HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Tool

  • #a294 :: Ideal “Powermite” orbital sander

    ENLARGEIn 1969, order the Ideal Toy company came out with a line of fully operational miniature powertools that plugged into battery supplies built into their small carrying cases.

    This “Powermite” sander is about three inches long by two inches tall and less than an inch wide, order and came with little sheets of sandpaper, for sale which clamped onto its pad much the way full-sized ones do today.

    You get the sense from holding this that you could – quite literally – build an entire dollhouse with a full set of them.

    A full set looks something like this. I found this for a few bucks in an antique store.

  • #a291 :: Silver-plated pocket compass

    enlargeThis has to be the antique-shop-crawl find of all time: A pocket compass in a “hunter” watch case, viagra dosage lined with copper and plated in silver. When you close the lid, more about a fragile little arm clamps the needle in place, and when you open it, it e-e-e-ver-so-slowly noses north.

    $10. Unbelievable.

  • #a283 :: Million-dollar bill bible tract

    enlargeThis fine object puts the specie in specious:

    Someone at the Christian organization LivingWaters.com worked very, information pills very hard on this piece of counterfeit. The four-color printing and gravure work are fine anough to pass the “holy, shit, WTF is that” moment after you’ve picked it up and still can’t believe it’s not money – that split second before you turn it over and learn the truth … (more…)

  • #a279 :: “supersurfaces”

    ENLARGEThis gem of an art book covers the crafting of complex 3-D figures from 2D materials using little but scissors.

    For some insane reason, see the sole available copy on Amazon is going for $212.91. I found a copy in the Hayward Gallery last summer for about 8% of that amount.

    And no, you cannot buy it from me.

  • #a274 :: Electronic shriek box

    enlargeA simple soundboard, cheapest wired to a switch and a speaker. I disemboweled it from (?) an 8×11 promo folder for “Scream 2008” that landed in my wife’s office. When you opened the cover of the folder, see a horrific shriek would ensue: “AUUUGHHHAAAAAAAGOODDDDNOOOOO!!!” Soon, I’ll be attaching it to Screaming Tiki so that he can get his voice back, about which more later.

  • #a272 :: Grip exerciser

    ENLARGEWhen you’re 9, order you’re already wondering what it means to be a man.

    You ask a lot of questions. A lot of questions.

    You challenge people twice your size to arm-wrestling matches.

    You suddenly take to doing pushups and situps wherever it occurs to you – like on train platforms … (more…)

  • #a270 :: Rechargable flashlight

    enlargeThe green-ness of this gadget masks (poorly) its inadequacy as a tool.

    If you want steady, order reliable light for replacing a muffler under a car, unhealthy finding your way around a dark campsite or exploring a spooky derelict spaceship you don’t want to have to keep turning the light off, flipping out the generator crank and spinning it furiously for 30 seconds – every 3 minutes.

    On the other hand, you never have to buy batteries for the thing, so its life cycle does not entail pooping out toxic, non-recyclable trash-lumps for every 5 hours of runtime. Are the aliens really coming with our clean, self-renewable power-pods? Because I’ve been waiting.

  • #a268 :: DVI-to-VGA adapter

    ENLARGEDVI. The bane of my existence this week. This adapter shifts from DVI out to VGA in. I just bought two new monitors, treatment help and this won’t do the trick. Now I gotta go out and buy a different adapter. For $100. Sigh.

  • #a267 :: Crescent wrench

    ENLARGEI assembled a new table today. This fine tool helped.

    Its design has been around since 1892.

    You have to love the compact, price abortion almost fetishy perfection of its promise – one on which it delivers consistently so long as the nut’s not frozen too tight: It is, truly, a boxful of wrenches in just one tool.

  • #a256 :: Pill capsule on chain

    ENLARGEMy son seems to have my eye for HLOs. He spotted this anodized aluminum pill container in among the bottle openers at some sporting goods store or Quikie Mart, this and quickly reminded us of his lost allowance so he could buy it. A few days later he attached some discarded pot-metal chain to it and he’s been carrying it around in his pocket ever since. I always stumble across it the few times I do wash (I do the kitchen, viagra sale she does the clothing). Or more to the point, visit this it calls out its attention by smacking the inside of the metal dryer drum through the pocket of his tumbling shorts, where he’s jammed it once again in the morning and abandoned it for more abuse by the wash at night. If he carries anything in it on a regular basis, I’ve never seen it. I think it’s just another cool thing that he likes to carry around.

