Making something from scraps that’s pleasing to the eye inspired some serious upcycling for local metal artist Mike Hochachka.
An old muffler is now a dog, pieces of a 100-year-old piano helped create tails and many other aspects of craftily created creatures, old shovels are now turtles, coil bed springs from a burned out mattress found in the bush are now the eyes of rock owls, there’s metal cactus in buckets and the prickles are barbed wire to keep things real, old file cabinets provide lots of material and there’s what’s left of a load of sheet metal with which he creates silhouettes of birds, squirrels and other friendly, fantastical creatures. There’s a gnome built to sit on the top of a door frame and there’s a cat head, too. It looks like he’s sneaking a peek at you. So cute.
There’s even a cow with a vintage milk bottle as her body with the holder of an oxygen tank wrapped around her torso.
And those old hand saws you see rusted out at every garage sale in town?
The blades are free-hand plasma-cut into trees. Fantastic.
Hochachka is a jack-of-all trades and does woodwork, electrical, mechanics - whatever it takes to get things done, he said.
In the recent past, he’s created a pull-down boat rack on his truck for his kayak and a greenhouse using whatever he had on hand.
“I call it recycling,” Hochachka said.
He even gets the grandkids involved as they go on their camping trips as a family and explorations into the bush result in heavy metal finds, he added.
He only started the metal art a year ago.
“I always wanted to do cut metal work and I started doing it all by hand with a jigsaw and it was so time consuming,” Hochachka said.
That’s when he decided to get his ‘cheapy’ plasma cutter. So much easier, he added.
His spring time project is creating knives with a tiny little forge he just managed to procure the other day.
Long ago, when he and his wife Connie used to be part of the Society of Creative Anachronism where a community of like-minded people would gather as if in medieval times to live and battle it out for a weekend, he had his sheet metal to create armour he used as a heavy fighter during battle and would forge knives he would sell to fellow society members. He’s revisiting the knife creations and will add them to the items offered when he hits the spring markets.
“To test it out I just twisted a railway spike and turned it into a bottle opener,” Hochachka said.
He also takes requests for commissioned pieces.
Hochachka and Connie have volunteered with the Buckhorn volunteer fire department for more than 30 years and he is now the deputy chief while Connie is lieutenant.
“There’s so much that I want to do yet but between work, the grandkids and the fire department... “ Hochachka said, who grew up right here. “It’s a lot of fun to come up with all these things.”
Feel free to connect with Hochachka on his Facebook page or email him at Happycamperstudio21@gmail.com.
