Minor Tool Gloat
 

I visited a nearby reamer manufacturer today which has closed its
doors after 90 years.

The main gloat is that I bought a 3 MT male, 3 MT female gage and a
2 MT female gage for $15 each. Not theft, but a good price. My
guess is that gages like that would probably go for well north of
$100. They will make setups easier on my lathe and tool & cutter
grinder.

Brand new 3 MT finishing reamer for $35 and a barely used 3 MT
roughing reamer for $5. I could have had fistfuls of Jarno taper
reamers for near salvage prices, but I didn't think anybody much uses
Jarno tapers, so I left those in the bin.

I had a nice 3 hour talk with one of the two brothers who own the shop
while poking around in dark corners for treasures. Rather than having
an auction, they're selling the stuff off piecemeal to the locals.

The Swedish Sajo universal mills he's selling look pretty nice, but I
suspect that because they're horizontals and because of their size,
they just won't sell unless he connects with the right buyer. If
there were still manufacturers like him around there would be a market
for them, but as we know.....

I don't know if it was because today was the 9th anniversary of 9/11,
but he mentioned that their business died right after the original
9/11. People stopped buying and their manufacturing customers stopped
buying his reamers. (Sold through McMaster Carr.) It just never
picked up after that. They had up to 65 or 70 workers there in the
70s, but it was down to the two owners and their sons just filling
orders as they came in.

RWL