OUR LATEST CHALLENGE A couple of months ago one of our customers brought in her grandfather's fireman's hat. He had been a New York fireman from about 1927 to 1947. He even survived a fall of 14 floors during a fire once. She wanted to be able to display it along with some other articles of his such as photos. She pretty much left it in our hands to design a way to display these items, but did indicate that she would like it to sit on a pedestal of some sort. What we came up with is pictured below. After several days of discussion between all the framers in our store we came up with some ideas to really set this up in a functional attractive display.
With a good bit of luck, we were able to find and 'old' solid brass fire extinguisher at an antique mall. We had our starting point. The extinguisher was not tall enough by itself to make a pedestal for the plexiglass display box so we built a wooden base to give it some height and painted it with a black crackle finish to give it a look of being smoke and fire damaged.

One of the great things about this old extinguisher was the big brass ring attached to the top cap which screwed down onto the extinguisher. This allowed us a great way to mount our base for our display box on top of the extinguisher.

Next came a 1/2" finished plywood platform for the top of the pedestal covered with suede material. As shown in the photo above, we attached a piece of brass tubing to the top of the extinguisher with a round padded top to sit the fireman's hat on. We also added a finished moulding edge around the platform so that the custom-made plexiglass case would sit on the platform securely. The case can be easily removed for cleaning or to add or remove items from this display. Below is a view without the plexiglass top.


And below is a picture of the finished product.


We're happy to report that the customer and her fireman father love the finished product.
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