The Giant Coffee Pot

Peter Von embarked on his final device for The Pancake Parlour restaurants in 2005: The Giant Coffee Pot!

Peter Von:

Coffee being just one of the things Lovely! Pancakes ‘does’ so well, let’s celebrate it! First go looking for likely bits: no good going to the scrap yard, the rules changed years ago, and besides nothing good is actually turning up these days. So off to the metal spinner who makes the truck size wheat silo lids I then used to make the giant wind-up-watch clocks from.

Beauty! Out the back I find the perfect starting piece, a rusty but big circle of steel, a one off trailer that didn’t work. Not for sale? Bring in the Missus, ‘The Persuader’. Forty dollars lighter and ten minutes later, I noticed on the way out a cute largish spun flangey thing. Also rusty, but not terminally so. Now I’ve (potentially) got the base of a ‘giant coffee pot’ and the top circular bit so off home and into it. I start with the drawing now that I’ve got the scale, using the bits.

The criteria as I see it ... It has to be mechanical; it must be really big, imposing, lots of fun, beautifully finished and appearing to pour coffee convincingly enough to satisfy ME. Also light enough to bolt imposingly to the big windows at Highpoint and not be of any danger or annoyance to the customers.

Taking one of our own collection of antique coffee pots to go by, I’m impressed by the hexagonal enamel one with the glass top under which coffee used to bubble quietly. So I decided to replicate that one, only BIG, and what about a giant cup into which the coffee can pour?

The Missus, bans the making of this inside the house (as has been my usual antics). Besides, once made, how am I going to get it out as the base is 1200mm wide and the doorway 700mm?

So outside in the heat of the backyard, I start to fold up the sheet metal sides to make the final skin of MDF. Then out to Stevens Sheet Metal to roll up the spout in steel sheet. Thinking back to all those lovely fancy machines I saw in America, I design and cut out of the obligatory thick MDF, the fanciest brackets I can conjure up, together with a giant mock ‘tilting’ wheel and the curliest, funniest handle possible. Then out with the router to fill the garden with dust and the neighbourhood peace with noise. It’s so hot that I can’t handle the metal anymore so it’s into the separate room at the end of the drive where we keep our rare veteran car. It’s about now that my age and arthritic hands kick in to make me decide to finish working and retire ... and soon.

Because this room has big opening glass doors to allow the car to be taken out, it’s filled with some of our collection of objects. This instance related to cars, so laboriously and with a heavy heart, I painstakingly proceeded to mask off all of the stuff in this room with sheet plastic to protect it for when I start to rub down the gaps on the corners of the coffee pot where the MDF skins meet.

I’d previously used an entire 5kg tin of car filler which had to be smoothed off. Although fitted with overhead fans I couldn’t use them for fear of spreading the copious dust, so in my enveloping dust mask I battled in the heat. About an hour into rubbing down by hand, the clear plastic sheet taped to the walls became so heat affected that it gave up, slowly lowering itself onto my sweat and dust covered body where it stuck. I think it was about this point that I started to weep and I had weeks still to go! I had already found long ago that it was no good farming stuff out to be done because most people simply couldn’t understand what I was on about, and I ended up simply wasting their time and mine, so I had no choice than to continue. I literally stuck to the job, so to speak. My spirits lifted when I was able to give the completed body a coat of the beaut blue enamel. All the hours I’d spent preparing paid off and when I attached the yellow painted fancy handle it looked so good that even I was excited.

I made the giant cup hexagonal to match the coffee pot, covering a wooden frame with thin MDF bent into shape via dunking overnight in the fish pond to soften it. When I painted it white, ready for the mock coffee to pour endlessly into it somehow I became even more excited! But how to make the ‘coffee’ pour?

Looking backwards into the past (yet again) I remembered how the old striped barber’s poles looked endlessly moving without going anywhere so there must be a way I can use that illusion, after all it’s simply a spiral to nowhere.

Another cup of strong coffee, more brain cells alert, of course! Off to the toy shop to buy some foam ‘pool snakes which were simply bright coloured plastic foam about one and a quarter metres long in solid soft rod form used to entertain kids in swimming pools. Right, wrap them around a solid core (actually my didgeridoo which was handy), bits of gaffer tape and give it a spin – magic! Making it permanent with rubber glue around a long cardboard tube, fit a bearing to the top that fits into one of the spout ends, carefully brush with brown paint exactly the same colour as coffee and add some painted ‘shine’ highlights.

I next fitted a reliable motor inside the giant cup, a little outside my mechanical skills, believe it or not. Just in case I lined the cup with heat resistant foam which also deadened the sound of the motor. The big tilting wheel on the side of the device following the pattern of the giant coffee grinder wheel at the Jam Factory I made out of routed MDF (yet again). Once the shadowed computer cut lettering ‘ANYTIME IS COFFEE TIME’ was on the gorgeous blue and red wheel, the effect was utterly convincing. Only one thing missing now and proving difficult to find – a knob big enough for the clear acrylic dome (rejected by the makers as too wrinkly) at the very top. But what is brass and bold? When in doubt, the Op shop and there it was, up the other way, an old brass spittoon of all things! Perfect! The truckies arrived, as always believing they’d seen it all after the years they’ve been picking up ‘things’ from our place. For some reason they took a real liking to this one.