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Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The key to happiness and 20 centimes

May 9, 2018
The flea market opened this morning for the first time this year at around 5:00am.  I stopped by around 9:30 to see if I could figure out which booths might have the best spills.  It was about 3/4 filled - apparently Wednesdays are for antiques and the weekends are more general stuff.  I did identify a few booths that had jewellery and other small items and went back in the afternoon to prospect one of those booths.

I found a lot of brass stuff including the civil war tent slip.  (Thanks to "Indiana Bones" on Facebook for identifying it).  It was patented in November 1880.  Patent number US234896A.

link to patent
May 21 update: I donated the tent slip to the local Historical Society where it will be featured in a case of other civil war relics.  Doing my part to save history!

This key says "Handy Harry 54 6th Ave. N.Y" on it.  I seem to find a lot of keys on this site ranging from modern to vintage and I'd guess this dates from the 60's.  It seems that by the end of the year I'll have a lot of brass and lead scrap.


I got a bit excited when I dug up what turned out to be a French 50 centime from 1973 - it looked kinda gold-ish at first.  It's a bronze-aluminum coin that held up well underground.

A nice piece of junk jewellery is this earring with a blue stone:
Not exactly the bluebird of happiness, but I'll take it.

So the key to happiness is a hobby that keeps you engaged and that your friends not only tolerate, but find amusing.  My friends are all quite interested and supportive of my obsession!

Oh, and I thought I'd show my photo setup in the corner of my workshop.  

I have 2 cool white LED lamps on 2 multi-joint desk lamps so I can position them differently for each shot.  For instance I drop one lamp down to the table to side-light coins.  I can also move them to front or back light different objects.  I shoot 12 megapixel images and crop them way down for the blog.  I use the green cutting board because I like having the scale in mm and inches so it's easy to get a sense of size of my finds.


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