Saturday, November 27, 2010

Material guy

This week was about material stuff, sometimes it brings more joy than people, especially when it's about building something.

Something exciting about buying hardware - with the plan to do something nice with it. There's no feeling like that of going to a hardware store with a list, and getting exactly what you need! This time it was bunches of stainless steel bolts and nuts in myriad sizes to replace every fastener I can on my bike.
Goodbye rust! Goodbye seized bolts! Goodbye ugliness!



Then three days ago, I looked at an old silencer lying around and I was tempted... I cut it apart and patched it back together with odds and ends from the junk I have at home. In the end the result looks pretty cool and that's amplified a hundred times because it's made by my very own hands, the hard way. Gonna sound sweet and perform even sweeter.I like that whole old school way of working... call it hacking... If it's good enough for Burt Munro, it's good enough for me.



For some reason, to me, simple stuff like bits of metal or wood are so much more valuable than stuff like gadgets, gold, precious stones or whatever. Especially wood! How undervalued a material it is, and lots of folks take it for granted, as if it were made on an assembly line!

They say "Only God can make a tree", but hypothetically, even God can't make a 2 foot wide naturally grown oak in less than a century. The piece of wood that shows up on this blogs title, is a very rare piece of Himalayan yew. Very few living souls have even seen a tree that's thicker than 6 inches - this piece is part of a 14 inch thick tree that washed down the river in a flood. Money can't buy this stuff!

So to all the folks who disrespect wood and waste it, GTFO this planet!

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