That fits my dad to a T, he always had some doohickey, thingamajig, gadget either in his workshop in the basement or out in the garage to fix anything.
9
Even if I had that, I wouldn’t be able to find it.
26
Machinist here. We literally had four 4 by 4 by 6 chunks of aluminum supporting the foot of our bed for about 4 years. You couldn’t see them. The wife discovered them when we moved into our current house. Then she forced me to fix the damn thing right. I kind of miss the aluminum.
22
I can neither confirm nor deny…
6
My uncle had a wine cellar built under an old oak tree (dry county), and when he passed on, my cousins didn’t know what to do with all his homemade wine. The bottles sat there for decades, when they discovered the old wine was great to use as a bug bite antiseptic!
10
I think I still have roof rack clamps for the car that I sold to buy the car that I traded in for the car I have now for which I have a roof rack that I’ve never got around to installing.
Oh, yeah, does anybody need an 8-track cleaner cartridge? If I still have it it would be under the cassette drive cleaning kit.
10
I can relate to having scrap lumber piled up and never used or disposed of creating a heaping mess you’d have to walk across to get to some tool or the drawers in the workshop with all the orphaned nuts, bolts, nails, pipe sections that were all in heaps and a mess to find anything useful. The worst part is if the scrap lumber was a recycle and still had nails sticking up waiting to go through your foot if you forgot to step cautiously.
I wish I could have been there when they finally bulldozed that old workshop and burned the remains. Good riddance to old junk.
Now we just haul the scrap pressurized treated lumber and plastic composite remnants out to the old dump on the back portion of the property where it can weather gradually until there might possibly be a need for it or perhaps someone will just burn those piles to someday. I probably won’t be around to see that either.
6
Just organized my garage by straightening out shelves and put all the things I could do without in a pile on the floor.
Then I put the majority back into the space I cleared on the shelves and threw a small box of stuff out.
11
Anybody who owns a welder has even more junk.
7
My problem isn’t having the suddenly required treasure that I saved for 60+ years it’s that I finally threw it away last week.
15
I had one, but loaned it out, to someone,can’t remember who????
7
Bad Brad… ya didn’t save the pieces?
4
I have the proverbial box full of cables, chargers, power supplies (and other assorted detritus) for TVs, computers, and phones. Not enough yet for a trip the copper scrapyard, but maybe someday soon.
4
Hey, I’ve spent most my life saving and salvaging all this shit, I mean stuff.
I assure you, I have some items you’ll never find in any store.
7
Walter
Brought them back to work. I think I spotted one of them floating around in the rem section. The rest we made parts out of.
2
I still have spare parts for my first truck- a 1956 Chevy panel.
Sold it in 1980; but you never know…
7
I have been referred to as the Jack First of the Pacific Northwest.
I call it my bag of tricks when I can locate the part and as my shit that might come in handy someday pile when I cannot.
More often than not it’s someone else who needs the part than I do.
6
@ Tom Dually THURSDAY, 27 MARCH 2025, 19:05 AT 7:05 PM
I finally got rid of my Mach 1 parts a few years ago. I had a few NOS original Ford pop open gas caps. Made a mint off those.
I had a half gallon of mercury (HG) in the bottom of a safe at mom’s house. The scrap dealer paid me handsomely for that. I used to use quite a bit of it, since I hadn’t used any in twenty years I figured a few ounces was a lifetime supply ant that point and divested of it.
5
The problem is that when you finally throw it out a week later you need it.
8
Hah! 20 + years? Amateur. I’ve got stuff from when I was a kid back in the 60’s. My day will come, it’ll come.
4
I even have a 21½ mm swivel socket for the crown nut on a 1923 Hupmobile four barrel, fuel injected, side draft carburetor.
Although, I’m not sure I can find it right now.
6
@JD – What year?
I have a 69 Mach 1 351W. Got anything left that might fit?
4
The women’s equivalent of this is makeup that we try and think it doesn’t work for us, but we throw it in the drawer for “just in case”.
We also do it with clothes.
We will have entire wardrobes of two sizes on either side of the size we currently wear. Just in case.
And we are just as reluctant as the guys when it comes to getting rid of the stuff.
A commonly accepted measure of a woman’s craziness is the number of cats she owns. But how many jars of old, rusty bolts and screws does a man need to have in order to meet that criterion?
6
In the 1970’s I worked at a hardware store. I swept the floors every evening after school. When I passed the loose hardware drawers I would always sweep up screws, nuts, washers, etc with the broom that customers had dropped while searching for the one they needed. It was a waste of time to try to put them back so I would put them in my pocket and take them home. I have a huge plastic pail full of that hardware that probably weighs 10 pounds. To this day, almost 50 years later, I still reach into that pail occasionally and find the screw, nut or washer I need.
