Side projects and the bathroom sink
I went to the shop today for one thing- to clean up a present for a friend of mine. It’s a WWII dental field chair and foot-powered tool. I’ve had the setup since I was somewhere between the age of 2 and 5, which is too far back for me to remember exactly, but I never really had the drive to do anything with it.
My friend Joe just graduated from dental school and moved back to Fort Myers to join his parents’ practice. While he was in school I thought it would be a great present for him when he graduated, and now that he is, I’m cleaning it up to give him. My grandpa (who said he had a tooth filled with one of these in WWII) convinced me that it was more valuable to leave it the way it was, so I was happy not to spend the rest of my vacation sanding and painting. I wouldn’t have been able to get the silk screen logo back on either. I’ll leave it to Joe to decide how to clean it up.
Before I boxed it up, I couldn’t find packing tape. There are probably over a million different tools in the shop… and no packing tape! So in the mean time I decided to mount a compressor hose reel that I got my grandpa for Christmas last year. He has been thinking of all the ways he could mount it to be portable and what to do with it, but I decided to just mount it to the compressor.
As I wrapped up that project, my grandpa finished his lunch and nap and asked me to finish welding a lug on to a washer. The washer is part of the mowing deck of one of my grandpa’s lawn tractors and sandwitches the blade on to a shaft kind of like a friction clutch. It’s been a year since I’ve done any stick welding, but I was able to run a bead of weld that he filed and ground down to fit.
On a side note, this is the bathroom sink in the shop. When I talk about “the shop” I am talking about my grandpa’s machine shop. It is a 2000ish square foot building with every tool known to man. Over the years working there (since I was about 5 years old pulling weeds) I have come to describe it like this: No matter what job I’ve needed to do- from sweating copper pipe, to pouring concrete, to making a new babbitt bearing for an engine crankshaft- he had the tools. (This is partly why he has achieved super-hero status in my mind.) But even with all these tools, that sink has been sitting on the floor for as long as I can remember.
When I was a kid, there were no walls, just piles of junk/treasure that defined the boundaries of the bathroom. There was a toilet and some pipes sticking out of the wall where the sink would eventually go. About 15 years ago my grandpa framed out the room to the left of the bathroom, then about 5 years ago he finally got the walls put in to the bathroom. After I moved to FWB, he finally installed the sink. It still needs a door, but that will probably take another 5 years. There’s actually a drain in the floor to install a tiny shower, but for now there’s a shelving unit in that space full of… treasure.
Sometimes I think my projects take too long. Then I saw the sink and it reminded me that my grandpa has spent over a quarter of his life on this project, and it’s just a bathroom.
