A stroll through grandpa's workshop...

As I’ve previously discussed, my grandpa left me a lot of tools. He passed away over a decade ago, and I just recently had the chance to start taking inventory. I took an evening to drive out to visit my mom and rummage through the garage as I wanted to figure out whether or not grandpa had a router. I’ve been wanting to learn how to use one, but also haven’t felt like I needed to BUY one yet, and figured if there was already one there, I could at least start practicing with whatever he had until I could upgrade to something nicer.

I felt like I was going to have success nearly immediately, as one of the first drawers I opened had a couple of random router bits in it.  Unfortunately, aside from the router bits, there wasn’t anything else that looked router related, so I began to dig further.

I started rummaging through some old boxes–grandpa kept the boxes for most every tool he had, storing the tools with their original manuals in them. I discovered next a belt sander, which is pretty nice since one of the other tools I’ve been told I need is a belt sander. I pulled it out of the box–an old 4″ belt Craftsman–and plugged it in. The good news is, it fired right up. The bad news is, the rollers that the belt sits on are supposed to snap out and make the belt taut, but they don’t currently. It’s probably something that can be fixed, but I’m going to have to figure out how.

 

One of the next items I found was stashed in a drawer with a variety of old tape measures. It wasn’t a tool, but it was a piece of grandpa’s history. See, grandpa was a heavy equipment operator–he used to drive the machines with the blade in the middle, and as a result he was a member of the Operating Engineers local 701 union. In the drawer I found a bag of old Union buttons. My grandpa was proud of his union membership, so it didn’t surprise me that he still had the pins, but I did not expect to find the stashed in a drawer in his workbench.

 

 

I started to lose hope of discovering a router in the shop when I stumbled across this Dremel routing attachment–maybe grandpa didn’t have an actual router, maybe this was all he had. But this was just the accessory–I didn’t find a Dremel tool to go with it. I’m not even sure if this would work on a modern Dremel, but it was a cool find all the same.

 

 

I didn’t dig this one out, but I found grandpa had a 10″ Radial Arm saw from Powr-Kraft, an old Montgomery Ward brand. There was enough stuff stacked on it that I didn’t feel like pulling it out, and since I had the Subaru with me and not a truck, I wouldn’t have been able to take it with me anyway. Grandpa liked a lot of the power tools you’d get from department stores–lots of Sears Craftsman items in particular. Montgomery Ward hasn’t been a household name in some time, so it was neat to find it on some old tools.

 

 

This old Black & Decker No. 44 Sander was another cool find–currently, there aren’t a lot of tools that are solid metal, for the most part we’ve moved to plastic bodies in bright colors. This one is solid metal on the body–it’s about the size of most modern sanders, but it weighs a ton. The chromed out appearance gave it a nice vintage feel. They don’t make them like this anymore.

 

 

 

 

My grandpa also had this old Army Signal Corps TS-297/U multimeter. My grandfather never served, so I’m guessing it was either bought surplus or a relic of his days in the Community Conservation Corps. In either event, it looked to be possible World War II era, so it was a really interesting find.

 

 

 

Another thing that I found scattered throughout the shop was vintage packaging–grandpa would reuse anything he could, and a lot of it was old boxes from things like spark plugs, which used to come in metal packages. The mindset of his generation was generally to not throw things out if you could reuse them, and it is still apparent in reviewing his shop today. Even the collection of various nuts, bolts, and screws in baby food jars is still there today.

 

 

 

As I got a couple hours in, I’d pretty much given up hope of finding a router in grandpa’s collection of tools. It was getting dark, I still had an hour drive home, and aside from the bits, I had found no evidence of a router in the cabinets and boxes. My mom came out to check on me, and pointed to a silk flower arrangement she’d stored on the bench. “Did you check behind that?”

 

No, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t. Why would I check behind a floral arrangement on TOP of the bench, which could easily have been the most obvious location to look?

I moved the flowers, and there sat a metal box, Powr-Kraft on the label.

There it was–the proverbial holy grail that I had come seeking. It shows some signs of wear, but given the age of the tool, it’s actually in remarkably good condition.  In with the manual, stashed neatly in a plastic container, I found the original purchase receipt–grandpa bought the router on sale for $54.97 on February 17th, 1969. This router was purchased a good 14 years before I was born, and it still runs beautifully. And an assortment of bits sat in the bottom of the box, adding to the number of bits I found in the drawer. This wound up being a pretty good haul.
Loaded up with a few of the items I needed to supplement my current shop setup, I headed back home to add to the collection. Now in addition to my newer tools, I’ve got a few cherished pieces of my grandpa’s shop integrated into my collection, some experienced veterans that grandpa used before me.

Do you have any tools in your shop that have a special place because of who they belonged to, or because of a cherished memory associated with it? Leave a comment and share a little bit about it, I’d love to hear!