c.1924 Palmeter Tool Co Socket Wrench Set

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

I ran into this by accident on fleaBay a month or so back while doing some research and just had to have it. I have never seen another one anywhere in the wild or on the web. I’ve been waiting to post it until I could complete some research, and just last night the Google Books team notified me that a few of my unlock requests were granted.

More posts to follow...

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

In 1903 John R. Palmeter of Jamestown, N.Y. was one of three partners involved in the formation of a printing company, capitalized for $10,000, story linked here.

Although I have yet to find a record of the Palmeter Tool Company being established, in 1922 John R. Palmeter filed two patents, one for an adjustable end wrench with a thumb button, and the other for an adjustable pipe wrench.

In October 1923 the patents (1,470,184, and 1,471,413 respectively) were granted…

…he had erected a factory…

…and placed ads for toolworking machinery and equipment.

In 1924, he must have been in production, because he was advertising my set - the “Socket Wrench Set with Reversible Ratchet”, praising its compactness for car owners, along with the patented adjustable end wrench in trade journals.

By 1925, he was bankrupt.

That may seem like an epic fail – from start-up in 1922 to bankrupt in 1925 – but it wasn’t at all unusual for small automobile makers in this era or for the myriad of small companies looking to break into the automotive maintenance market.

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

The female reversible ratchet, the drive plug, and the sockets are all 7/16-inch hex drive. The service openings in the sockets are 7/16”, 1/2”, 9/16”, 5/8”, 11/16”, 3/4”, 7/8”, and 15/16”. The set appears to be complete, although the ads show an Ell-handle.

The ‘PALMETER’ embossed box has a dark blue finish that you rarely see in this era.
I’m not sure what to make of the little tabbed openings. It’s almost like they were placed so that the box could be hung from any side on something else, but some of them don’t make sense.

One more time... :pimpflash

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

There is one other Palmeter tool on GJ, a ratchet - almost certainly originally from a set like this one, posted by tryba in Post #335 on page 17 of the Ratchet Collection Thread back in 2017, linked here, and identified on the next page in Post #347 by 3baygarage, linked here.

Oldtuleguy · Nov 16, 2019

I remember that one. Cool set. Also just a heads up there is another leytool set that popped up.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-LEYTOOL-WHITWORTH-SOCKET-SET-FREE-DELIVERY-/153718205415

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

I don't know anything about Leytonstone ("Leytool"), but that looks like a Duro export to me.

319 · Nov 16, 2019

The Palmeter set is very cool indeed!

Oldtuleguy · Nov 16, 2019

I refer you to post 796 of the di thread and our previous conversation. Been a while so you may have forgot about it.

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=865820&d=1550787693

3baygarage · Nov 16, 2019

Nice set. It’s been a while since I ran into one. Used to see them locally from time to time.

Private Lugnutz · Nov 16, 2019

319 said:
The Palmeter set is very cool indeed!

3baygarage said:
Nice set. It’s been a while since I ran into one. Used to see them locally from time to time.

Thanks, guys. Did you ever spring for one, 3bay? If so, post it up!

Oldtuleguy said:
I refer you to post 796 of the di thread and our previous conversation. Been a while so you may have forgot about it.

Ah, I remember now. Thanks for the nudge. It just sold, but shipping from across the pond would've been prohibitive for me, anyway.

3baygarage · Nov 16, 2019

No, I have the ratchet and some sockets. Not here or I would post them.

Private Lugnutz · Nov 17, 2019

No worries, 3bay. If you had a set I was just curious if the case was the same, and if it had an Ell handle.

tombell572 · Nov 17, 2019

Jamestown NY, also the original home of Crescent Tool Company.

Tom B.

Rileysan · Nov 18, 2019

You find the coolest stuff. Thanks for sharing!

Brian

Private Lugnutz · Nov 18, 2019

tombell572 said:
Jamestown NY, also the original home of Crescent Tool Company.

As well as J.P. Danielson, a co-founder of Crescent, after he split with Petersen. And the exterior cantilevered box makers, Duplex, and Union Cutlery, famous for their Ka-Bar knives, were in the outer Jamestown, NY area towns of Sherman and Olean, respectively.

Rileysan said:
You find the coolest stuff. Thanks for sharing!

Well, someone on eBay found this one, but I do like the unique stuff and I do like to find most of it myself!

Thanks, Brian.

Todd just sent me something he found on Newspapers.com showing a business cooperative in Salamanca, NY thinking of buying (and perhaps bailing) Palmeter out in 1924. Can you imagine being alive at this time? There were literally (not an exaggeration) hundreds of car makers and also hundreds of tool makers - soon to be reduced to dozens by the Great Depresssion. It was like the Dot.Com era before the fall only you could actually hold something in your hands to show for your work and people (us!) are still holding them in their hands nearly a 100 years later!

twertsy · Nov 18, 2019

Private Lugnutz said:
As well as J.P. Danielson, a co-founder of Crescent, after he split with Petersen. And the exterior cantilevered box makers, Duplex, and Union Cutlery, famous for their Ka-Bar knives, were in the outer Jamestown, NY area towns of Sherman and Olean, respectively.

