It appears that wood and plain-old steel just aren’t cutting it any more. No, for furniture with built-in character, try making it out of your old rusted-out cars!
Furniture from Old Car Parts? Yep.
By Jaime Derringer
Dec 8th 2009Joel Hester’s love affair with old and vintage metals began two years ago.
A client brought him a small metal beer sign that he wanted to use as a top for a coffee table. Joel, who lives in Dallas, Texas, knew a little something about making furniture from unexpected materials; he was already welding steel into custom bed frames.
So he made the coffee table — and then got an idea. Why not start a business? He’s since developed a passion for making custom furniture out of old cars. He calls it The Weld House.
But why cars? Well, when he received the client’s beer sign, he wondered how he could make it work since the sign wasn’t large enough to wrap the top of the table for a smooth, seamless surface.
So, after over a month of struggling with the process, Joel ended up wandering through a junk yard looking for scrap metal that might work with the beer sign.
“I turned a corner and saw an old Cadillac,” he says. “Its large trunk was the coolest mixture of color and patterns. I knew I could skin the metal off the structure of the trunk and use it to wrap the top of the table.”
Joel instantly forgot about the beer sign and called his client proposing a new, different idea of how to create the table: an old car!
