"Just Me" notreal at nowhere dot com wrote in message
...

"Greg Postma" wrote in message
...
My Mother in law has been under the weather the past couple of weeks, so
SWMBO and I have been spending a lot of time with her in the hospital
and
her husband (at home). The FIL is starting to lose his faculties, so we
have to check up on him daily, make sure he gets enough nourishment and
generally make sure he takes his meds and bathes once in a while. I
often
sit with him and "relive" his past. This past weekend, he told me that
he
wants me to "get those dam tools outa the basement..."I'll never use
them
so please get them to a good home".....

I expected him to have a couple of "Wen" grade tools, bent screw drivers
and claw hammers with broken claws...SURPRISE

When we went down stairs, he took a couple of plastic sheets off of a
table that contained the "cutest" little lathe...a 1952 Craftsman 6",
with
3 and 4 jaw chucks, a dead center, a steady rest, a couple of mics, a
bunch of tooling, a couple of gear sets, pulleys, and a box of stock
(brass, "tool steel", rods and shafts, bushings, and aluminum....

If seems that he was a "Bowling Alley Mechanic" from WWII until he
retired
in the 70's and he bought the lathe to make bushings and shafts for the
pin setters he had to keep running. He made a lot of the parts because
he
couldn't see paying AMF or Brunswick 50 cents for a bushing he could
make
him self..... Over the past 25 years or so, it has been sitting in his
basement waiting for a new home. He hasn't run it since it left the
bowling alley, but it has been lubed. Each year when he changed the
batteries in the smoke detector, he went down to the basement and
slopped
oil on the ways, the gears and just about anything that got in his way.
Through the years, the oil has built up and dried out so that It is just
about like Cosmoline... Sticky and gooey. I cleaned the bed with "Brake
Kleen" and it is flawless. Like wise the chucks, steady rest,ect. The
tooling was wrapped in the rust resistant paper and all looked new.

As I was marveling over my good fortune, he dragged me over the the
other
side of the basement and uncovered a set of shelves with a great
collection of wooden hand planes, chisels and funny little tools that I
still have to figure out. It seems that my MIL's grand father was a
cabinet maker and these are his tools, and he inherited some of them
from
his father and grandfather (both cabinet makers). I haven't brought the
wood working tools home yet, but I expect them to have been cared for
just
like the lathe.

I feel like a kid in a candy store....

I know that I won't be "running with the big dogs", making the big chips
like many of you with big iron, but I does feel good to "get off the
porch" and be able to make little chips with my little lathe.

Greg Postma




Very cool! Depending on the model of the Sears lathe, you could have a
very
fine machine. Some of those old planes could be worth some money to
collectors!

And a right ******* he would be to sell them, too.

Fourth generation tools are not supposed to be sold just 'cause they are
worth some money.