Vintage USA made handtools

Pirate63

Pirate63

Joined
Mar 27, 2014
Messages
971
Recently over the past few months I have started to look for (flea markets, garage sales and e bay) collect and restore vintage USA made hand tools. Here are a few tools I have found and restored recently. My garage workshop setup for knife restorations also works well for restoring old tools.

Have examples by Klein and Sons, Stanley, Craftsman, North Brothers (Yankee Tool), Utica and others. I can already tell this will be a deep rabbit hole.........
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Very nice, and great photo as well. One of my future goals is restoring a perfect handle screwdriver. Just gotta find one.
 
Pirate63,
Very nice job on the restorations. The toolbox looks like new construction. Either way, good work.

The rabbit hole is much, much worse than you can imagine. Please read on so that I can do you a huge disservice:

www.dot.supertool.dot.com/forsale/listaugu2024.dot.html (replace ".dot." with ".").

The owner of the website is Patrick Leach, and he is super-knowledgeable about old/antique hand tools. He publishes his "for sale" list every month, and can empty your bank account in seconds, if you have any interest, which you obviously do. I have bought from him for decades, and find him very fair.

Somewhere on the site is a place to sign up for the monthly newsletter/list.

Good luck, and thanks for sharing.

Joe
 
EricAxe said:
Very nice, and great photo as well. One of my future goals is restoring a perfect handle screwdriver. Just gotta find one.
Click to expand...
EricAxe,
If you'll take a look at the (modified) link that I posted directly above, Perfect Handle tools show up every once in a while. Note that there is a different set of offerings every month.
Good luck.
 
Just finished restoring this vintage USA made (no makers mark) egg beater hand drill I found last week, gave $6 for it. It was completely locked up so I broke it down completely and performed rust and old paint removal, and cleaned and polished the metal and applied cold blue, and refinished the wood handles with BLO. Works great now. The functional simplicity of these old hand tools speaks to me.

Before:
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After:
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It's nice to see someone who appreciates these old tools. I've restored a few old Stanley hand planes, and use them from time to time. They are fantastic tools, and are still very useful. I've also restored few hand saws. Clean them, sharpen them, and they work like new (I did have to totally recut the teeth on one). About 60 years ago, I found an old claw hammer in a rental house my father used to own. The handle was broken off, but I brought it home and kept it. Then, maybe 30 years ago, I replaced the handle, and I've been using it ever since.
 
I still use my aluminum stanley for all my leather work. I have the cast iron one too but mine is painted red. Boggles the mind to think how everything used to be cast iron, talk about a bombproof several lifetimes tool.

Beautiful kit!
 
A few recent restoration additions to the vintage tool box display.

Lufkin - 6' Tape measure (1960's vintage)
Master Tufboy Bright Blade - 6' Tape measure (1940's vintage)
Douglas Co. (Charoltte, NC) - Torpedo Level No. 500 (1950's-60's vintage)
Brown & Sharpe Co. - Model 13 Micrometer (Unknown Vintage. likely 1960's)
No makers mark - Ball Peen Hammer (Unknown Vintage, likely 1940's)

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