“This is a man’s version of buying shoes,” my auction buddy Janet observed as we watched the men wrangle over some antique wooden machinist tool chests at auction. Janet isn’t exactly the kind of woman who buys a lot of shoes, but she understands the allure of one of our favorite pastimes.
From what I could tell, no women seemed to be bidding on this lot. I had seen the chests during my walk-through at the auction house, and had noticed that they were dirty, battered and worn – but still appealing. They looked each to weigh a ton, all sitting on tables back against a wall in the auction house, almost in the shadows. The sparse light made them seem even darker and dingier.
These tool chests had obviously been put to good use by the workers who had owned them. There were only a handful, and I examined each of them. Pulling out the drawers – as I do with most items to see if anything is hidden away – I found them heavily stocked with an assortment of flat metal hand tools as ancient as the chests.
None of the tools looked familiar to me – I didn’t see any pliers or screwdrivers – and I later realized that I wasn’t sure what machinists’ tools were. I’d heard the term before, but I assumed they were the same kind of tools I use at home. I learned that they were not. A machinist used his/her tools to make other tools.
“A machinist is to metal as a woodcarver is to wood,” according to a wikipedia entry. The machinist used the tools to cut tools from metal. Tool and die makers are at the top of the list of skilled workers in a trade whose heyday was the years when manufacturing was king. The closing of manufacturing plants meant the demise of most of these workers and their industry.
That apparently is changing, as noted in a USA Today article earlier this year. Now, these workers are needed to make tools that others use in the manufacture of everything from car parts to cell phones.
The machinist tools at auction were obviously from a time when workers labored much more with their hands. Today, they work with automated tools that are a far cry from the lathes and calipers from decades ago. I wonder, though, if they even use tool chests anymore like the ones at auction.
With a little cleaning and polishing, these could find their luster again. I could imagine them being as lovely and functional as a jewelry chest. All were made of wood – oak, I presume – except for one that seemed to be covered in black leather. In my research, I learned that most of the antique ones were made of oak, with rarer ones made of cherry, walnut or mahogany.
Each chest had short and long drawers, and a flip-top opening, and the interiors lined with felt. The early ones were made with tin and felt-covered drawers. Wooden tools chests were sought after by machinists because the moisture-absorbing property of the wood kept tools from rusting or corroding, according to the website Antique Tool Chest.
They had a flat wooden pull-out cover that folded away beneath the drawers when the chest was in use. I didn’t realize this while viewing the ones at auction, but I assume that the covers were there.
I didn’t see any manufacturers’ names on any of the chests. Inside the cover of one was an imprint that likely had been left by a medallion with the maker’s name on it. By now, it was long gone.
Some could’ve been made by H. Gerstner & Sons, which appeared to be among the earliest and the premier tool-chest maker, starting out in 1906 in Dayton, OH. Harry Gerstner, a pattern-maker, spent a year designing and making a tool chest for himself. When a friend saw it, he asked Gerstner to make him one. Then coworkers wanted one, so Gerstner realized that he was on to something and opened his company, according to the company website.
Gerstner & Sons still makes tool chests, including some that it promotes as jewelry chests, along with actual jewelry chests. Its tool chests are among its most popular products, according to the company website.
One of its competitors was Union Tool Chest Co. of Rochester, NY, which made boxes for the federal government during World War I and II, and under the Craftman name for Sears, according to Antique Tool Chest.
At auction, bidding was not outrageously high on the chests, but it was steady. They sold for $80 to $230, with small tubs and boxes of tools selling for $20 to $60. I found tool chests selling on eBay for way past $500.
Maybe buying and selling them – which, I’m sure, is what most of the male bidders had in mind – was the way to go.
