Making Old Things New

What the heck is this?  Am I putting my laundry out to dry?  Well, no, not exactly.  So here is the story of why there is a freshly painted twenty pound steel gear hanging on a clothesline in my back yard.  When we moved into our house back in 1970 I found in the garage four large and heavy gears.  The man who lived for years here owned a garage in town where he fixed cars and trucks.  The gears were so large they had to have come from a truck transmission, I think.  So I kept them, of course, because, well, you never know...  Cut to 20 years later, and when I started photographing the night sky, I needed a weight to hang from my camera tripod to steady it when doing long exposures with my camera.  It makes the tripod more solid and less likely to shake in a strong wind.  So I thought of the gears!

This is the largest, heaviest gear and I have used it as a weight for about 30 years now.  But it was always rusty and covered with cobwebs and dark brown in color from the rust.  That can be quite a hazard if I have it lying in the grass while setting up my tripod and camera, and it would really hurt to accidentally stub my toe on it in the dark.  And when I drive out east to photograph there, then it makes a mess on the rug on the floor behind the driver's seat.   So the other day I had a brilliant idea!  I started with a wire brush, and after 20 minutes of that most of the loose rust was gone.  So I sprayed it with the red Rust-Oleum primer and then with a semi-gloss white that I happened to have around.  I could not believe how beautiful this old gear looked when I was done painting it!  So it won't dirty the car when I put it on the floor anymore and I won't trip on it in the dark!  What a great solution.

Oh, and this is one of the other large gears, and this is what the other gear looked like before I cleaned and painted it.  What a transformation.  Always good for the soul to make something old and rusted look beautiful again!  Oh, and I wonder if anyone else ever took an old truck gear and painted it white?  Seems unlikely, don't you think?