Bearings and things

Something I really enjoy personally is taking something which has been worn out and giving it a different purpose. A great example of this is our bearing ornament. The mechanical parts began life decades ago in my own classic Land Rover gearbox. They have covered more than 100,000 miles in both military and civilian life. After a fateful trip to the woods where I got stuck the gearbox got thoroughly destroyed. A casualty of a fault which put the handbrake on while moving, which on a Land Rover is much worse than other vehicles. So it ended up needing to be rebuilt, which as a byproduct gave us a pile of bearings to play with. Which in the end got turned into this little thing.

There are other parts in there which the keen eyed of you may have spotted are parts from clocks. I decided they would be a nice fit for the aesthetic. The clock parts all came from broken timepieces which had been attempted to be repaired but were too far gone. After we decided to put a light inside we found that they played on the light in some very interesting ways.

It is always nice when things come together like this as all the parts have done their part and have been part of peoples lives for a long time. Now they have been turned into something totally different and whilst they cant serve their original purpose they can still remain as part of someone elses life.

These mechanical parts are still something we are very much experimenting with. There are a lot of different approaches to take with such things. The various forms lend themselves to many uses and thanks to vehicles being so complex there are hundreds of shapes and constructions to make use of. Even something as simple as using them for casting can be useful, such as these coasters made from the races of wheel bearings. Also from the Land Rover, never much of a shortage of spare parts with those!

These are our first experiments using polyurethane casting resin. Also making use of some of the smaller parts of the clocks, or more specifically watches in this case. There is a whole lot of things we have in mind so keep an eye on our new items if you are also a fan of the look of the mechanical parts. There will be some more parts coming along soon making use of even more parts.