Watch your fingers, those belts will whip em off like pulling a cigarette out of a box
A Chevy pickup pulled into the drive and a burly Latino about forty stepped out with a shaven head and tattoos down his arms. His granddaughter dozed in the passenger seat as we looked the tools over, plugged them in, verified they worked. Sort of worked. Worked good enough. We took the big motor off so we could lift the table, put them in, he handed me cash, drove away. I gave the money to my wife. She made a sad face, and thanked me for following through.
They were old. I advertised them as “Vintage woodworking power tools” and I wasn’t kidding. The table saw and jointer dated from 1950, the sander and scroll saw not a lot newer. My father-in-law’s father was a woodworker, a carpenter, worked at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard back when "Hunter's Point" didn't mean blighted projects and random killings. Did his own work too and kept power tools in the basement of his house in South San Francisco. He died in the early 1960s and the tools followed my father-in-law around from place to place. He died in the early 2000s and the tools wound up in my garage. They took up a lot of space. Now they don’t.
But they were family, and now they are somewhere else, and the handmade tables are probably in splinters by now. Hey, can’t hold on to everything forever. Yeah, I know.
TUFKAS would've given his left arm to have those, to add them to his dragon mound.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you can't hold on to everything. My father machined his own parts for everything from his house to cameras on a machinist's lathe; we sold the lathe as part of the estate sale, along with a drill press and a hundred other things that he used to great effect and the constant amazement of family, peers, and profession. It's just stuff now, without the animating spirit to make use of it. I wish the buyers well.
ReplyDeleteif you dont use them... best that they move on to someone who will. at least some people still like to do their own work and make something quality. i have some basic tools from my grampa (hammer, saw, branch loppers, screw drivers) all wooden handles, all will last far beyond me and i love them.
ReplyDeleteActually I was gonna use em, especially the table saw, but when that thing cranks up it's like standing in the engine room of the Titanic, belts reaching out for errant shirt tails, whining and grinding like a crashing airplane, and anyway the bearing was old and the blade wobbled out of line and I couldn't be bothered to repair and restore the old thing. Turns out though there are people who do:
ReplyDeleteOld Wood-working Machines
Old Woodworking Tools & Machines
& cetera