My name is Jana Snyder, and my item is hard to name. It's a tool that my dad made himself out of bits and pieces because he was trying to change the oil filter in a car, and it was really hard to reach. And so he just welded some stuff together, and this is what came out.
We found it when we unarchived the farm storage building. [We] had this giant metal building that my dad, he was a shade tree mechanic and he would always be working on some car or truck or something, and this building was three generations of farmers in the same place.
[And] we just found it when we were digging through all of that stuff, and my husband looked at [it] and goes, “I know exactly what that is.” It's kind of an illustration of my dad and that generation ... “We're going to make do with what we have.”
And also the fact that he was an engineer, you know? He would look at things and pick them apart and figure out how they worked. If he took them apart, how could he put them back together?
For most of my life, he was restoring a ‘35 Ford, and so that was just kind of an ongoing project that he was always working on. It would sit for a while. I think it didn't originally have blinkers on the dashboard to show you whether your right or left blinker was on. So he wired up some little Christmas tree lights, and those were on the dashboard, and those were the lights. So he was just full of that kind of creativity.
He eventually finished it, and we used it for the getaway car in my daughter's wedding. So that was fun.
