Best housewarming gift ever

A few months before our move into the new house, my wife told me she has a housewarming gift for me.

Wha? I thought housewarming gifts were to other people who are moving into their new homes.

No, this will be epic, she said.

Okay, what is it?

I'm not telling you.

Awwwwwwww.

She hyped the gift up.

Hard.

It was to the point that no matter what the gift was, it was going to be a disappointment.

She gave it to me months later when we stepped into our new home for the first time after closing.

It was not a disappointment.

My wife works in the cancer center of a hospital as a physicist. Her team had recently decommissioned a radiation machine to get a brand new one put in. It would all go to the junkyard anyway, so she kept a few pieces.

She kept these gears and couldn't figure out how to use them. She agonized over it for a while, thinking about putting it on picture frames or something. Meh. Random gears glued onto a picture frame? It's popular for Steampunk frames, but it doesn't do it for me. It's just meaningless gears on a thing that doesn't need gears.

Finally, she realized it was right there in her face. Add some rubber bumpers, and they are coasters.

The best coasters ever.

Industrial? Check.

Upcycled? Check.

Meaningful? Check.

Unique? Double check.

Find me a better set of coasters. Hint: they don't exist.

From the day she handed them to me to the day we moved in, it was just the concrete countertop and these steel gears as coasters.

This gift was...epic.

Now, it's true that not everyone is as lucky as I am, to be married to a cool medical physicist. But go on eBay and you'll find tons of industrial salvage that you can buy for pretty cheap. Rubber bumpers are also pretty cheap. 

True, it probably won't have the same meaning and reflection upon your own life, but if you need that connection, start looking around your workplace, home, or community, even. A coaster, after all, is just a thing between a surface and a cup. If the office or store is decommissioning some kind of machine to toss, ask to see if you can take a screwdriver to it to see if there's anything inside to salvage. For myself, as an architect, we have pretty much done away with most drafting tools as almost everything is now digital. But some of the old timers may have old T-Squares that one can saw into squares. Old architect scales nearing the end of their useful life, though typically plastic (but there are some metal or wood ones) can be sawed down and glued together into a coaster in triangular pieces. Pieces of leftover balsa wood used to make models can be cut and finished and even drafted on. There are vendors that throw their products at us from time to time in hopes we will spec their product and our library needs to throw some pieces out from time to time. Job sites on projects may have leftover items like strap ties to salvage. For mechanical items specifically, I think I would have to wait for our large format plotter to be decommissioned, and I have no idea what's inside that thing.

But for me, I will be placing my deliciously carcinogenic pint of barrel-aged stout on a piece of machinery that spent the last few decades fighting cancer.

Products in the project:

• Gear from a cancer radiation machine by custom (sorry)