Rescuing a 1960s ESSO Pump

When you have somewhere like Nottingham Hackspace with it's tools and TARDIS like workshop and you see something like a 1960's ESSO diesel pump about to be thrown into a skip as scrap it's nearly impossible not to entertain the idea of acquiring it.

This pump made by the Wayne company had been ripped from it's fixings and was still leaking a slippery mix of diesel and rainwater when I arranged to move it to the Hackspace.

Friends Martin and David helped move the pump on a hand cart from a former lock gate works on the River Trent the half mile or so to Hackspace HQ in Sneinton.

Unfortunately the back panel had been smashed off and lost and the front panel was bent and detached. In an aborted attempt to remove all the innards to clear space inside I removed a huge electric motor.

I can confirm that every nut and bolt inside the pump appears to be it's own bastard size and in spite of Hackspace's extensive collection of spanners, sockets both metric and imperial, removing the innards would allow the placement of a beer barrel or shelves or something... truth is that in Hackspace everyone wants to know what you are going to do with anything that looks remotely interesting. This is usually follow by the

words "You should...(then insert any number of ideas here)" spouting RULE 3 always seems somewhat futile in these cases. If you've gone to the amount of effort to bring a heavy, diesel shedding, lump of pump into the space you must be planning something! Right?

Somehow and I don't know how this has happened, I seem to be the Hacker who makes lamps. I've now made four since I started going to the Hackspace, two for our station street neighbour Venus Pole Dancing Academy, one out of a street bollard in the comfy area at Hackspace.

Because the pump already had lamps inside it, it seemed the obvious thing to do. All of the internal electronics is shielded inside copper pipes packed with Magnesium Oxide. Having ripped out the junction box from the unit already and struggling to pop open any of the compression fittings, I decided to rewire the insides choosing to earth the body of the pump at the same time. At least if anyone asked what I was going to do with it I could say "Make it into a lamp."

In truth the next step is to continue to work on removing the guts of the pumping mechanism I've played with the idea of putting a TFT monitor inside the front of it and having it as a sort of digital photo frame. A very ambitious project that has been suggested is to put a barrel in it and run a bear pump through the original hose. What I imagine will happen is that I will leave it just as it is for at least the next few months.

Besides I now have my eyes on something else I want to bring back to the space...