Recent content by misterbill

I finally had enough of the "stinkdriver" smell emanating from the Oxwall flat bladed screwdriver hanging on the pegboard in my garage. I chiseled and drove the handle off of the blade and turned a wooden replacement from a piece of black cherry that had been lying in my yard. The ferrule is a...

I doubt it. I'm not one for modifying tools in that way unless I'm desperate. I have the obligatory bucket of sacrificial tools to go to first.

I was recently working on something with metric hardware where only a thin DOE would have worked. I didn't have anything on hand and didn't see anything new that I liked with the satin finish I prefer. I turned it into a game and have been picking up German-made DOEs to make a set. For $10...

This l'il fella' arrived in the mail today. Clipping of the No. 74 ignition pliers is from the 1939 catalog. Bill

I was surprised to see that there wasn't already one of these universal slip-joint 7 inch combination pliers on this thread. Here's one I picked up from an estate sale yesterday. Bill

Was sipping my morning coffee lamenting the lack of sales and saw one pop up on CL locally. Turned out to be an abandoned house with no electricity and obviously once inhabited by a machinist at one point. I got there several hours after the start time and it had already been picked pretty...

Answering some of my own questions... we know from visual evidence on Alloy Artifacts that Wright started their renumbering scheme (at least for their drive tools) in 1959 and the box containing the "60" marked tools is of the two-tone black/silver variety. The 1957 catalog shows the older...

They cleaned up pretty nicely. Ever use bluing to help preserve them and hide the pitting?

Sure do. Just scroll in this thread and you'll se examples. OTG had this set in a green box in post 327 and genog had an example of a red box in post box in post 466. There are others. The green, if I had to guess, runs from post WWII until the early 1960s when Wright went to their new...

Found this little gem in a tackle box at my parents' house yesterday. It's a 1940 dated P12 3/8" x 7/16". Bill

My daughter wanted to harvest some peonies from my parents' home before we put it on the market. (These flowers have been split for at least three generations and my daughter wants to keep it going.) So, we drove together the three hours so she could spend a couple hours digging them up...

Another interesting observation that also acts as a warning against absolutes… this socket I received from @d42jeep has a “63” date code. This is after Wright supposedly had gone to an alphabetic scheme in 1961 (“A”). Bill

I picked this up on FBM today. Only the ratchet is dated (1964) but the 10 point sockets and two-tone box are consistent with that timeframe. It got me wondering about one thing, though. Can we determine when Wright changed colors on their socket boxes? I think they went from green to the...

Another Wright FBM pickup. None of the sockets in this partial set have any date codes but they seem consistent withe the 1964 dated (“D”) ratchet. Bill

Nice find and I approve of your supervisor.