One-of-a-kind custom works of functional art.
Boneyard Beautiful salvages old mechanical parts from farms, ranches and old mill sites and recycles these parts into functional art, i.e., lamps, desk sets and other unique objects d' art for your home or business.
Boneyard Beautiful operates out of a small studio that contains a modest machine shop. Some would call it a garage but calling it a studio grants it the dignity it deserves. We run a lathe, a mill, a welder and an acetylene torch. Our investment in machines and tools is substantial. One of us is a NASA Certified Machinist with 28 years of machining experience. The other is the artist with 20 years of experience in quality control, engineering, and manufacturing. We’re still interested in the industries we grew up with, aerospace, biomedical, hard drives and software development. But making art is fun. Our hobbies include teaching firearms safety, radio-controlled airplanes, utility radio, playing guitar, and shooting pool.
Each art piece requires many hours of work. It takes several hours to envision each piece from the available parts. Then comes several more hours of planning on how to assemble the parts without compromising the state in which they were found. We could settle for external welds and other visible methods to join the parts, which are cheap and easy, but doing so would undermine or ruin the very beauty we are trying to preserve and enhance.
Planning the steps for assembly is crucial and difficult because some of the joins are not reversible, or once completed, they eliminate the possibility of using other methods. For example, it’s not possible to turn a whole 30 pound lamp on the lathe if we forgot to drill and tap a hole for the light socket. So far we still have all of our fingers and we haven’t scorched our eyeballs by welding without eye-protection.
When you buy one of our pieces, you’re paying for much more than a mere collection of reassembled parts. Each component is a mechanical jewel, each assembly is a reflection of artful continuity, and each finished product is the culmination of our training and our desire to preserve the beauty of what once was. Our prices reflect our effort and dignify the art. We are sure you will be pleased.