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Old Scrap Finds New Home As Art
Old steel wagon wheels, Harvestore unloader chain, disc blades and pipe are all fair game
when Wallace Keller gets busy with his welding torch. They might just become a 1,500-lb., 24-ft. long reptile or other creature that Keller sees in them.
"Ideas just come to me," he says. "I look at different parts an
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Old Scrap Finds New Home As Art AG WORLD 29-6-24 Old steel wagon wheels, Harvestore unloader chain, disc blades and pipe are all fair game
when Wallace Keller gets busy with his welding torch. They might just become a 1,500-lb., 24-ft. long reptile or other creature that Keller sees in them.
"Ideas just come to me," he says. "I look at different parts and see pieces of an uncompleted critter."
For example, mower guards and combine parts sort of suggest bird beaks, while two milker buckets welded back to back suggest the body of a bird. When Keller puts it all together, he has what he calls his dairy roosters.
He started making junk into art after being forced to retire in 1992 after a heart attack. After a few years, his kids suggested selling things. Today, he sells about 200 pieces a year at art fairs and to collectors and folks who just stop by his home. Best of all, he says, he can justify picking up just about anything at an auction or flea market. He also visits the scrap bins at local implement dealers.
He has made cannons out of pipes and various machine parts and a 6-ft. tall skeleton out of pipe wrenches. He makes turtles out of upside down waterers from dairy barns. Perhaps his most popular creation has been the "Tin Man" fashioned out of hot water and water softener tanks, pipe and electrical conduit.
His artwork more than pays for itself. The Plumber sold for $350, and a dragon went for $500. He makes "mosquito" bodies out of rocker arms from Chevy 350 engines, nuts for eyes and Fiskar hand trimmer handles for wings. He makes 30 of them at a time and sells them for $12 each.
His most expensive project yet at $800 was a sign for a nephew's horse farm. The farm's name is "top of the world", so Keller decided to make a 5-ft. diameter globe. He found disc blades to match the curve of the globe, and cut and bolted them in place to replicate the continents. He then added equator and longitude lines.
What Keller enjoys most of all is meeting people who stop by his home or his booth at art fairs. "I had a family with three little kids stop by to have their picture taken with the tin man," he says. "I have met some really super people."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Wallace E. Keller, 3931 State Road 78, Mount Horeb, Wis. 53572 (ph 608 437-8219).
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