Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you're in time, and sometimes you're just a few minutes too late. Sometimes you run into a 300-foot coil of vintage genuine manila rope and it's 1" diameter (the specification for rope in WWII), and sometimes it's 3/4". Today was one of those
lose, not spec, arrive a few minutes too late days!
That's
not my Army cabinet with a butcher block top that you see in the back of
not my vehicle in Pic 1. The guy who bought it walked up to the back of the big panel truck it was sitting in just a few second before me!!!
To make matters worse, I had already been at the flea for close to an hour, having started on the other side and worked my way around to the house close-out guys in the dirt along the side of the parking lot at the end! (Sometimes I start there, and sometimes I end there. You can't see it all at once, so it's a
sometimes damned if you do, sometimes damned if you don't **** shoot, you guys know that... But if today was a day I had decided to start with the house close-out guys, that cabinet would be MINE!)
In an act of self-flagellation, I offered to help him load it, adding insult to injury.
Pic 2 is a shot of the data plates. ("Data what?" the guy said. Yeah, rubbing salt deeper and harder into the wound, the buyer didn't even know what any of that gobbledygook meant, nor did he care!)
Reads:
CABINET, SP/PTS, TYPE 1, CLASS A / FSN: 7125-693-4352 /
CONTR. NO. DSA-4-D86073-TR529, and
DEHLER MFG CO. INC. /
U.S.
It's not really in my wheelhouse. The FSN dates it to after 1953. The "DSA" (Defense Supply Agency) in the contract number dates it to 1961 to 1977. And the "73" in the contract number is very likely the year it was let. It's missing a drawer. And you can see that the lip (for clamping vises, grinders, etc on the top) has been snapped off flush. But that's just me trying to talk myself out of my disappointment. It was a nice cabinet! Dammit!
Does it get damp down there in winter?
