No guesses? Okay, your future thread host will embarrass himself without company.
Full admission: this thing, marked "STEELCRAFT" on the shank, had me stumped at the flea market. I honestly thought it was an ingenious pencil sharpener! (And even now when I
know what it is, I
still think it would make an ingenious pencil sharpener!)
My first thought was a ratcheting screwdriver, but it's so toy-like cheap (so much so that a toy toolset tool was actually my second thought!), made with cheap materials, it can't weigh more than a few ounces, and I couldn't see any way the end would accommodate screwdriver bits, that I really couldn't bring myself to believe this was meant to be an actual ratcheting screwdriver.
So I had myself convinced that the idea was to put a pencil in the hole in the top and push the end of the ratcheting shaft against a desk a few times to turn the shavers that must be located inside the green wooden compartment.
on me!
Turns out the painted wooden compartment with the little rotating lid is for the extra bits. The nub at the end screws off. I'm guessing you put the bit through the back end and screw it back on.
The coolest thing is that STEELCRAFT MFG CO was located in the "BRITISH GERMAN ZONE" (which I found on the shank when I got it home and cleaned up), created to aid in the reconstruction of the economy of occupied Germany after WWII.
See thumbnails.
