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After a little bit of begging and a short lecture, I bought myself a new toy today. It’s a Bostitch nail gun. Well, actually it is 3 guns and a compressor.

It is bad to the bone. If you have ever taken the moulding off the frame of a door, it is stapled on with the same type of staples that the staple gun shoots. The brad gun is for building small projects like picture frames and attaching light moulding on furniture. The finish nailer is for attaching base boards and crown moulding and building furniture. Plus the compressor, although fairly light duty, will be able to handle a few other tasks around the house like inflating tires and basketballs and such.

I’m looking forward to framing in that mirror I hung yesterday so that I can test out the brad nailer. And now that I’ve got the stain right for the moulding, that should go up in a snap.

Oh gosh, I love a good toy.  Especially one that makes life easier

Look closely at this picture and see if you can imagine a loveseat forming out of this.

Progress on the prototype loveseat has come to a screeching halt. My workshop is full of other furniture (not of my design) right now and I have nowhere to work. I’m desperately trying to get rid of this corner entertainment center that is taking up the lion’s share of my work area.

I may, this weekend, just do a brutal casting out of excess stuff in the shed. I have a cafe table in there that is being used as a workbench. I have several stools in there that are serving the same purpose. There is one of those little wheeled tote things that old people use all the time for their groceries and whatnot that is holding scraps of lumber. All this stuff just needs to go. I’m tired of it. If anyone out there wants any of those things, let me know. I might just do a small yard sale and sell them really cheap. I don’t know yet. But one way or the other, I have to make room for the chair design. I can’t afford (in oh, so many ways) to drag out the design aspects of this due to some piddling old furniture getting in my way.

I have finished the upholstery on the loveseat. Now I have to build the frame.

As a reminder:

Current situation:

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The bottom of the seat is going much more slowly, complicated by the fact that the in-laws came today to work around the house. Okay, don’t let me blame them, because they didn’t actually do anything that would have stopped me from finishing it. I just wasn’t organized enough or driven enough to do it.

I’m a little worried about the way the upholstery sits on the frame and I think I may need to add more foam to fill it up properly. The trouble is that I think the foam I have is too thick and doesn’t allow me much room to work. I either need to find a different way to go about this or perhaps buy some thinner foam. Maybe both.

This is what 5 pounds of hog rings looks like.

Hog rings, in case you are wondering, are for attaching upholstery to frames. So you can make something like this:

So I have the top half of the seat reupholstered and am currently working on taking the old hog rings out of the seat bottom.

A long time ago (roughly 7 years now) I worked in a junkyard. We used all kinds of things from the cars for various non-automotive purposes. For instance, we would take the oil out of the cars and put it into this drip system which was used to heat the shop during the cold months. We also would use the seats from the cars for the seating around the shop. I ate many a lunch whilst sitting on the bench seat out of an old Ford pickup.

One day, as I looked upon some guys sitting in those seats, I thought that it would be really cool to make furniture out of old car parts. The more I’ve thought about it, the cooler the idea has gotten.

Last year, I decided that I wanted to start my own business and I thought that the auto furniture/ restoration would be a cool business to own. I didn’t (and still don’t) have much capital to start this thing, so I decided that I would start an online business.

That’s when I bought the domain automanempire.com. Dave thought up the name from the original idea of automotive furniture.

I quickly lost focus of what I wanted to do and I went through about 10 ideas in rapid succession of what Automan Empire ought to be. What it turned out to be was pretty much nothing. The website now suggests that I could do a restoration for you, but the reality is I can’t. I have nowhere to do it and I don’t even have enough capital to start it if I did have a shop.

I have recently regained my focus, though. I have hashed out a plan in my head a thousand times and pitched it to just about everyone I know and everyone so far has thought it was a good idea, so now I am taking baby steps towards beginning to make auto themed furniture.

I have started by buying the rear seat of 69 Mustang fastback.

I will recover it in black and build a wooden frame for it and stain it a very deep, dark color and polyurethane the bejeebers out of it. I want to make a very functional, high end loveseat.

There are a couple of companies making auto furniture, but it is not exactly what I’m doing. Corbin is one of them. But my pieces will be more designed to look like high end furniture, not campy like their’s are. I want to build pieces that a car guy would want to put in his living room and his wife would not object. I also want the prices to be more in-line with normal furniture prices. $3000 for a loveseat is a bit much, I think.

Well that is my idea. I will keep you updated with how it comes along.