Collections of cars and interesting things

collecting cars is outside my wheelhouse for several reasons, but man they are some sweet rides. I never knew the word for “rampside” before, but I’ve seen them. I assumed they were all custom-chopped vans but were they in fact a factory design? really nice resto–the paint; everything.

these are my Pez dispensers.

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I used to have PEZ dispensers. I still have some. I like the knife dispay. My wife and I once worked together as teenagers in a custom knife shop. Is that one of the moving ones?
The idea of the rampside is that the door has a thick rubber cover at the top, and it can be opened right onto the sidewalk or curb. For a while, they were popular with the phone company, because it was easy to load and unload spools of wire. We stuck the new engine in the middle of the bed on this one, so we mostly lose that functionality. Originally, the engine was in the very back. We have a radiator in it’s place, and an aluminum scoop under the car to direct the air in.

Rampside-

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oh, now I get it. very cool. would’ve been a boon when I was doing mobile DJing.

yeah, motorized. it was actually in motion when i snapped the pic. one of my most prized possessions. liberated from the storage-room of the neighborhood cutlery/kitchen store in my wilder days. no longer have any of the knives and the movement on my Victorianox watch was garbage, but I suppose I did have a swiss-army collection going at one point.

My wife and I once worked together as teenagers in a custom knife shop.

sounds like the definition of a “keeper” right there :slight_smile:

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I collect ancient coins, mostly Greek and Roman. (I also have a lot of older rare US coins and other things I inherited not too long ago, though I won’t be expanding that collection).

Don’t have a nice small set of photos to illustrate the collection well, but here are a few nicer/interesting ones:
Augustus denarius:

Chalcidian league tetrobol:

Marcus Aurelius denarius:

Roman Republic quinarius:

Rhodes drachma:

There are a lot I haven’t shot any photos of (hard to get decent photos of small semi-shiny things), so no photos of a few of my faves like the Nero dupondius, Athens tetradrachm, Alexander the Great tet., Ptolemy Tetradrachm, Otho denarius, etc.

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You said a lot in your last sentence. Here is some advice, which came from an old ship captain: “Find the smartest, hardest working woman that you can, marry her, then do everything she tells you to do”. It worked for me.

But knives. I have been collecting Puma knives since I was a teenager. Nowdays, it is mostly Randall Made. I wear a Randall every day, because I am lucky enough to live where doing so is not considered unusual. I also have a bunch of Japanese swords.

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When I was younger I wanted a '54-'56 Thunderbird so bad. They’re such amazingly beautiful things. Yours looks like its beautifully restored. Such a head turner of a car. The '36 coupe’s a real beauty too, though they’re all stellar.

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wasn’t the '56 with the hardtop the one with the porthole windows?

I think that is wonderful. I have always been impressed with the sense of the presence of history that comes with those coins. I have wanted to collect them, but do not want to go, with coin collecting, through the period in collecting where you don’t know enough, so you blow a bunch of money on something pretty but worthless. My only coins are the foreign pocket change that I always dump into a jar when I get home from work.

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Indeed. I probably have pictures of the other top on a hard drive somewhere.

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My dad was the second owner on the coupe. It was his first car, and what we drove when I was small, except when we were in Japan. I came home from the hospital in that car. It was black, with the original motor then. Now it has a computer that lets you adjust the engine while driving. And air conditioning.

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Such a cool, ground-level sense of the history too. Buildings, paintings, and even arms/armor to some degree are more purposefully expressive, situational and personal. Coins are like holding a pint of history’s blood in your hand, a small, nearly indestructible drop of the circulatory system that has been in the pockets of many people, and swirled around any number of activities. Gives me a little bit of historical vertigo thinking about the coins in my own pocket in the context of these, too…

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I have only ever had a fleeting interest in numismatism throughout my life (I’m much better at spending money than keeping it) but damn, I must say that those coins are spectacular.

… also I really like saying the word “numismatist”. It rolls off the tongue so much better than philatelist (I was very much this as a youth) which sounds like some kind of weird sex thing.

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My dad collected US coins when he was alive (and was in a numismatics club, so I went to coins shows a lot as a kid), so I picked it up from him.

I studied Classics in school (to the point of working part way through a PhD), and started collecting ancient coins in grad school. I liked being able to actually see and hold artifacts from eras I was reading about, and many are fairly cheap (easy to find decent specimens in the $20-30 range, or even nice $5 ones so long as you’re interested in the late Empire). There are some fakes out there now (some obvious, some not very obvious and only clear once you’ve checked on a scale), and knowing what a fair price is isn’t always clear though most dealers are not trying to play games. I’m happy to have something I can keep in a pair of binders.

Ancient coins were propaganda pieces as much as money, so they often have art that’s interesting in itself but also tells a story about events of the day.

I especially like the ones that show some wear since you know they passed through a lot of hands thousands of years ago. This Persian/Achaemenid Siglos (485-420 BC) was circulated enough that it’s like a beach pebble on the sides, and has a bunch of stamps from bankers/money changers marking it’s journey through many marketplaces:
Imgur
It also was around while Athens was fighting the Persian War.

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I should start a thread for those of us that are too dull or too povo to have collections of interesting things. :smile:

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Do you have a collection of boring things? Lint? used disposable chopsticks? post it.

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No photos, but it’s nearly time for the quarterly muster on my dust-bunny ranch.

I was visiting a person’s house, and they had the normal accumulation of odd things that people who travel tend to accumulate. The difference was that they had sorted all of the things into interesting groups before putting them on walls or in cabinets. Sorted by color or function or material, and it was really interesting. I don’t think the things were collected with intent, just well curated.

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I’ve spotted a flaw there. Unless going to the post office counts as travelling. :slight_smile:
Anyway, I shan’t disrupt things any further, but you did give me an idea.

I noticed this today, took a picture- kendo and Iado gear. not a huge collection, but possibly worth posting.

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