A Huge Rusty Spoon

One finds the oddest things in one's backyard at times. Last summer, a freakish sequence of wind gusts brought down a huge old Manitoba maple at the bottom corner of my yard. Before the tree removal crew came to deal with the thing, I went down and relocated a stack of fence boards that I'd piled near the tree some time ago, so the crew would have unimpeded access to the stump area. While I was rummaging around down there, I found this rusty old spoon. The thing is huge. 'Looks like something you'd use to give cough syrup to a hog. (Do hogs get coughs?) I'll see how well I can clean it up. It's in pretty rough shape.

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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010

After

It's still ugly as sin, but in a clean sort of way.

I wire brushed it on a 6" wheel, scoured it with a scouring cleanser and gave it an application of GM Blue Coral Preservative Sealer. And it turns out that I have something of an antique item in the workshop (see below).

It would take extraordinary efforts to get this item to a truly pristine condition, so I'll leave it at this. I've made a place for it to hang on one of my toolboards. If I ever have to administer cough syrup to a hog, it'll be right at hand.

GM Blue Coral Preservative Sealer

It's a paste wax, basically. It has a blue colour in the jar. I don't know when it was last available. I must have bought the jar pictured in the late sixties for the chrome on my Austin-Healey Sprite. Most of it is still left.

There's someone in Kernersville, North Carolina who has an empty jar of it on Craigslist -- asking price is $1.00.

There is an outfit known as Blue Coral that makes car cleaning products, but they don't appear to have any connection to this GM Blue Coral.

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