2023 - Volume #47, Issue #6, Page #20
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“Wrench Bench” Made From Old Tools
“He kept showing me the pics he took of it, but I was busy farming and trucking, so I didn’t have time to make it,” Lance says.
When illness hit Gene, Lance decided to make his wishes a priority. “Dad had a bout of colon cancer, and I thought, ‘What if I lose him before I get it made?’”
“So, when I came home from trucking one weekend, and it was raining, I said to Dad, ‘Get your wrenches out.’ He’d been buying them by the bucket-full for years, saving them for the chair,” Lance says.
It took two days or so to weld the bench together. The part that was the most time-consuming was trying to fit the wrenches in the correct configuration. “I built the base first. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. The picture I saw didn’t have arms, but I wanted Dad to have armrests.”
Lance thought the project was complete. “I had just put the last weld in the chair, and I was thinking I was done, then Dad flips up the phone and says, ‘I want a footstool.’”
Lance notes that when choosing wrenches, it’s important to choose wrenches of the same thickness. It took 55 wrenches to make the chair and footstool.
Gene died a few years ago. Lance brings the chair to antique tractor shows and exhibits it in his honor.
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