I like tools. I'm not a "tool fanatic", I don't need to own every tool that exists, but I appreciate tools, what can be done with them, and for most of my life I made my living with tools. These days, other than working on my bikes, most of my tooling involves hobbies.
I always enjoy threads about tools, and I came up with this idea. So if you have an old tool, one with a story, please share, I'll certainly enjoy reading about it.
Here are some of mine.
1. I grew up in a house in the 1970's, and there was an old swing set in the back yard. This thing was HUGE. It had a slide with a crows nest, two individual swings, and a 4 person carriage swing. It was a heavy duty set, all steel construction (except the swing seats), and the main support structure was made of large diameter (3.5") heavy steel pipe, all bolted together (made in the 60's).
I was the youngest child, and I got years of enjoyment out of that set, it was my "pirate ship", but once I grew out of it, dad decided it had to go (got in the way of mowing the grass). Problem was, the bolts were all rusted together, there was no way to unbolt it. And dad wasn't the type to pay someone to dismantle it and haul it to the dump, especially when he had me around, I was around 11 or 12 years old.
So one day dad brought home a new hacksaw and a bunch of blades, handed them to me, and instructed me to cut up that HUGE swing set into small enough pieces that we could load them into the family station wagon and take them to the dump. That's it, no guidance whatsoever.
Over the course of an entire summer I cut that behemoth down into car-sized pieces. No small task. I would go on to use that same saw for all manner of tasks and projects throughout my youth, I particularly remember using it to cut ninja stars out of circular saw blades. I still have that saw, and I use it regularly. If you've ever seen my switchblades, it was this saw that I used to do all the cutting of parts. Unfortunately as a child I didn't always appreciate tools, hence the rust. I left it outside overnight more than a few times.
Good ole' Blue (the handle is actually a darker blue than it appears).
2. When I was a kid I had a lot of chores. One of them was to carry the trash cans out to the curb the night before trash day. But we didn't have wheels on trash cans back then, and for an 11 year old, those cans could be HEAVY. So to spare me a broken back, one night dad brought home a dolly. But it wasn't assembled, it was in a box, in pieces. He gives me the box and tells me to put it together.
Assembling the dolly was a simple enough task, but there was a problem- the wheels, which had heavy duty steel hubs, were supposed to have plastic bushings in the center for the axel to pass through, but one wheel was missing the bushing. There was no way that wheel was going to work, the hole was too big. I go to my dad, expecting that he would take the dolly back, but instead he just says to me "Figure it out".
"What the hell" I think to myself, what am I supposed to do? Then I remembered that we had an old set of wheels from an ancient lawn mower that had long since gone to the dump. And as luck would have it, the rear mower wheels were about the same diameter as the dolly wheels, and the center hole was the perfect size for the dolly's axel. So I decided to use the mower wheels instead.
Not so fast, there was another problem. The hubs of the mower wheels were too thick, like two steel bowls welded together. There wasn't enough room on the axel to accommodate both wheels and still install the cotter pins through the end of the axel. I decided to use the good dolly wheel, and one mower wheel. But still not enough room, just barely. I needed to narrow the hub of the mower wheel.
So I grabbed a ballpeen hammer, and hammered the hub inward until it was thin enough to fit on the axle. And so I had a functional dolly to take out the trash.
That dolly served me well into my teens. After my dad passed a few years back I found the dolly, it had seen better days. The handle was covered in rust, and the rubber wheels were all cracked. I needed something to wheel around my 80 pound 12" disc sander, and I thought the dolly, with a little modding, would be perfect. So I sanded off the rust, painted it, replaced the wheels with a pair from Harbor Freight (perfect fit), added a plywood base, and once again, after all those decades, it saves my back and serves me well.
I also use it to haul my solid aluminum motorcycle wheels, with tires, to a nearby shop for tire changes. And that alone makes it worth it's weight in silver.
3. No real story behind this one. It's just my very first power tool (Ram Tools, out of Chicago). You know a power drill is old when it has an all-metal housing. I guess at some point people decided that an all-metal housing was dangerous, I heard people were getting electrocuted from metal shaving getting into the drills and causing shorts, but I don' know if that's true or an urban legend. I still use mine. It was a big step up from the eggbeater drill I started with, although I thought that eggbeater was pretty awesome.
