The Newest Member of the Steen Clan

Last winter I was down in Utah talking with my boss. He had recently bought a vintage Coke machine, something I had always wanted. I told him how I had long hoped to acquire an old Coke machine. That's when he told me that he actually had TWO Coke machines (such is the opulence of my boss's lifestyle). He offered to let me have the other machine for a paltry $100, the price he paid. So last February, we made a return trip to Utah, loaded the machine into the Suburban and brought it back to Idaho. There it sat in our garage for roughly 4 months while I slowly and methodically took the machine apart, labeled every piece I could, and cleaned roughly 30 years of coke syrup off it in preparation for sanding and painting. The Coke Machine before I got some auto paint from a body shop, a paint gun, and rented an air compressor and primed it and painted it over a couple of days in our garage. I had never done anything like that before so I was pretty nervous. Aside from some pretty horrendous bondo spots that I didn't sand down too well, the machine looks pretty good. The finished product: The Coke decals were custom made at a local sign shop and cost me as much as the machine itself. After getting it all put back together I was relieved to find it worked perfectly. And the coin mechanism is set to 25 cents! What a bargain!