If you see something weird, do you ever stop to take a photo?
If not, you really should. While you may have no idea what the object is, there's a good chance that someone on the r/whatisthisthing subreddit knows exactly what it is. They have an incredible track record of identifying all kinds of odds and ends. All you have to do is take a photo and ask 'em.
This maze of dowels is actually a useful storage area for cookie sheets, baking pans and stuff like that.
OP correctly noted that this was an aftermarket addition to the car. For cars that don't have indicators to show when the headlights are on and off, one of these little buzzers can do the job.
Here's something very familiar to practitioners of certain martial arts. It's a makiwara board — essentially a wooden dummy for practicing wing chun, kung fu, and some types of karate. Bruce Lee used something similar.
Is this an actual thing, or not an actual thing? It's an actual thing! In this case, it's a wooden mallet for splitting logs.
OP guessed that this might be some sort of old engine, and they were bang on. To be specific, it's the triple-expansion steam engine from a vessel known as the SS Pomo.
It might look like the beginning of a construction project, but this project is actually already done. The bricks are set there to slow down the flow of water in the event of a flood.
This is, simply put, an aspergillum. What's an aspergillum? It's a little hand-held sprinkler for dispensing holy water in religious ceremonies.
This is an accessory that was once very common. It became more illicit as time went on. It's a spoon for snorting small quantities of snuff, or small quantities of...other stuff.
If you've put together Ikea furniture in the past, you might have already identified this as the sliding mechanism for a drawer — in other words, the thing that allows drawers to slide smoothly.
Let's double down on the Ikea content with this one. While it looks a bit like a tote for carrying firewood, it's actually part of an Ikea wall organizer.
To cut the suspense: you can probably break this with a sledgehammer. It seems to be a sturdy anchor for a clothes line.
This thing was pretty familiar to several posters. It appears to be a resealable tap for pouring liquid out of cans.
Modern phone jacks may seem like an ancient, unchanging design, but they're actually streamlined versions of the original. If you're wondering what old phone jacks looked like, here you go.
I thought this was some kind of mini barometer or something, but it's just novelty candy. It's from a Mentos (the Freshmaker, don'tcha know) limited edition set known as 'This or That.'
Oftentimes when you find something suspicious like this, it's evidence of some kind of infestation. In this case, it appears that OP is unfortunately dealing with termites, because that stuff is termite poop.
Here's an old-fashioned kitchen feature that's since fallen out of style. The flat surface is for kneading bread, the other part is for portioning dough, and there's a spot underneath for storing ingredients.
It isn't every day that someone is able to successfully identify hundreds of thousands of an object, but that's the case here. These things are steel shot, uh, peen. It's from the manufacturing process.
Is this important? Maybe. Is it important to the dishwasher? Not at all. It's just a straw that came detached from a sippy cup.
If it looks like a bomb, it's probably a bomb. But this isn't a bomb at all. OP looked into it and found that it was a 30-year-old weather buoy that washed or was dumped ashore.
Sometimes, the most intriguing-looking items turn out to be the most pedestrian. In this case, the object is nothing more than a kids' toy. Spin it around and it lights up, simple as that.
