Dining Table Made from Elevator Pulley Wheel

I'm getting a lot of use out of the old freight elevator gearing. Appleseed used some of them to actuate the revolving TV wall. The pulley wheel is enormous and very heavy. We kicked around several possible uses for it. One thought was to use it as a chandelier, but it's pretty heavy and I was worried that if it ever fell it would go straight through the floor and/or my head. We decided a dining room table might be a little safer. Ben welded together a table base and it will be topped with glass. You can see the result below (minus the glass).

We're going to use the elevator car itself for something, too, but I'll let you guess at what that will be until it's built and I have some pictures.

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Revolving Television Design

When I bought The Counts Bros. Building it contained two freight elevators that were no longer functional. Actually, they might have been functional but I wasn't brave enough to try them out. The first picture below shows the lifting platform, looking down the elevator shaft from the 2nd floor. We removed the shafts and rotting platforms. However, the gearing and pulley wheel were still in great shape (not to mention GIGANTIC). In the pictures below you can see the them as found, and later removed.

We set out to find a creative way to use the elevator machinery in my residence. I suggested hanging it on the wall as art, but Appleseed had a better idea. A television and speakers would be mounted on a wall in the center of the loft, shown on the plans below. They designed the wall to rotate so that the TV can be viewed from the entertainment space, kitchen, dining area or office area.

The mechanism used to rotate the wall would be the elevator gears. In the conceptual drawing below you can see the television, speakers and receiver mounted on the wall. To the right of the Television the round gears are mounted on the fixed wall and connected to the TV wall with a belt drive that rotates the wall as the gears are turned.

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I've Made a Horrible Mistake

When I found this, I posted that it was the old Standard Furniture sign. With some help from Standard's current owner, I realize now that I read the property records wrongly and that I was actually reading adjacent properties. After a touch of embarrassment, going back to the records I see that there were actually 2 furniture companies recorded: Kliner Furniture Co. (1937) and A.P. Furniture (1938-1957). Sooooo, what did the other half of this sign say? I don't know. I guess I'll have to drag myself over to the library and dig into the city archives for pictures. I've been meaning to do that anyway, but its cold and wet, and frankly I don't want to go.

This Must Be a Sign

This sign is about 4 feet high and 20 feet wide.  I tried to donate it to the Birmingham History Center, but they said it was too big.  I was going to give it to Steve, but he said it wouldn't fit in his store.  I hate to throw it away, but I don't know what to do with it.  I'm thinking maybe I'll put it up in the parking deck on the concrete block wall.

Space 111's Impromptu Art Installation

Wednesday I went to the weekly figure drawing class over at Space 111.  Afterwards I invited everyone over to Storkland/Counts Bros. to see all the weird odds and ends and give me advice about making some art out of it that I could display in my new loft.  I showed them the display I put up in the window with all the weird old stuff I found.  

I used a couple of the old ladders and put up the Standard furniture sign, the ink bottle, an adding machine (the only one I could lift), the thread box and various spools, and other odds and ends.

They asked if they could make their own display, and I said "heck yeah!"  In a whirlwind of activity they put together a better display in 15 minutes than the one that had taken me days.

They used items which I had previously found less interesting: mason jars, mirrors, glass medicine bottles, glassware, balls of string.

My pictures don't do it justice, so if you're in the area walk by and take a look for yourself.

Treasure in the Coal Chute

Steve from What's on 2nd visited me on Sunday and we dug around looking for treasures. There's a coal chute next to the old freight elevator, and we found some cool items. We found an old ink bottle for refilling the ink wells used for fountain pens around the turn of the century.

When the building was first built it was the Counts Brothers sewing machine company. I haven't found many items from that time, but there was an old sewing machine in the chute.

20 years later the building housed Standard Furniture Co. Buried under the coal and debris was half of the Standard Furniture sign. I'm hoping  to be able to find the other half.

We also found some license plates from 1946. I wonder if I can find out to whom it belonged.

Finally we found an old piece of wood with an interesting brand: Wabash Stove Boards. Steve wasn't familiar with it, but heating stoves were not used much past the 1910s so this is around 100 years old.