I believe that is a cement mixer.

I was gonna say, it looks like a cement mixer to me too.

It is a cement mixer...my Dad had one just like it!

That would have been my guess. Looks like hypertufa time!

I would point it upward, mosaic it, plant it and hang bling from the "skirt" around the bottom....or something like that. It has alot of possibilities!! How fun!---Sheri

I would love to get a cement mixer. My thoughts are to use it by adding sand and colored broken glass to make tumbled glass. This in turn could be used to mosaic, make jewelry, use wire wrapped around it to embellish hanging items, or ... Many opportunities. Great find! Enjoy.
Sugar

Yup, a cement mixer! I used mine to tumble glass like sugarmaple mentioned. It turned out very nice! I saw a yard pic not long ago where they had a lawn chair sitting on a bed of broken pttery (in place of sand or pea gravel or bark). All the pieces had rounded edges so it wasn't sharp to walk on. It looked so pretty with all the colors. I imagined if I did something like that I'd run the pieces around in my cement mixer with some sand...yours is a treasure!

If it is fixable, I'd use it to mix up hypertufa or concrete as suggsted, but if it can't be fixed, I'd paint it a great color (I'm into color right now), fill it with soil and plant it up bigtime! Would make a very unique planter!

Oh I would love a cement mixer. Just can't justify buying a new one. Prestonia the pottery "gravel" sounds so pretty! We have so many leaves in the fall its hard to maintain areas of gravel or small pretty things. A lot of what I used to have in the garden gets raked away. That's why I'm now mosaicking. So I can get it to stay in one place!