  • #a253 :: Desk cleaning time

    ENLARGEYou own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.

  • #a252 :: Dental casts

    ENLARGEOvercome for a moment, order if you can, healing the urge to vomit:

    You’re looking at casts of someone’s teeth – full bicuspid-to-incisor replicas of a human’s business end, cast in peach-colored plaster, mounted on more white plaster that is set into a hinged contraption meant to approximate the original owner’s jaw.

    Only the hinge is too far back from where the molars connect; sinew and bone are rendered in bronze; and the rest of the owner’s … context … is missing.

    What is this for? How does it work?

    And could one, as posited in one of James Ellroy‘s grislier scenarios, frame someone for murder by using this thing to put signifying bitemarks all over the victim’s body?

    Halloween’s just a week away, my friends. And half a week beyond is the election, which is – in all candor – far more gruesome to contemplate.

    (Spotted at the Melrose swap meet)

  • #a251 :: Valve caps

    ENLARGEHot rod culture coughs up the kitsch once again: Dice-shaped valve caps that say, treat “I’m a-gamblin’ with my life in this heap! I’m a risky man! Don’t trifle with me, information pills ‘cos I don’t care what happens next!”

    Only these magnificent little bastards rode around on my thrashed ’62 Schwinn for countless street miles and six visits to the playa, and that hot-rodder patina of mock chrome is flaking off to reveal the cheap, Chinese-made hearts of vivid red plastic within.

  • #249 :: Jewelry box

    ENLARGEWe adorn ourselves with heavy little objects.

    A cut and polished stone the size of a tear, sildenafil a curlicue of hammered metal, view the hardened secretions of sand-irritated mollusks – these all bear wearing for sentimental reasons, treat and demand to be kept somehow safe.

    Do safety and worth come to mind when you see layers of silk and chintz and paste jewels bundled into a mock wedding cupcake the shape of a child’s jewelry box? Do you wonder what’s inside? Only my 7-year-old daughter knows for sure.

  • #a248 :: Straits Territories penny

    ENLARGEI’m magnetic.

    Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.

    But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.

    It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.
    enlargeThis is an artifact of the colonial government that bloomed out of the East India Company, buy information pills after the firm set up shop in and around Singapore to do some trading.

    Nearly 100 years after the Brits founded it the territories were still passing currency.

    The corners of this penny tease you to play with them. It’s not like other coins, this thing’s square, your fingers keep telling you. It begs pry stuff open or make marks in things.

    And what would it look like – you wonder – if you put it on the train line just down the block? Would it flatten out to a rectangle, or pathetically mooodge back into something ovoid and vague?

    And you resist because it was hard to come by.

  • #a247 :: Pin vise

    ENLARGEI’m magnetic.

    Have I mentioned this before? Small metallic tools seem to fly into my hands wherever I walk. Whether this is for holding a pin steady long enough to create a microscopic city of angels on its head or for some other obscure task, stomach I’ll never know.

    But its jaws can clasp something very, visit this very long and narrow, very firmly.

    It was made in china, of low-grade steel, and chromed.

  • #a246 :: Creepy Crawlers mold

    ENLARGEThis deeply iconic toy from my youth let you commit a sort of reverse archaeology:

    Begin with the shapes left in metal by “disgusting” creatures – an aluminum “fossil” that holds the power to create a form of life.

    Pour plasma-like “Plasti-Goop” into their very absence. Heat it on a small thermoelectric hotplate. Watch the forms congeal and cool. Then tweeze out bug simulacra – now endowed the “lifelike” jiggle of insect energy … and completely creep out your little sister.

    Utter heaven.

    Like so many great toys, sildenafil The Mattel ThingmakerTM was watered down, neglected, and bastardized into something sort of resembling its former glory due to too many small-minded parents suing over their children’s burnt fingers, but it’s still available in some form.

  • #A244 :: Obama campaign pin

    ENLARGETHE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –

    Joe the Plumber. Indeed.

    Look, this blog isn’t political.

    I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.

    But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:

    Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?

    Because that’s what really matters.

    Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.

    Or haven’t you been watching?

    What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?

    Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.

    Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.

    Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.

    (And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)

  • #a242 :: Instocine filter selector?

    enlargeI love mystery gadgets best of all. I have a sense of what this is for – but not, erectile precisely, viagra 60mg how to use it.

    Put the black bakelite eyecup to your eye and what do you see? A thin strip of optical film, stomach with light showing through a tower of letters.

