Zeeko Salvage

The Estate of Robert Bruce. Auction Fever, and 'The Cyclone'.

We went to an auction yesterday on River Road, out in the almond orchards. I am an auction rookie, I feel the hooks of addiction already. All of that shouting, commotion, competition, posturing. It felt like poker tournament. Today, an auction hangover - we picked up the pieces.

It starts out innocently enough, a sign on Highway 32 on the way home from work, and a Craigslist ad. Then you notice the address - River Road. The Estate of Robert Bruce, (as in 'Bruce Road', and the family that owned the 1600 block of Park Ave, starting in 1860).

10 am, a respite from 4 days of North wind, and it is finally warm in the sun, but the action is inside of a cold metal building full of massive steel machines. A huge welder, ancient hoist, and V8 engines hang overhead from skinny chains. Someone next to me says "I have this same building, glad to know that I can hang 4 or 5 tons from the rafters". As we arrive - 10:00 on the dime - they start moving through the merchandise, quickly. A $1,500 air compressor sells for $65, a 1,000 pound drill press for $35. Lots of the auction-goers are regulars, and some won't run up the price if their buddy or neighbor is bidding.

Only a few familiar faces. 19 years in Chico, and I still don't understand - even as we enjoy the explosion of the 'local food movement' - how come there is so little crossover between us townies and the old school ag. community.

'You might not want to stand under that yellow welder, it weighs about 600 pounds'. My friend Jamie notices the two pairs of Chevy V8 headers and the bumper in the rafters and buys it all for $7.50.

We get there after the preview and it is hard to get in to see what was in each box, so there is an element of lottery to it all. For future reference, 'The Junker' is in dark glasses.

I'm not sure that I should buy anything heavy, but then I spot Dave Richer, and he tells me that he'll have a trailer here to pick things up on Sunday, that he'll help me load.

100 years of hoarding to sell in 4 hours. Wind-thrashed clattery tin outbuildings hide Model T Ford parts, pieces of a windmill (with motor, stand, blades, and a disassembled redwood tank), elegant 30's sedan fenders, and dusty bicycles. Out in the open, piles of rusty bed frames and galvanized barrels with sloshing mystery juices, minimart coke dispensers, orchard sprayers, piles of old tires, and conveyors sink under heavy orchard dust and moss. Dave buys a big log-sized stack of rough-cut walnut slabs and rat shit. The body of an old International Scout rots into a heap of grapevines. Someone buys it for $12.50. The auctioneer's kids are keeping track of each sale, they are busy.

Most of the stuff in the machine shop is custom - hacked together, and built with an awkward balance of extreme thrift, indestructability, and minimalism. This guy was a hell of a designer, and the things that I buy are lighter than I was afraid they might be. Mr. Bruce knew how to pick the right size materials for each job. I buy a gas welding cutting stand made from two truck brake drums for $12. The top drum still turns on bearings, so you can spin the piece that you are cutting with one hand.

I find a 4' welding table with 1/2" thick top. After the sale has moved on to another building, I discover that It has a tractor seat mounted on one of the legs that pivots out from underneath so you can sit and weld at the corner. Also couple of old bench grinders attached to a handmade stand of angle iron mounted on a 90 pound pump flange, a toolbox (hiding bonus prize of 10 blacksmiths tongs from Old Chico and a mess of lathe tooling and end mills), and a handmade steel-rolling machine (traded to Dave today for a handmade propane blacksmiths forge).

But by far the goofiest Auction Fever purchase is the Cyclone.

The Junker and his daughter - who have the scrapyard on 20th Street - buy everything heavy. Nobody else wants to try to move the 2,000 pound milling machines or piles of rusty metal. One of the lots of rusty metal and bedframes includes this sheetmetal 'Cyclone' - a dust collector from a nut dryer - The Junker buys it all 'same dollar' (one bid for all the items) for $15.

After a few hours, I poop out. Before Erika goes home to rest, she tells me that she wants to get a box full of vintage fabric, but I am burning out, and need something more than a hotdog to keep going. She returns just in time to bid on the items herself. We grab the few lighter purchases and peel out.

Erika at 40 weeks pregnant, is bidding on a box of Indonesian sarongs from Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bruce's 1950s trip to Asia (according to memorabilia in the box).

Today we returned to survey the damage.

Dave had thought about buying the Cyclone yesterday to make a hood over the forge in his blacksmiths shop, but he didn't want all of the junk metal that came with it.

I thought about it last night and realized that I could use the super funky snorkel bottom to make a Dr. Seuss inspired exhaust hood over my welding table.

When we went to pick up our other items this morning, Dave asked The Junker about it, and he said 'Fifty Bucks'.

Is that a Cyclone you are towing?

"That's a lot of sheetmetal for not much money", says Dave.

Dave's daughter thought that this was pretty cool. She wanted her dad to cut a door in it for her.

My half. Stand by.

Filed under // inbox salvage adventure the shop toolmaking

Posted December 4, 2011

Making tools for toolmaking, a leatherworking press.

We are always on the lookout for old tools that we can repair or repurpose. We use our punch presses a lot, and I have been thinking that custom crafting tools like presses could be a good niche for us.

