Someone in my building is throwing this away. At first I thought it was a chimney pot, but it’s cast iron and has bolt holes in both the top and bottom. The casters certainly aren’t original, so maybe it was repurposed into a table at some point. It’s too tall for an office chair, though maybe it would work as a drafting chair. Regardless, I’m more interested in what it might originally be from. It looks like a fitting from a steam engine or locomotive, though the bolt holes in the top flange don’t look substantial enough to be for anything at high pressure. Thoughts?
It’s a cast iron machine pedestal. A Google image search for that phrase should provide lots of images of newer and older versions. You bolt it to the floor and then bolt something like a grinder on top, and that sucker won’t move. Modern example 1 and example 2.
Note that although it is (probably) a pedestal, it doesn’t have to be a machine pedestal – it could also be a sink pedestal, a dock pedestal, or the bottom section of a street lamp.
The fact that it’s so plain a casting, and – critically – not broken, argues that the material is mild steel / wrought iron rather than “cast iron” – so, more recent than a “cast iron” pedestal.
