Vintage Desecration - Things Altered/Repurposed, and a Vintage Treasure Lost Forever.

[kiwilrdg]

It is sad that so much older technology that is still servicable is being destroyed. People have been convinced that to be servicable a piece of technology must be less than a year old.

It is nice to communicate with the folks here for that reason.

 

[Shangas]

The thing is that back when a lot of these things were made...Mechanical typewriters, hand-crank, treadle sewing-machines, tube-radios, cathode-ray TVs, fridges and so-forth...on a whole, there wasn't the kind of buying-power that there is today. People didn't have the kind of money that most people have today, to just throw around on junk that didn't last.

They had to make very penny work for them. So they ONLY bought stuff that would LAST, or if it didn't last, then something that could be repaired.

Any company back in the 30s that made something to be "disposable" or cheap, would never have survived. I think marketing-types realised this. Because people needed REAL value for money, and were not ABLE to waste money on something that didn't last, they HAD to produce something of ACTUAL QUALITY.

Something I fear, is lost on today's society.

On top of that, technology changes too fast these days to make repairs really practical. I forget when the iPhone came out, but they're already up to iPhone 4 or 5 now.

I still don't own one. Not because I can't afford it. But because I see them as a waste of money. You buy one, and then eighteen months later it's out of date. And if you hold onto it and it breaks, they won't repair it. They'll throw it out and make you buy a new one. More money down the drain...

 

[LizzieMaine]

I still don't own one. Not because I can't afford it. But because I see them as a waste of money. You buy one, and then eighteen months later it's out of date. And if you hold onto it and it breaks, they won't repair it. They'll throw it out and make you buy a new one. More money down the drain...

Precisely. That's too much money to waste on something I neither want nor need. It's the biggest racket going.

 

[kiwilrdg]

I get tired of companies telling me that I need things like a camera to talk on the phone.
I don't really like carrying a cell phone in the first place but it has become important for work.

 

[Stearmen]

Lets not get to nostalgic about how people hung on to their old technology! I know all my grandparents and their friends had pits dug behind the farm where they would toss the furniture and radios, still working. They could not wait to get new stuff. These were people born in the late 19th and very early 20th century. New was always better, thats why so many old buildings were torn down before and after WWII. I am so lucky my dad saved my Atwater Kent, and he only saved it because he had a tube tester! My mother, born in the 20s did like antiques, where I get my taste for it.

 

[Shangas]

It's not true that people necessarily hung onto their old technology. My father said that as a child, the moment the family got something new (like a radio, or a telephone, for example), the old one was automatically thrown out. But I was making the point that back in those days, if you DID decide to hold onto something, it would still work, and if it broke, you could get it fixed. Not so much so, these days, unfortunately.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In our family, we hung on to everything as long as we possibly could. My grandparents still had their Firestone console radio in the living room as late as 1980, and the appliances in the house were the same ones that were there when they bought the place in 1945. They had no interest in the latest thing, and that same attitude was drilled into me as a child: be happy with what you have. My grandmother was almost pathological about not throwing things away: she had forty years' worth of brown paper grocery bags neatly folded and stored under the cupboards, "in case we need them."

 

[davidraphael]

My grandparents still had their Firestone console radio in the living room as late as 1980, and the appliances in the house were the same ones that were there when they bought the place in 1945."

Absolutely. My grandparents were the same. They got furniture and appliances when they married in the early 30s and they still had them (if they didn't break) in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid. She used a hand-cranked mangle until she was too weak to use one. To my young eyes, the house was like a museum. And the TV! talk about big! If you hollowed it out you could have put on live full-cast performances of Shakespeare inside it !

And it wasn't just appliances: For example, my grandfather's shoes were patched, fixed and resoled dozens of times over decades.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Nothing got thrown out by us, either. Most of the stuff my grandparents have was in the house when my dad was a kid. When the TV's went out at my great-great-grandparents' house, they stacked a new one on top of the old one. In the 70's, in the truck yard, he still had all the stuff for horse-drawn wagons.

 

[kiwilrdg]

Things that were worthless were thrown away. That is why we think things were better then. If the junk got thrown away we see all the good things.

Today the designed obsolescence means if there is something good there will be a part that will break and not be replaceable when the manufacturer wants to sell you a new model. Since we have gotten used to the idea of replace rather than repair there are not too many places to get repairs done.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The big difference is that there was less junk that was bought -- money in our family was too hard to come by to waste it on every foolish bit of crap that the Boys From Marketing said people needed. If, as kids, we saw something on TV and said "I want that!" the answer was "you don't need it, you can't have it, and you're not getting it." End of discussion.

 

[p51]

When the TV's went out at my great-great-grandparents' house, they stacked a new one on top of the old one.

I tried to explain this to my nephew recently, he couldn't wrap his head around the idea.

I get tired of companies telling me that I need things like a camera to talk on the phone.

I can surf the internet on the new cells my wife got us, which is nice. But I hardly need it. The last time we went to the phone place to ask a question, I asked how I could get rid of 80% of the phone's functions as I only made calls, and sometimes checked my e-mails and that was it. The employee looked at me like I was asking how to use it as a murder weapon, or something.
Oh, I'll also often turn the phone off and often have the ringer down to nothing. Hardly anyone has my cell #, either. When my wife calls, it'll ring because I want her to get through to me if she needs to. Everyone else? They can wait until I'm home!

 

[Shangas]

Several years ago, my father purchased an old cutlery chest from a flea-market.

The chest was EMPTY.

I don't mean that it came without silverware. I mean it came without ANYTHING AT ALL. No lining, no cradles, no felt, no blocks, NOTHING. Just an empty box.

He bought it, and brought it home, and for years, it sat in the home doing NOTHING but gathering dust.

I got sick of seeing it just taking up space (it's a pretty big thing). And so I told dad I wanted to turn it into a pen-chest for myself, so I could store my collection of vintage and antique writing instruments.

I am proud to say, the conversion is nearly finished!

This is a cutlery chest that is COMPLETELY USELESS for its original purpose. And if not for my dad, would probably have been thrown on the junk-heap twenty or thirty years ago. Here's some photos of our progress:

Lining the box with brown suede:

Installing the bottom pen tray:

Pens trying out their new home:

Making the top tray:

More photos coming soon...