Collecting in a Big Weigh : Manuel Santos of Costa Mesa says his hobby of finding and restoring scales is ‘like a fever.’

All things being equal, Manuel Santos prefers scales. His small Costa Mesa home abounds in weights and measures, in devices for weighing bread, meat, babies, mail, gold, fish and sundry other items. His vintage collection ranges from utilitarian postal scales to beautifully restored examples of old-time craftsmanship, adorned with metal critters and filigree.

The scales are his pride and joy in a collection that also includes Popeye items--including a Popeye phonograph; try finding a CD-age equivalent for that--and old kitchen items such as food tins and boxes and an antique cabbage-slicing appliance.

He also has a gleaming old wood-burning stove wearing a first-place ribbon from the Orange County Fair. “Oh, that’s not for the stove,” Santos said. “It’s from a few years ago, for having the most people stuffed into a Volkswagen Rabbit. I really don’t remember how many people. Believe me, we were kind of tipsy at the time.”

Santos looks like someone who’s more likely to be up to his armpits in motorcycle grease than into kitchen gadgets and delicate instruments. But he’s been there, done that.

“I had a motorcycle I wrecked (he displayed an impressive scar along his right arm), so I forgot the motorcycles,” he said. He likes the old kitchen items, he said, because they put him in touch with his grandmother’s time. Popeye’s just something he likes. The scales seem to have an almost mystical quality to him.

“I like the way you can just blow on some of them and it registers, or you put a weight here and it balances out there,” he mused.

Most folks don’t seem to fall into their fixations headlong, but rather take a winding, albeit slide-like path. That was Santos’ case.

“When I moved into this place, I just had a couch and a bed, and I didn’t know what to do. So I started collecting coins. I worked at a liquor store, and a lot of coins came through there. I started reading books on coins and then started on stamps, and from that I started going to antique malls and looking around. I figured some of the booths they had were decorated pretty neat, and I thought I could do that, so I started collecting old cans and tins, this and that, old pepper shakers.

“Then I picked up a scale or two and thought they were pretty neat. So I started asking people about scales, and they said, ‘Have you seen the Scale Man ?’ ‘

This was the moment when Santos could have backed off and still possibly had a normal life. And any of us terrified as children by the gill-headed creature of the ‘50s monster flicks would probably want to give someone called the Scale Man a wide berth. But Santos forged on, finding that the Scale Man was an Anaheim antiques dealer who had hundreds of scales. Once he saw that trove (since sold) he was hooked.

“It’s like a fever,” Santos said. He figures he has more than 50 scales, some stored at his mom’s because he doesn’t have room for them all. “They come in all shapes and sizes, so I can never quit. I’ll never find just the right one, because they’re all unique.”

His acquisitions may be a reaction to his childhood: “My dad never wanted to save anything. Everything he had, either you use it or if you can’t use it you throw it away. That was his motto.”

Finding the scales is an adventure in history for him, though he’s had trouble researching scales, finding almost nothing on them in libraries or book shops. His favorite part is restoring them.

“When I buy some of these, they may look like nothing, but I look at it and picture what I can do with it. I’ll take them all apart, clean them up, have parts brass-plated, paint this and that. To me there’s excitement and joy out of everything, but what I really like is to get something that looks like nothing and bring out the beauty and luster, the imprint of the metal that may be there. There’s a detail and feeling you don’t get with these digital things nowadays.”

A prime example is an antique balance scale, with gleaming metal plating offsetting an ornate frame book-ended by winged lion griffin figures. The lineup points between the scale’s two sides are iron sea horses, whose noses touch when the weights are equal. He has a photo of how the scale was when he bought it, and none of these details was evident beneath the corrosion.

In contrast to the delicate craftsmanship of that, he has a clunky old British bathroom scale that requires one to step up about 10 inches to use.

One scale, the centerpiece of his collection, required no restoration. It’s a glass-boxed banker’s gram scale, used back in the mining days when banks still had to weigh gold dust and nuggets. Though without the fancy design of his others, the scale is a masterpiece of intricate design and so sensitive that a breath can indeed set it in motion.

Breath is about the only thing that does get weighed on his scales. As much as he loves scales, Santos doesn’t care much what things weigh.

Some people also get the wrong impression from his scales.

“A couple of guys have walked in here and said, ‘Hey, do you sell coke?’ That’s their first idea. I tell them, ‘No, and anybody that does it, the door they walked in is the door they can leave.’ I may drink and smoke cigarettes, but I don’t support drugs.”

He has yet to come across a competitive bidder for the scales he buys, but prices are still often over $100. He works as a handyman, and “now I’ve got to be particular because you’ve got to work harder for the money now. Rent goes up, food goes up, gas goes up; everything goes up except the paycheck.”

Certain scales are harder to find, he said, because unscrupulous dealers refinish them as bogus Coca-Cola scales, which are easy, pricey sales to collectors of the soda brand.

Between buying his scales and paying for the plating and other restoration work, Santos has a fair amount of cash tied up in his scales, but he’s never weighed how much. He explained: “See, if I was to calculate how much it all cost, I might want to sell it. For my intentions, it’s better not to know what I have or how much it’s worth. Instead of being tempted to sell them, I try to appreciate what I have, and it gives me something to share with people who come over.”