with scrap leather to keep lid clips from gouging drum. Fire hose cattails, and Japanese crane motif inkjet printed on raw canvas. 

 Cattails - Old waxed cotton tarp, fire hose, scrap leather, and ripstop poly/cotton from old cargo pants/uniform at my last job.

 Binding the lid with army surplus webbing.

 Finished product - front view.

 Lid and side - olive strip on the right made from waxed cotton tarps that were the roof of Lauren Kennedy's family cabin for several decades.

 Front view. 

 My aunt runs a business in Kansas City 'Asiatica' that repurposes vintage Japanese textiles. The crane is from a digital photo that I took of one of her old fabrics. We inkjet printed it onto some raw canvas and then steamed it to fix the dye.

 Lid clip and cattail detail

 Lid detail

Handle is scrap leather wrapped around hemp rope that used to tie the German Army duffel bag shut (thru these same grommets).

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530-966-8186.

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 Conchos and belt ends seems to fit well too with the hardware. 

Here's how it's supposed to look.

A close-up of the magnet. 

We are going to be vending as part of a fundraiser party for the Chico Urban Artists Collective artcar project, at GRUB on 7/23 see you there!

 

 Well, no metal lathe is in the foreseeable future, but Erika's dad was a mechanical engineer, and we have some of his tools around.  The small drill chuck on the bottom was in his old toolbox, so I bolted it to a piece of angle iron that I can clamp into the drill press vice.  I  chucked up the 7/16" bolt piece in the drill press, and put a sharp, broken bit in the bottomchuck.  By moving the spinning shaft across the broken bit, I was able to scribe a divot in the center of the shaft.  Then I chucked up my bit in the bottom, and spun the shaft in the drill press down onto it to drill it.  It worked!  Dead-center/straight hole.

I want to be able to use replaceable hole punch tubes in this press, so I tapped the shaft to the same thread that the punch tubes have (5/16" fine thread).

 Here is the completed punch shaft with punch-tube in place - the hole on the side is for punched bits of leather to come out.

 Here is the finished shaft assembly.  There is a flat platform on the old press shaft that the handle of the press pushes down onto, and it sits on top of the spring that pushes the whole assembly back up after you pull it down.  I folded a thin piece of flat stock over to get the thickness that I was after, and then brazed the tab onto the shaft.

Here is the finished product.  The bottom anvil is another piece of 7/16" bolt.  The press is pretty small - our main press (behind it) has a lot more leverage, but this one punches 2 layers of thick leather belt easily, and it will work great for punching and setting rivets.

Because the punch shaft is threaded, you can replace the punch tube with a normal bolt, and use it to set rivets.  

Keep your eyes open for these old presses, and let us know if you see them around. 

 Future projects - got a lot in the same auction simply titled 'Heavy Stuff' = including 2 3' long wrenches, and these bad-ass old cast iron lockplate covers.  Total lot weight was #130.  Look for these in projects to come.