Recent content by abie

Hi sorry for the late answer, I just saw this. The tool box has a mechanism that prevents the drawers from opening when the door of the bottom compartment is shut, the springs are a part of that.

Getting the outside down to bare metal and etch priming it unfortunately revealed several shallow dents all over. Nothing major, but I'd have been annoyed every time I looked at them. So I watched a bunch of videos on how to do bodywork and used bondo to fill them in. My technique was probably...

Got a bunch of work done over the last week, started by removing the slides and 68 years of grease and general crud from the inside. The bottom was in bad shape, there was a deep layer of corrosion that I had to grind off with a 40 grit disk. Took ages and kicked up clouds of dust, this was the...

@hobbyistcollector Let me know which specific dimensions you need, and I'd be happy to measure them for you.

It's probably because they aren't rubber, it's a very hard and dense plastic of some sort

I was going to toss these casters in the trash because they looked too far gone, but then I found out new ones were $15 a piece, eek. I soaked them in soapy water and scrubbed off the gunk, and had to use the paint stripper on them because someone had painted the plastic black for some reason...

I've been working on this as time permits and so progress has been slow. There were at least three layers of paint on this thing, but I got it down to bare metal finally. Process was to rough up the paint with coarse sandpaper to give the stripper a chance to bite, followed by two cycles of...

Yeah, it's proving to be a ton of work. I got it all taken apart and I'm working on it a little bit at a time as time permits. The bottom was nasty, there was 75 years of caked on grease and gunk there. Scraped off most of the crud and found some light rust, so I painted on some Evaporust and...

Oh totally, I'm not trying to get the color spot on, but I'd like it to put it back to as close to the original as possible. I'm just starting to build out my tool collection and this is my first larger piece of storage, all my stuff is scattered across multiple smaller toolboxes. I looked at...

That's a beautiful job, I hope I come close with mine. Mine looks to be the same model as yours, but has an oval logo without the horizontal lines on either side.

Thanks! That's just the info I needed. I'm going to go with the Rustoleum gray which is a hair darker than the silver. I'm not trying to do a 100 point concours restoration, but I'd like to get as close to the original as possible.

Hi guys, I picked up this vintage 1950's Craftsman toolbox over the weekend. It's in somewhat rough shape and I could use some advice putting it back to it's former glory. As you can see, someone's rattle canned it red. I found it in the 1955 Sears catalog, and according to the description it's...