What is it with this broken handle?  Can you fix it? If not, put up a picture
and I'll look at it. Maybe I can fix it.


> On Dec 10, 2014, at 2:21 PM, Thomas Conroy  wrote:
> 
> O Galoots:
> We went fleaBAGging last Sunday, a quiet day for what has been a quiet year.
The day was predicted clear, but sandwiched between a week of rain beforehand
and a predicted week of rain after, which cut down the crowds but also,
apparently, the tool sellers. At the start of the day, 6AM,  the headlamps were
out as always but seemed almost unnecessary, things were light enough to see
where you were going though not quite enough for details on the tables; it
turned out that there was low cloud cover and the city lights were reflected
down from it. As the sun came up there was a shimmery pearly-grey bowl overhead,
not close enough to seem confining but close enough to hide the Oakland Hills to
the east and San Francisco to the west, close enough to conceal the line between
sky and earth. The only indication of distance was the banthas at rest on the
other side of the Oakland Estuary (container-loading cranes, Jeff). The sunrise
was pink and blue pastel cotton candy, just little diffused streaks through a
quarter of the sky. It was comfortably warm all day.
> This is a pretty self-centered report. The day was slow for everyone, more
comfortable conversation in groups of two or three during a good walk, and not
much rust on show. Not many big exciting finds, and I don't remember most of
what turned up on Kirk's tailgate at the end; but my finds, few in number but in
good condition and more costly than I usually allow, raise some questions.
Including some questions about the security of the universe: I went wanting to
get an adjustable-mouthed spokeshave and a cigar shave, and I brought them home.
Usually, knowing what tool you want to get is a guarantee that you won't find
it. I'm worried that paired socks will start to pour out of the dryer, and then
everything will implode back into a black hole.
> 
> I started by getting a delicate little 6 mm. Swedish chisel while it was still
dark, at $5 more than I usually pay for a chisel but I wanted to encourage the
Old Tool Gods. Didn't work. There were fewer tools and fewer tool sellers than I
have ever seen. As usual we went to the back and worked forward through about
forty or fifty rows, and until about four from the front I had found only the
chisel and a couple of little screwdrivers, the kind with pocket clips on them,
to regrind into bradawls. I overpaid for them, seventy-five cents each, but it
didn't worry me. I was comforting myself with the notion that at least I would
be taking home most of the cash I came with (call no man happy until he is dead)
when the gods started jerking me around.
> First I found a pair of 13" (8" cut) Wiss editor's shears (turns out the right
name is "bankers' and paperhangers' shears"). Twenty bucks was way more than I
ever pay for scissors, but they are longer than any I have and I was desperate
for something to take home. Turns out that the mark on them was apparently used
from a few years after 1895 until a few before 1915; this is from catalogs in a
great site maintained by a descendent, not from the original (corporate-
swallowed) company:
> http://jwissandsons.com/ 
> 
> Almost immediately after that I found one of the things on my want list: a #
54 spokeshave, the yoke-adjustable-mouth with straight handles. In fact, it was
much better than that: it was a #54 body without a blade, and in what I
recognized as a early type because it is almost identical to the one I already
had with the right handle missing. I asked and she said $15, and I tried not to
reach for my wallet with suspicious speed. The thing I love about the #53-#54 is
that it isn't just adjustable-mouthed. Both the mouth and the protrusion are
altered by turning the same screw, and once they are set in harmony with each
other, they stay in harmony as you move the screw. Now I felt I had money to
burn, since one of my wants had fallen cheaply into my bag. Around the corner
and at the start of the next row there was one of the reliable tool sellers,
notable for good users that haven't been overcleaned, at prices that are on the
low side of fair. He didn't have anything that grabbed me but I chatted a bit
and showed him my Find. He said "You know how old that is, don't you?" and when
I waffled about pre-WWI and maybe 1880s he said "early 1870s." I had overlooked
the words on the bottom side of the handle: "Bailey's Pat. July 13, 1858."
> 
> Tom Lamond's spokeshave book is awe-inspiring, but it is also frustrating in
many ways. He has a typology of the Bailey #3 / Stanley #53, and it is
reasonable to assume that the #54 types are pretty much identical. What I have
is one of the subtypes of Type 7. The type spans the last two years of Leonard
Bailey's manufacture (1872-73) and the first twenty-five of Stanley's (1873-98).
