This week, I picked up an ancient, decrepit box of rusty auger bits at an estate sale. The label inside refers to 1884 and 1887 patents by the Irwin Auger Company of Wilmington, Ohio, and it appears to be a fairly complete set, albeit in a wooden box which is pretty close to losing all mechanical coherence.

Why, you may ask, am I buying such a crazy thing? I ask myself the very same question. I guess part of it is that I just find old tools to be, well, very interesting as artifacts of what we would today call “Maker Culture”, but which would have simply referred to as “knowing how to do stuff” a century ago. For the modest investment of $10, I get to embark upon a journey not motivated by anything as mundane as “practicality” or “efficiency”, but I get to glimpse a world where wood didn’t come in the shape that you wanted to, and if you wanted to impose your ideas upon it to construct it, you do using tools which today seem quaint, but which used to be fairly common.

What am I going to do with them? Well, that’s a fine question. In the short term, I’ll probably test a couple of different ways to restore them by removing rust, sharpen them, and maybe even work on cleaning and restoring the box that they came in.

They are, after all, a pretty rusty mess. But other than that, the condition appears fairly good. I’ve been meaning to test two different techniques for rust removal that I’ve seen demonstrated in the my binge watching of restoration videos on YouTube: either using a chemical like Evaporust (actually, using Evaporust) or removing rust with electrolysis.

If I accomplish anything interesting using either, I’ll write it up here, of course.

I really owe all this insanity to Rex Krueger and his YouTube channel. This episode is what lead me to pay $1 for a brace at a garage sale a couple weeks ago, and to pick up this box this week.