I try to spend a little time on the weekends attempting to clean up my father's workshop. Ultimately, I would like to be able to organize it for work that I might actually do. (Dad's been dead ten years. It's time.) I will never use the table saw or the jig saw. Probably won't use the lathe. And the three-foot tall drill press is just ridiculous.

But, before I can even figure out what to do about those things, I have to clear enough space around them to to get to them. Today, it was a box of old books. Very old catalogs from supply companies, by the look of them. The prize (in very bad shape) is a Sweets Architectural Digest from 1928! Didn't Dad ever throw anything away? That, and some Popular Mechanics magazines from the fifties. Yikes.

I also found three old car radios. What was he going to do with old car radios? It's no wonder it's taken me this long to get around to trying to clear out the workshop/garage/storage room.

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Not sure if their are flea markets in your area, but the ones here have several vendors that would love antique tools.

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LOL. I didn't think of them as antiques!

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sorry, too much association for me. I have all my dad's tools too, and among them are a bunch of antiques from his dad. I have been thinking about selling them too.

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have all my dad's tools too, and among them are a bunch of antiques from his dad. I have been thinking about selling them too.

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Not that some things out there aren't antiques. Thankfully, not the power tools. It's a little hard sometimes to separate the antiques out from the junk.

I know of a set of cast iron cobblers lasts, for example. Heaven only knows where Dad got those.

There's also a box full of rusty old hinges.

I also have two barrels of roofing nails to figure out what to do with. Yes, I said barrels. (I'd actually like to keep the barrels, without the nails.)

Somewhere out there (I know roughly where), there's an old Jewel-T coffee can of glass door knobs. I wouldn't mind switching out at least some of the unremarkable metal doorknobs and using the glass ones.

There are some old glass cabinet knobs and handles, too, that I'd like to use. But the orange bakelite handles don't really fit with any color scheme currently in use.

There's a little of everything out there. The problem is

• Finding it.
• Making room to easily access the equipment I will actually use.
  

Because, one of the things I'd really like to do is to get his lapidary equipment set up conveniently and start learning how to use that. He had a cabbing lap, a faceting lap, a trim saw, a slab saw, a tumbler, and a flexible shaft (sort of like a dremel where the motor part stays on the table and the grinding part is attached by a flexible shaft). There's probably fifty pounds of rough material out there, not counting the good faceting material that's in the safe. Heck, there's one large piece of garnet rough that I know for a fact he paid well over a hundred dollars for more almost thirty years ago. And then he never cut it. I've got pieces of rough that I bought that he never got around to cutting. Garnets, tourmalines. Now that could be fun.

I haven't heard that the deal has changed...I know of several stores that were operating on this principle, but I haven't been in one for three or four years.

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I read a story once about a guy who was one of the world's great collectors of antique sewing machines---only his heirs and the people who handled his estate didn't realize it. Before anybody else could get to his stuff, it was on the way to the dump.