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May 24, 2008
The bending room
Last night I had to get some metal table legs bent. So I went to an old garage complex down by the canal. It was a series of low red-brick sheds with corrugated iron roofs, the ground was hard beaten oil soaked earth and wooden flooring – difficult to tell the difference sometimes. There were yellowing lights in chipped enamel shades suspended on fraying electric cord and dirty skylights letting in the sodium orange of the overhanging streetlights.
The first space was quite clean compared to the others, and I was greeted by a short stocky man with grubby hands and an old faded pale blue boiler suit. Various oil manufacturers had at one time been advertised above his torn breast pockets but now their names were barely legible amidst the muck and grease stains.
The first thing I noticed was a row of old cars gathering dust progressively as they disappeared into the gloom. The first car was bright red, and I recognised it immediately. I had just that afternoon written about it here on my blog. It was a 1920 Packard twin six roadster.
“That’s a 1920’s Packard twin six roadster, isn’t it?” I said with more confidence than my scant knowledge of motor cars could support.
The man nodded and I knew I was now OK, I was accepted. “What can I do for you?” he asked, obligingly, lifting his head slightly.
I explained that I needed the legs bent. He took them from me and without looking at them headed off down a murky passage. I followed and passed other rooms, off to the sides, full of dusty car parts - wings and bonnets in muted shades, stacked on old shelves. In some dim rooms, among oil drums and hoists, well worn men in oily weeds were welding hidden fittings or bent over benches beating noisy panels.
“A lot of people here” I remarked.
“We all worked for the same firm,” your man said, ”then they went bust and we bought them out.”
“Do you specialise?”
“Nah, we all do a bit of everything.”
The conversation took us to a long low room with dark walls and lots of large square tables, each with a strip light hanging over it, like a pool hall in a 1930's black and white movie. The tables all had raised metal rims with differing indentations. I realised these were the bending tables.
He took the metal legs to a far table and slotted them, one at a time, into the indentations, then lent across and bent the top of each 90°. He knew what he was doing. He lifted them out and, still not looking at them, carried them over to a central table, slightly smaller than the others, with what looked like a gas ring in the middle of it. Placing the legs, like the four points of a compass, under the ring he lowered an old brass light fitting onto a central recess in the otherwise flat top. Bending down he squinted across under the ring and, tapping each leg slightly with the large end of a dirty ball-peen hammer, he brought the legs up true.
Funny what you dream about.
Posted by john at May 24, 2008 07:39 PM
Comments
Perhaps now the legs are unbent, you'll get unstuck again. Good.
Posted by: Daphne at May 25, 2008 11:30 AM