In Lamond's typology the 7 was made by Bailey and the 7.1 by Stanley, with the
only distinction being the blades (one marked by Bailey, the other two by
Stanley). You can't tell which is which from the body alone. The irritating part
is that he tells when the patent marking on the body was first used (1864, on
the type 4) but not when it went out of use. And it would appear that some Type
7.1 shaves have the marking and others don't. When did the marking go out of
use? I think it is a reasonable assumption that it was used until the patent ran
out in (probably) 1879. [Sidebar: until1861, patents were for 14 years with a
renewal of 7 years possible "in certain circumstances." The 17-year patent came
into use in 1861. So depending on "circumstances" and on details about
grandfathering, Bailey's patent may have run out in 1872, in 1878, or in 1879.]
How did Lamond miss the end of the patent date on the body? It certainly
deserves a note in the typology, considering how much space he gives to mark
variants on the blade. In any case, when I got home and checked my broken-
handled #54 (without patent date) I found it had the blade Lamond considers the
earlier of the Stanley Type 7.1 blades, already sharpened; so I switched it in
and have a correct early Type 7.1 as my go-to user spokeshave. Didn't even have
to clean the sucker.
> 
> I thought that the dealer's generosity with information deserved some
response, so I looked around for something to buy. Found a bevel-edged socket
Witherby, a little over 1/2" and with 6" of blade, that more or less fits a hole
in my good set (I need a 9/16", but both my 1/2" and my 5/8" are a bit scant and
this fits well enough). It was marked $20, more than I would have paid except
for the gratitude, but as I held it out to him he said "Eight dollars." Then he
noticed it was a Witherby and already priced. We did a little dance, possibly a
tribal or regional ceremony alien to those of you resident in the harsh-wintered
East. As I gritted my teeth and forced out "Twenty is fine," he gulped and said
"Oh, well, I said eight." I said "Lets split the difference," and when we worked
the arithmetic in our heads I came out with 16 and he came up with 12. Still
don't understand how that happened. I handed him a twenty and he gave me back a
five and we left it at that. It wasn't until  I got it home that I noticed that
some hellbegotten previous user had consistently sharpened the last inch of the
blade, not the entire back, leaving it bowed by about 1/32", which is  a lot
more than it seems when trying to true up a 6" chisel by hand. If you want a
short chisel, why not use a short chisel instead of ruining long ones? Apart
from that, and a bit of mushrooming to the socket, it is in nice shape, and I
look forward to being able to use it in (on past experience) about two years.
> That spokeshave went to my head. Since I had bought it for so much less than I
expected, I felt justified in paying more than my usual bottom-feeder's prices
for, well, everything that caught my eye. Or at least it felt like that, though
I was in fact nearly done. But we went back to the far end of the flea, as
usual, to check the sellers who weren't there at 6AM (most of them), and I ended
up with a nice Atkins saw that I will post some separate questions on, paying
three times as much as I ever have for a saw that wasn't new ($15). Saw a 1"
Buck Cast Steel tang chisel sharpened down to 2" long that I though might go
into a set of Bucks I am trying to assemble---- except that the set has 4"
blades and isn't beveled, and I have a 1-1/4" B.E.tang Buck that I put into a
walnut pear-shaped palm handle that is as near as bedammit to the new chisel,
and now I am trying to assemble two sets of Bucks, not one. Ah, well, it all
makes work for the working man to do.
> https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=zyeMFSzPgGc
> 
> Then, like Danglars in "The Count of Monte Cristo," captive in the cave of the
Roman bandits, when he had spent an enormous fortune to prevent starving to
death and had just 50,000 francs left, I contemplated what I had spent and what
remained. I had flattered myself a couple of rows before in being able to go
home with most of my cash intact, and now I found that it had shriveled to a
mere thirty bucks. This I would hold on to. This I would hold on to. And I did,
until we got back to Kirk's truck and had taken the usual tailgate pictures. And
then Kirk, that paragon of generosity, said "Did you find a cigar shave? If not,
I have a kit; how much would you like to pay for it?" The "kit" was a shave he
had disassembled to fix a crack in the handled; he had fixed the crack and
sharpened it, simply hadn't gotten around to reassembling it. If I had any grace
or style I would have given him every cent I had left, which would still have
been about a third of what it was worth, but I was still channeling Danglars and
I kept back ten bucks. Went home with money in my pocket. It'll serve me right
if I end up in a cave paying 500,000 francs for a whole roast chicken.
> 
> At the tailgate, everybody had a bit to show for the day, mostly in pretty
good condition and not too spectacular. Michael showed Kirk how to sharpen a
scythe, but I'm not sure it was that day's acquisition. Neither Michael nor Bill
bought the post vises and anvils they had been looking at. There was the usual
exchange of promised trade goods. I got home happy, far more exhausted than a
little seven-hour walk justified but with a small number of tools I wanted in
good condition. I put together my shaves and tried them out. They are both
sweet. I put them away and took a nap.
> 
> Tom ConroyAnd I won't apologize for the over-use of the letter "I" in this
report. You were warned.
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