Care

Much of our equipment is older than my Grandfather and has been in constant use since it’s manufacture sometime in the foggy past.

Our hammers have been held by people we’ve never known and our machines have travelled from the industrial age to modernity and noticed nothing.

They are my inheritance which I consider valuable as silver and I love them as oldest friends.

They are all hand made by men long dead for jobs that nearly died with them.  

One tool that I remember having prominence in our old forge was my father’s leg-vice.  This was reluctantly placed in a corner and half-forgotten a few years back as the decades had worn the thread making it impossible to tighten past one inch.

This week I took the time to repair the tool by adding new faces to the vice allowing the new “closed” to still have bite on the thread.

 

The new bits were fabricated from brass and mild steel and will be fixed to the old vice sensitively, allowing them to be removed if need be. It would be simpler to arc weld them on, but it would also be a shame.