The Old Iron

           We had decided to refurbish the barn for our horses. This meant cleaning out at least 30 years of stuff accumulated by my in-laws.  There were things from Betty Sue's mother's store and things from Thad's parents.  He has lived here almost his entire life. 

          While bringing down things from the old rotten loft, we came across this old iron that you see dismantled below.

It has been in the barn since this particular barn was built about 1980.  But Thad told us at least a dozen times, how his mother would allow him to iron the easy stuff like pillowcases and wash cloths to keep him busy when he was about 6 years old (1945) He repeated this story many times in the past couple of weeks.

So he had no idea the iron "disappeared" from the back of the barn.  If you look at the picture above you will see a piece of conduit that held the wires in the hot part of the iron.  It had gotten very hot many times for many years and it was corroded. In order to do a restoration on this iron, we needed new conduit that was very very small. They don't make it that small anymore.

So we sent Paw on a secret mission to find this conduit and he had no idea why.  For at least a week, we kept after him to FIND it.  We would not tell him why or what it was for.  He asked and asked until it nearly made him mad.  Above you will see the motor completely disassembled. He finally found some braided stuff that would work.

This is an after picture.  Everything was completely restored back to original and tonight we gave him his 73rd birthday present..again.  He was speakless for a minute when he remembered those days so long ago when his mother kept him busy at that iron.  Everything worked on it, if only for a minute.  It was worth all the hours we spent on it for that moment.

Happy Birthday PawPaw! We love you!