Road Trip Report from the Old Sled Works, Duncannon, Pa.

This large sign in the shape a sled leans against the Old Sled Works Antique Mall, a remnant from when the town could take pride in producing the Lightning Guider sled for decades.

I made the drive north through Maryland to south central Pennsylvania this morning to attend Sled Fest, a two-day celebration of the Old Sled Works antique mall's 20th anniversary in business.  I shot more than 100 photos today, but I'll try to pare those down to a manageable number.  This post will cover what I bought, and I'll follow with a post to show a little more about the Sled Fest.

I've been to Sled Works many times in the past, in fact, it's where I bought some of my first mid century collectibles, including some wrought iron and brass items I still have.  I have never left there without some kind of a great find at a good price, and today was no exception.

I made the drive early, left home at 6 a.m. and was sitting in front of the antique mall at 8:05 a.m., earlier than I expected.  Luckily there were some flea market vendors setting up outside so I did a little pre-shopping shopping.  Bought a baggie full of post cards for a buck, and got two more tiki masks for our screened porch wall for $5 each, 

And I also picked up this 50-cent cookbook...

 and got this Presto percolator coffee maker along with a few old paper/ephemera items I'll cover in a different blog post.  I plan to give the drip coffeemaker a rest and perk some joe in the morning with this baby.

So when I finally made it inside the building, I did a sweep through all the booths and found a few LPs for a buck each, including this Pajama Game with some cool cover art,

 some paper collectibles such as this 1963 Girl Scouts calendar for $3.75 (I'll probably hang it in the camper),

 and a decent deal on about a dozen miscellaneous Viewmaster 3D reels, including this Tom Corbett Space Cadet set.

Here's a rundown of the other stuff I picked up inside the mall:

$4 for this melamine server plate

$4 also for this bamboo Hawaii souvenir tray - I don't think it's real old, but it looks good anyway and we can use it in our bar

an aluminum sugar container for $2

On my second pass through, I spotted this small bookshelf - with the discount it was only $18.75 - score!  

I have to find a home for this bookshelf, right now it's in the dining room, but it will probably move to either the hallway or basement.  I love the look of this thing, but it really is pretty small, only about 24 inches tall.  Maybe I'll put some of my Whitman TV books on it.

And to wrap up this post, when I saw it I knew I had to grab this brass-framed, 3D, light up version of the Last Supper!  Once I polish the frame it will hang next to the similarly framed fat Elvis I picked up last summer.  

At the rate I'm going, I have the makings of quite a low brow art gallery, with the paint by numbers paintings and these lighted brass-framed babies.  I think the gallery will probably have to be in the man cave, i.e., the unfinished basement - She Who Must Be Obeyed does have her limits.

I'll be back with more photos from the Sled Fest, and some bonus pics and a couple more scores from another antique mall I hit on the way home.

3-D Viewers and Cameras - make your own 3-D views!

If you haven't researched the mid-century 3-D viewing craze, you might think that View Master was the only option out there.  Actually, there were a few 3-D viewer options.

This item is great because of the colors, the design, and it featured side-by-side viewing of 35mm-sized color slides taken with a 35mm stereo camera.  I have a single slide that came with this viewer, it shows a couple of middle-aged ladies enjoying cocktails in a 1950s decorated living room.  I wish I could easily get a shot of the slide, it's very cool.

This is another viewer similar to the one above.

Here's the projector you can use to show View Master reels on a screen or bare wall.

I also have the 1950s era View Master stereo camera and accessories.

View Master Personal stereo camera

Cutter and storage case

The film cutter makes a die cut and you use a special tweezers tool to place them in the correct pockets of blank reels.

With the right color-slide film and some blank reels and a film cutter made especially for the film shot with the camera, you can make your own Viewmaster reels!  But with film developing services getting scarce, and color slide film not too commonly available anymore, making your own reels will take some extra effort.  It's on my long long long term To Do list!

3D when 3D was first cool

This has been a big year so far for 3-D movies - Avatar is the one I saw, and the effects were very good.  Filmmakers tried 3-D for a while in the mid-century, but the quality was lacking.  3-D photography was also big 50 years ago, and many of us had our first 3-D experiences with View-Master viewers and reels.

I looked at View-Master reels when I was a kid, but our family didn't have a viewer or much interest in them.  (The extent of our photography at home was a Polaroid Instamatic - cool to watch the photo develop by itself when exposed to light, but low quality. I sure wish more of our old family photos were on 35mm film or slides.)

When I started frequenting flea markets and antique malls, I caught the View-Master bug, and soon I started picking up inexpensive examples of the Viewers and reels.

These are a couple of the earliest View-Master viewers.  I like the cat-eye shape of the one on the right.  Both are bakelite, so if they get dropped they can crack or break.

 

The viewer on the left is a similar cat-eye shape but made of lighter plastic.  The one on the right is a lighted viewer, it came with a small light and took batteries so you could view the slides without aiming the viewer at an indoor light.

This is a variation of the plastic viewer in a lighter color. It came with the original box and has no wear, probably was never used.

The View-Master company changed hands from Sawyers to GAF sometime in the 1960s or 70s.  The bottom viewer is marked GAF and has a bicentennial red white and blue color scheme.  The other viewer above is one of the more plentiful modern versions.

Many of my reels are TV related, but I also have a lot of  old travel reels.  The travel reels will go along with us in the Shasta for viewing while we're out camping.  It's pretty easy to still find travel reels cheap.  I'll have a little more to share about View-Master stuff and 3-D viewers in my next post, so stay tuned.