I took Friday off to make it a four day weekend. Part of the reason was so that I could prep some wood for my woodworking class. I got twenty Douglas Fir 2x4s from Lowes, and cut them to 64″ in length. My idea for my woodworking class was to use their jointer to trim them up, then surface plane them to identical thickness and laminate them together to make a 2’x5′ workbench top. I got them all cut on my chop saw on Friday, and got them loaded into my car. I was hoping to get them all jointed and planed, but my general inexperience and a failure to double check the fence angle on the jointer meant that I only got the jointing complete in three hours. Still, it was a pretty good morning.

I took Carmen out to lunch, and then headed home. As I was driving along San Pablo, Carmen spotted a yard sale, and suggested we turn around and give it a peek. “I see tools!” Okay, I thought I’d give it a quick peek, even though I had no cash with me, and my SUV was already laden with the wood that I had cut for the class. I could always go back and get cash, I suppose.

I ended up going to an ATM and getting cash.

First of all, I picked up this Jet JWBS-14.

It got it for what I consider near “steal” pricing. It isn’t without its flaws. A brief inspection revealed that the table was oddly askew not just left to right, but front to back (the left rear corner was high) and the table was fairly loose and tightening the trunnion bolts along the bottom didn’t result in a lot of improvement. I ducked under, and detached the table, and flipped it over. I know jack-diddly about bandsaws, but even I could tell something was odd. The seller had mentioned that he had “repaired” the table, but I wasn’t all that concerned given the price. But the repair didn’t strike a lot of confidence in me. Apparently the two trunnions that sit under the table and allow the table to tilt left to right were replaced by these black pipe monstrosities:

Astute viewers will note that the left one has a single elongated hole, where the second one has two holes. My guess is the one on the right was made first, but the measurements were way off. But apparently he didn’t learn a lot making the first, because the second has the whole that is super wide, seemingly because it wasn’t drilled square in the first place. The welds and cuts are… well, they just aren’t very good. And nothing is deburred, it really just looks like a mess. I suspect that they aren’t very well centered or aligned, which probably introduces the front to back tip that would be difficult to sort out. It probably didn’t help that only four of the six holes were populated by screws, likely because the remaining two holes were not aligned with where they needed to be. It didn’t give me confidence that among the four screws there were three different types either. Luckily, these didn’t actually damage anything. I ended up ordering a pair of proper castings to replace these, and they should arrive in a couple of weeks for a modest cost of $40.

There are three other minor issues that I’ve found so far:

• There is a front knob/latching bolt for the top front door which is simply missing.
• The alignment pin on the table is missing.
• The stop bolt that sets the table at 90 degrees is simply missing.

But the belts and motor appear to be in good shape. It runs very quietly. The bed had some fairly ugly scratches and a modest amount of rust, but a little scrubbing with WD-40 and a green pad got rid of 75% of it in just a few minutes. When I am ready to install the trunnions, I’ll finish that up. The fence is pretty janky as well, but I could probably make some improvements on that. In all, I’m very pleased.

But the guy had some additional hardware that was also sufficiently antique to be interesting. I couldn’t resist, given my desire to restore rusty things lately. I found these four items fairly quickly:

Proceeding from left to right, I found a (probably not particularly old) No. 80 Stanley card scraper. It did not include the blade, but was otherwise in pretty excellent shape. It just needs a little cleaning and a replacement blade, and it should be able to return to service.

Next was a little Stanley No. 120 block plane. I doubt this one is very old, but I would guess it is not super modern anyway. I got a similar blockplane for $2 a couple of months ago, but this one has a more sophisticated blade tensioning adjustment, and is a heavier casting, which makes me believe it is of modest age. I’ll try to get it tuned up and ready to go sometime in the next few weeks.

Next was a nice little marking gauge. It has two pins on one side, and one on the other, and so can be used to either mark mortises or just cut simple marks from you reference edge. It’s made from a dark wood (rosewood?) and brass, and isn’t in flawless condition, but again, I paid only a small amount for it. I hope to get it sorted out and back in service after cleaning it, and polishing the brass a bit.

And of course the last was a genuine antique: a very rusty “breast drill brace.” As you can see, it dirty and has a fair amount of service rust, but the mechanism works. It’s pretty cool. The chuck is set for the square type of auger bits (like the antiques I restored previously) so it will be pretty neat to restore.

I was all set to leave, and I found one more item: an old “alligator wrench.”

These kinds of wrenches were apparently used in the railroad by steam fitters and the like who used them to yank on pipes. This is a No. 3, about 15″ long, and just seems like a cool old wrench to add to the collection. I think this will be the test subject for my new and improved 5 gallon electrolysis setup. There are a few markings on it which are hard to read, but which are pretty faint. I tried to get a rubbing of a symbol near the head, and found this:

Symbol of the Illuminati? Blue print for a flux capacitor? I have no idea. There are some other faint letters and numbers on the wrench in addition to the embossed No. 3, perhaps after cleaning it will be more apparent.

Carmen also helped me do some garage tidying and vacuuming. I installed a retractable 40ft extension cord which should help keep me from tripping over extension cords. It looks a lot nicer in the shop.

Totally psyched by the addition of the bandsaw. Hope you all had a good weekend too.