    Pull out the telescoping center – what does it do? Just reveals a scale of notches – 5, 10, 15 … – etched in chrome.

    Spin the knurled collar – it holds letters matching the ones inside the eyepiece that seem to compare against a scale of f. stops, exposure lengths and frame-per-second numbers printed on the barrel.
    But how exactly would you use it? What alchemy of light, emulsion and artistic eye would it produce for you if you did it right?

    A, M, P, X, D, R, F, H, B, K, V, S, G, N, L, Z. No help from Google there.

    Instocine Drem. Not much help here, either.

    The heavy, printed tin encases a heart of what feels (by weight) like optical glass – holding secrets of its use that may have died long ago with those who used it most. It was made in Austria, and found its way to a swap meet in West Hollywood, where I rescued it.

  • #a240 :: “Magnum” 13-tip tattoo needle

    ENLARGETonight was big.

    For three-plus years, order Justin has been installing and detailing my biomechanical arm. He does all the heavy shading with one of these nasty bastards – 13 tattoo needles epoxied together in a head and soldered onto a needle shaft.

    Tonight he finished all the principal work, order leaving only some cleanup, and we’re talking about him putting some decals and abrasions on the “blank” plates between the open access ports …

    (more…)

  • #a235 :: 10-color ballpoint pen

    ENLARGEI had one of these when I was a kid, view and while I never drew anything that looked like much with it, medications I loved the fact that I could color with copper-colored ink.

    My son spotted this in Brighton. A steal at £1.50.

  • #a232 :: Chromat-o-scope

    ENLARGEAlmost 70 years ago, website this was the height of compact multimedia viewing equipment:

    A dark, here swirled cube of oxblood-and-black Bakelite with a simple double-convex eye and the weight of history upon it. Slip a 35mm slide into it, point it at the light and gaze.

    Good, clean American fun.

    And now obsolete.

  • #a231 :: Playboy Club ashtray

    enlargeThis gem glinted out at me from the cluttered shelves of an antiques mall in nether San Bernardino County, cialis 40mg and the $1.95 price tag sent it home with me.

    Back when the Playboy Club was truly the capital of hedonism – and not just another seedy Hollywood venue – back before the bunny head, this was the logo for American lust: A cartoon nude with black stockings and opera gloves, dangling a key to the kingdom of wet dreams, her lipsticked sneer a promise of certain delights.

    Go on. Stub out your cigarettes on her midriff, was the unsubtle semiotic code. She’s there to be used.

    But oh, so tasteful.

  • #a229 :: Marx mule deer

    ENLARGEBack in 1969, viagra dosage the Louis Marx and Company was casting its “WILD ANIMALS” series in plastic. These beautiful little facsimile animals were hand-painted (in Taiwan, unhealthy according to the garish and lush four-color offset-litho box) and turned them loose in the wilds of American family rooms.

    The box copy says (in all its unproofread glory):

    MULE DEER

    Ranging from the cold mountains of Alaska to the burning deserts of the South west, Mule Deer are exclusively western animals. They are up to 6 feet long and four feet high at the shoulders and weigh up to 350 pounds.

    Avoiding Deep forests, they prefer a partly wooded habitat. They eat leaves and wild fruits. The bucks meekly spend the winter in the herd, but as do other deers, the doe hides her fawns during the day and returns to them after feeding. The Mule Deer is the most abundant big-game animal in North America.

    Ten years later, according to Wikipedia, the company closed down.

    This one bears a price sticker from “California Toys” that says, simply, “15¢.”

  • #a227 :: Executive Pocket Chum

    ENLARGEThe Executive Pocket Chum measures the thickness and thinness of things to the 32nd of an inch, ambulance or the fraction of a millimeter.

    One can imagine it monitoring the precision of millwork tumbling from Gary, Indiana steel plants into assembly-line catch-bins by the millions in 1950s.

    Or the diameter of overbored engine cylinders in something more accurate than the vague tolerances considered by this mechanic I once knew, order who casually tossed around phrases like “a smidgen,” “a red cunt-hair” and “a skosh” with the abandon of someone who had a demonically exact notion of the size he was describing.

    The Pocket Chum turns up in Google, having gone on record as measuring pestilential mushrooms and acetabular fractures in dogs, whatever those are.

    You slide the center rule up and down in the frame and measure the inside diameter and outside thickness of anything you like. It’s elegant, crisply made and ultimately not worth much more than $5.99 on eBay – approximately what I paid an antiques dealer for it the other day.

    It is a perfect heavy little object.