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