Thanks dad, for making tools a part of my life. And thanks for making me figure things out for myself, I'm a better person because of it.
I always enjoy threads about tools, and I came up with this idea. So if you have an old tool, one with a story, please share, I'll certainly enjoy reading about it.
Here are some of mine.
1. I grew up in a house in the 1970's, and there was an old swing set in the back yard. This thing was HUGE. It had a slide with a crows nest, two individual swings, and a 4 person carriage swing. It was a heavy duty set, all steel construction (except the swing seats), and the main support structure was made of large diameter (3.5") heavy steel pipe, all bolted together (made in the 60's).
I was the youngest child, and I got years of enjoyment out of that set, it was my "pirate ship", but once I grew out of it, dad decided it had to go (got in the way of mowing the grass). Problem was, the bolts were all rusted together, there was no way to unbolt it. And dad wasn't the type to pay someone to dismantle it and haul it to the dump, especially when he had me around, I was around 11 or 12 years old.
So one day dad brought home a new hacksaw and a bunch of blades, handed them to me, and instructed me to cut up that HUGE swing set into small enough pieces that we could load them into the family station wagon and take them to the dump. That's it, no guidance whatsoever.
Over the course of an entire summer I cut that behemoth down into car-sized pieces. No small task. I would go on to use that same saw for all manner of tasks and projects throughout my youth, I particularly remember using it to cut ninja stars out of circular saw blades. I still have that saw, and I use it regularly. If you've ever seen my switchblades, it was this saw that I used to do all the cutting of parts. Unfortunately as a child I didn't always appreciate tools, hence the rust. I left it outside overnight more than a few times.
Good ole' Blue (the handle is actually a darker blue than it appears).
2. When I was a kid I had a lot of chores. One of them was to carry the trash cans out to the curb the night before trash day. But we didn't have wheels on trash cans back then, and for an 11 year old, those cans could be HEAVY. So to spare me a broken back, one night dad brought home a dolly. But it wasn't assembled, it was in a box, in pieces. He gives me the box and tells me to put it together.
Assembling the dolly was a simple enough task, but there was a problem- the wheels, which had heavy duty steel hubs, were supposed to have plastic bushings in the center for the axel to pass through, but one wheel was missing the bushing. There was no way that wheel was going to work, the hole was too big. I go to my dad, expecting that he would take the dolly back, but instead he just says to me "Figure it out".
"What the hell" I think to myself, what am I supposed to do? Then I remembered that we had an old set of wheels from an ancient lawn mower that had long since gone to the dump. And as luck would have it, the rear mower wheels were about the same diameter as the dolly wheels, and the center hole was the perfect size for the dolly's axel. So I decided to use the mower wheels instead.
Not so fast, there was another problem. The hubs of the mower wheels were too thick, like two steel bowls welded together. There wasn't enough room on the axel to accommodate both wheels and still install the cotter pins through the end of the axel. I decided to use the good dolly wheel, and one mower wheel. But still not enough room, just barely. I needed to narrow the hub of the mower wheel.
So I grabbed a ballpeen hammer, and hammered the hub inward until it was thin enough to fit on the axle. And so I had a functional dolly to take out the trash.
That dolly served me well into my teens. After my dad passed a few years back I found the dolly, it had seen better days. The handle was covered in rust, and the rubber wheels were all cracked. I needed something to wheel around my 80 pound 12" disc sander, and I thought the dolly, with a little modding, would be perfect. So I sanded off the rust, painted it, replaced the wheels with a pair from Harbor Freight (perfect fit), added a plywood base, and once again, after all those decades, it saves my back and serves me well.
I also use it to haul my solid aluminum motorcycle wheels, with tires, to a nearby shop for tire changes. And that alone makes it worth it's weight in silver.
3. No real story behind this one. It's just my very first power tool (Ram Tools, out of Chicago). You know a power drill is old when it has an all-metal housing. I guess at some point people decided that an all-metal housing was dangerous, I heard people were getting electrocuted from metal shaving getting into the drills and causing shorts, but I don' know if that's true or an urban legend. I still use mine. It was a big step up from the eggbeater drill I started with, although I thought that eggbeater was pretty awesome.
Thanks dad, for making tools a part of my life. And thanks for making me figure things out for myself, I'm a better person because of it.
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