Nichols business sells 'the best junk in town'

NICHOLS, Iowa (AP) - As a boy, Don Hutchings would pick through the heaps of scrap in his father's junkyard and wonder what he could do with it all.

These days, the wheels still start spinning when it comes time to unload a truck.

Salvaged material is strewn about his small farm to the point that friends joke it looks like he's having a perpetual lawn sale. Old farm equipment, industrial parts, rusting metal - whatever he can get his hands on - is piled high.

But what most call junk, Hutchings sees as his palette.

Hutchings transforms material that would otherwise be rusting away in a forgotten barn or landfill into unique artwork at his workshop outside of Conesville in Muscatine County.

"I go to sales and buy stuff, and people will say, 'What are you buying that for?'" said Hutchings, 50. "I can make anything out of virtually anything."

The pieces are on sale at his shop, Junk FX, 807 Ijem Ave., in a pole building on the eastern edge of Nichols' main drag, otherwise known as Highway 22.

There are flowers made of silverware, golf-club birds and rusted-wrench dragon flies. There are trees with colored-bottle branches, trellises with rotary hoes woven in and Christmas-bulb fireflies.

"People say our stuff is hilarious; they use the term 'whimsy' a lot," said Junk FX employee Brandon Conaway, who handles sales and marketing. "They get a laugh out of it."

Hutchings was 13 when his dad, who ran a junkyard in Galesburg, Ill., let him use a welding torch for the first time. He began melding items together in interesting ways, creating pieces that he would load into his mother's station wagon to sell at local farmers markets.

For his seventh-grade shop project, he made a table out of a heating register. When his teacher insisted that an adult had to have made it, Hutchings' dad went into the school to tell them otherwise.

Hutchings started college in Illinois to become an art teacher, but his life was derailed by a struggle with drugs and alcohol in his 20s. At one point, he was living out of his van in Galesburg, he said.

His art helped him find his focus and gave him the means to earn some money when, at age 27, he said he sobered up. He has been clean since, he said.

At his workshop on his Conesville farm, Hutchings has a team of five workers, whom he says - like him at one time - some might have labeled unemployable. Hutchings designs the pieces, totaling in the hundreds now, and his employees craft them.

"We're not normal people," Hutchings laughed. "We always joke that our company motto is, 'We're here because we're not all there.'"

The workshop, called Black Crow Forge, ships thousands of items around the country each year, and Hutchings makes regular trips to national wholesale shows to find new retail outlets, he said.

In Iowa City, Junk FX artwork can be found at Iowa City Landscaping, 520 Highway 1 W.

While the shop churns out pieces in large numbers, Hutchings also specially makes individualized items for customers with items they bring to him. He's turned a grandmother's old sewing machine into a tractor, and a dad's set of tools into a one-of-a-kind sculpture, for instance.

Junk FX employee Sara Moore said Hutchings gives new life to materials.

"I love that it's getting recycled," she said. "It would go to the junkyard, but now it might last a little longer and even get passed down."

For Hutchings, as long as there's junk to work with, the ideas will continue to spin.

"I can't make everything I come up with," Hutchings said. "I have to slow it down."