I found these 3 presses on a local auction last week. Two of them are for embossing paper, but I thought that the one on the right had potential to become a leather punching/rivet setting machine if I could make a new shaft to replace the paper punch that was in there.

Here is the workhorse of our shop - a 1937 Delta 17" drill press. I found it laying in pieces at the salvage yard at the 'Last Chance Mercantile' in Monterey County and got it for $20. It needed a chuck, motor, handles, and repair on the cast iron belt-guard, but I love the art deco 'helmet', and have been carting it around thru 3 moves. There are a lot of great old tool resources online, especially vintagemachinery.org (formerly OldWoodWorkingMachines.com). They have manuals for thousands of old tools, and some original parts are still available for these.

I measured up the existing shaft in the press and it was a hair under 7/16", so I got a 7/16" bolt at the Restore, cut it to length, chucked it up in the drill press, and used a mill bastard file to turn it down to the correct diameter. I tried to punch and center-drill it with the drill press, but it is really hard to center punch a starting point that is dead on, and the first try was off center and crooked. I want a metal lathe...

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.

Filed under // inbox leather the shop toolmaking

Posted May 13, 2011

Harvester teeth to flowers, spring cleaning

Going to have some new sorts of goods for sale at the Bizarre Bazaar in 2 weeks. Spring cleaning! Gathering random metal for years and finally have time to recycle it. Rice harvester teeth and lug wrenches become flowers; metal rings and combine chain, yard bling. Old garden tools are new garden tools, and Erika is sewing leather and finishing bag projects that I've stalled on. If you have broken old garden tools that you want to recycle, hit us up: zeekobag@gmail.com

(download)

Filed under // the shop toolmaking

Posted April 13, 2011

Making tools - a hand press made from scrap metal

We use our hand press to set rivets and snaps, and punch holes in thick, tough materials. The problem - we only have one press, and have to change out the tooling on it everytime we want to punch a hole and then set a snap or rivet in it. We needed another press. I saw a simple press at at a leather shop in the Bay, and decided to make one out of scrap metal.

This is a worn-out towing hitch from a tractor. It will become the body for our rivet and snap-setting hand-press. The bandsaw is from a junk store down by Yuba City.

Trailer hitch marked for cutting with a torch

Rough-cut with a torch, and ready for grinding.

After grinding the edges of the body, I welded on a piece of pipe that will become the cylinder that the press shaft slides up and down in, and also, the pipe will hold the anvil at the bottom that carries the bottom half of two-part snap and rivet-setting dies. I needed the top and bottom shafts to be perfectly centered with eachother, so I used this single piece of pipe, and then cut the center section out once it was welded.

I had a piece of hot-rolled steel from another project that is the the right size to fit inside of the pipe cylinder to act as the 'ram' for the press. I couldn't accurately drill a hole in the center of it with my drill press, so I took it to a small machine shop in North Chico called 'Machine Works' and they reamed out a 3/8" hole in the center of it for me. Most snap and rivet setting tools have 3/8" shafts - these tools slide into the 3/8" bored shaft.

Here I have cut away the un-needed sections of pipe, and cut a length of the steel rod to act as our bottom anvil, or tool-holder. Notice that the anvil fits loosely in the pipe.

This piece will become the mount for the handle - on top of the press body.

Cut out with a torch.

The pipe that I used for the cylinder was welded pipe, not seamless, and the bored shaft was about a 1/16 of an inch smaller than the pipe. I used some galvanized flashing to shim the pipe to just barely fit the bored shaft.

Shimmed cylinder with shaft in place. Threaded eyebolt on top of the shaft will attach to a linkage from the handle, pressing the shaft down when the handle is pulled. I welded a nut onto the top of the shaft which allows for adjustment to the length of the eyebolt - so you can adjust the clearance at the bottom of the shaft if you need to use larger tooling or punch thicker materials.

I needed to have two identical pieces for the linkages that connect the handle to the eyebolt on top of the shaft. Rather than trying to get the holes perfectly spaced on the drill press, I cut lengths from some commercial shelf brackets that had holes at 1.5" centers.

Here is a cut, ground, and stamped linkage piece.

Handle, linkages, and eyebolt on top of the shaft.

Tapping threads into the shaft for the setscrew that holds tools in place. I used the wrong sized tap and broke it off in the hole, thought that I had ruined the entire shaft, but was able to punch it out and retap it with the right size.

So here is the fully assembled press. The shaft, moves up and down in the cylinder, holding tooling (hole punch) which presses against the bottom anvil. In this case, the bottom anvil is a 3/8" bolt.

I thought about just welding the body of the press to a steel baseplate, but decided that I might want to attach it to something else in the future, so I drilled the press body, bolted on some angle iron, and then welded the angle to the baseplate.

Mounted on the table and ready for use.

Wrapped the handle with some old handlebar tape.

Punching holes and setting snaps.

Filed under // the shop toolmaking

Posted January 5, 2011

The Estate of Robert Bruce. Auction Fever, and 'The Cyclone'.

Making tools for toolmaking, a leatherworking press.

Harvester teeth to flowers, spring cleaning

Making tools - a hand press made from scrap metal

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