Well, someone on eBay found this one, but I do like the unique stuff and I do like to find most of it myself! Thanks, Brian.

Todd just sent me something he found on Newspapers.com showing a business cooperative in Salamanca, NY thinking of buying (and perhaps bailing) Palmeter out in 1924. Can you imagine being alive at this time? There were literally (not an exaggeration) hundreds of car makers and also hundreds of tool makers - soon to be reduced to dozens by the Great Depresssion. It was like the Dot.Com era before the fall only you could actually hold something in your hands to show for your work and people (us!) are still holding them in their hands nearly a 100 years later!

That is frankly quite interesting to think about........the dot.tool era.

Username already in use · Nov 18, 2019

That's a dandy little set, Lugz. Quite the find.

Private Lugnutz said:
I’m not sure what to make of the little tabbed openings. It’s almost like they were placed so that the box could be hung from any side on something else, but some of them don’t make sense.

From the looks of it, the tabs appear to be some type of pressure 'stays' for the tools inside the box. So they don't move around too much. If they were meant for hanging, you would think they would need to be turned at 180* :headscrat

Private Lugnutz · Nov 18, 2019

twertsy said:
That is frankly quite interesting to think about........the dot.tool era.

The analogy is very strong, Todd!

I've been thinking about it for a long time now.

The "dot-tool" boom could very easily refer to the speculative investment bubble that formed around the nascent automotive and automotive maintenance industry between 1920 and 1930. The soaring market encouraged investors to pour more money into any company with "motor car" in its business plan. This excess capital encouraged more companies to form, often with very little planning, in order to get in on some of the easy money that was available at the time. The "dot-tool" boom was of course followed by the "dot-tool" crash (exacerbated by the 1929 Wall Street crash), which saw many companies - many no more than a new-fangled ratchet or adjustable wrench - fail, proving again and again that there was not necessarily a correlation between a new patent or a re-branding of an old one and profitability. And, just like Microsoft (from licensing OS/2 to IBM in 1985 to capturing 90% of the market share with Windows by 2000), Amazon (1994), and eBay (1995), only a few 600-pound gorillas (Blackhawk, Walden, and Snap-on - bailed out by Forged Steel Products) emerged.

I broke into tool collecting about 13 years ago, mainly in the WWII era, vis-a-vis my Willys 43 jeep toolkit, going from on-board to depot maintenance. But in the past year or so I have become increasingly intrigued by the early Roaring 20's just for that reason. It was a time of unparalleled expansion and innovation, and after that, to today, all tools basically looked the same!

If you missed it, this is from the introduction (post #1) in my GJ Roaring 20's thread!

"But it’s the more obscure makers in the middle of that group shot, with names that seem at times either fictional or in the wrong industry, that I want to show and talk more about. My father’s day present to myself was to lock myself in the basement to complete my thoughts on this collection.

The Roaring 1920’s was a decade of dramatic change in America, typified by Jazz, Art Deco, Prohibition, the common use of telephones, radios, and refrigerators in homes, the spread of nation-wide advertising, mail-order catalogs, and chain stores, and what’s known as the Vintage Era in automobiles. Out with the old – high-wheeled open-cab motor buggies with brass fixtures and discrete speed settings, and in with the new – closed cabs with eight cylinder engines, four wheel brakes, and balloon tires.

In the Brass Era, cars were expensive novelties, and their Ritchie Rich owners either had a wealth of knowledge about their mechanical operation or hired men to drive and maintain them. Believe it or not, in 1922, there were 175 different car makers in the U.S.. Seemingly, there were just as many companies making tools to keep them on the road. As you might expect, breakdowns were quite frequent. Garages and service stations were born, but many car owners were still do-it-yourselfers, with kits in the trunk. While Mossberg and Walden-Worcester dominated the industry, scores of copy-cats were born, making handles and detachable sockets out of pressed-steel or, in some case, malleable iron. Other men, schooled as machinists, blessed with entrepreneurial minds, and prompted by the demand for automotive service tools, tried their hand at alternative approaches. Few would succeed.

If necessity is the mother of invention, this one had an appetite for eating her own. By 1930, the number of US car manufacturers was reduced to less than 25, and three eventual giants had emerged in the automotive tools trade, toting hot-forged, cold-broached, heavy-walled socket sets: Walden, Blackhawk, and the fledgling Snap-on. These three would come to vanquish the mighty Mossberg (who would later team up with APCO) and left all the pressed-steel/malleable iron knockoffs and the innovative tinkerers in their wake. The automotive hand tools industry would never be the same. From a technology perspective, the opposite was true, for the industry would be exactly the same. Look no further than your own garage stack to understand that these early socket sets look pretty much the same as the socket sets many of us still use today.

As evidenced by some of my former GJ threads, it’s this earlier 1920’s period – and more precisely, the years 1922 to 1925, just before the major shift took hold, that seems to intrigue me the most, explicitly because the market was not so homogeneous."

c.1924 Palmeter Tool Co Socket Wrench Set

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