This year’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance was another doozy, made even more overwhelming by the event coordinators’ decision to move the event from Sunday to Saturday due to expected storms on Sunday. Here are a few of my favorite cars from the three days I was there.

I also got to see four time Indianapolis 500 winner and one of my child hood heroes, Al Unser Sr. , and I helped him out of his Indy winning race car after he’d driven it on to the fairway.

I finally put the finishing touches on the Rusty Rider and planted him in the garden. I built a “drop” or “stunt” for him to ride on, it’s based on a stunt we built back in the day in Montana, it was a 2×6 laid flat on  vertical supports and it ran for about 30 feet, and then it ended and the drop was about 6-8 feet. We called it “Heaven” and it was used at a few of the Safety Team events and then ended up out at the “property”. I miss it, and those days.

I-Beam base with Cherry table top engraved with the Tennessee state outline. POA

I had this idea in my head for a while, it originally had a concrete top but that seemed like it would be just a bit too heavy. This is made with a steel I-beam I found at a local salvage yard, stabilized with channel steel from the same yard. All of it is nice and rusty, bent, scarred, and full of character. It comes with skid pads so the metal won’t give your flooring any additional character.

The top is made from a 2×12 of Cherry that I got from my favorite local lumber yard, Good Wood of Nashville. It comes from a locally fallen cherry tree. The square head bolts, washers, and nuts are from my collection of rusty metal that I hauled down here from Montana. If you are interested in this table, or a custom piece of furniture, feel free to contact me. Thanks!

Well, we moved, my wife is pursuing a PhD at Vanderbilt so we moved down to Nashville June of 2013. We have been pretty busy since then, adjusting to a new place, remodeling a different house, adjusting to new schools and employment. It has been a huge change, we miss our place in Missoula, we miss our friends and the community. But Nashville has a lot to offer. I have been hiding out at home probably too much but it gives me time to work on the house which we have basically redone from top to bottom in the last 15 months. Here is the fun part, getting creative with our previously ugly ’70’s paneled kitchen and fire place surround. Out went the paneling, in went new cabinets and concrete counters, and for the fire place, reclaimed smoked oak planks from a tobacco smoking barn. That wood was as hard as stone but I predrilled and fastened them with square head nails, finished off with a rusty piece of angle iron as the mantle.