4
Jethro
Bro you need to visit my shop. 38 plus years of machining aerospace parts. Including hardware instillation. Standard protocol is order plus 10%. We have racks and racks of MS hardware. We gave up tracking it all about a year ago. That might be my retirement. LOL
2
@Uncle Al…
I bought a new jeep wrangler in 2018, and one of the selling points was old-school rain gutters on the roof. I went on Craigslist, and lo and behold, somebody had two pair of really classic rain gutter roof rack mounts. They were attached to pieces of wood with ugly orange carpet strips, but they were exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the seller never responded.
I called my dad, who lives two hours away in another state and asked him if he had the ones we used when I was a kid. He’d gotten rid of them twenty years ago when he moved, so I asked him to BOLO for some around his area, seeing as he haunts the thrift shops every week.
A month later, I went to visit him, and when I got there, he told me he had found some roof racks at a thrift shop. There on his shop bench were the same racks I’d seen on Craigslist, complete with the ugly orange carpet. I have hauled canoes, kayaks, sailboat masts, ladders, drywall and plywood on those things that were new when Kennedy was President.
If a dad doesn’t have it right at hand, he knows how to reach out into the void and find it, without the danged internet, thank you.
4
Mr Kakalogical has a stash of various items, some found on our daily walks, some left over from any number of projects, and some that just magically appeared.
We have these “no way” moments regularly.
These stashes come in handy when you live in a 115 year old house.
2
When my long-deceased dad worked in aerospace, he obtained a BUNCH of rejected titanium screws. He had to sign paperwork promising not to use them in critical applications. This was back in the 1960’s. He never used them for anything. When he passed I inherited them. Thousands of them. When I die, my son will probably inherit them. Every once in a while I find a use for a couple of them.
That fits my dad to a T, he always had some doohickey, thingamajig, gadget either in his workshop in the basement or out in the garage to fix anything.
Even if I had that, I wouldn’t be able to find it.
Machinist here. We literally had four 4 by 4 by 6 chunks of aluminum supporting the foot of our bed for about 4 years. You couldn’t see them. The wife discovered them when we moved into our current house. Then she forced me to fix the damn thing right. I kind of miss the aluminum.
I can neither confirm nor deny…
My uncle had a wine cellar built under an old oak tree (dry county), and when he passed on, my cousins didn’t know what to do with all his homemade wine. The bottles sat there for decades, when they discovered the old wine was great to use as a bug bite antiseptic!
I think I still have roof rack clamps for the car that I sold to buy the car that I traded in for the car I have now for which I have a roof rack that I’ve never got around to installing.
Oh, yeah, does anybody need an 8-track cleaner cartridge? If I still have it it would be under the cassette drive cleaning kit.
I can relate to having scrap lumber piled up and never used or disposed of creating a heaping mess you’d have to walk across to get to some tool or the drawers in the workshop with all the orphaned nuts, bolts, nails, pipe sections that were all in heaps and a mess to find anything useful. The worst part is if the scrap lumber was a recycle and still had nails sticking up waiting to go through your foot if you forgot to step cautiously.
I wish I could have been there when they finally bulldozed that old workshop and burned the remains. Good riddance to old junk.
Now we just haul the scrap pressurized treated lumber and plastic composite remnants out to the old dump on the back portion of the property where it can weather gradually until there might possibly be a need for it or perhaps someone will just burn those piles to someday. I probably won’t be around to see that either.
Just organized my garage by straightening out shelves and put all the things I could do without in a pile on the floor.
Then I put the majority back into the space I cleared on the shelves and threw a small box of stuff out.
Anybody who owns a welder has even more junk.
My problem isn’t having the suddenly required treasure that I saved for 60+ years it’s that I finally threw it away last week.
I had one, but loaned it out, to someone,can’t remember who????
Bad Brad… ya didn’t save the pieces?
I have the proverbial box full of cables, chargers, power supplies (and other assorted detritus) for TVs, computers, and phones. Not enough yet for a trip the copper scrapyard, but maybe someday soon.
Hey, I’ve spent most my life saving and salvaging all this shit, I mean stuff.
I assure you, I have some items you’ll never find in any store.
Walter
Brought them back to work. I think I spotted one of them floating around in the rem section. The rest we made parts out of.
I still have spare parts for my first truck- a 1956 Chevy panel.
Sold it in 1980; but you never know…
I have been referred to as the Jack First of the Pacific Northwest.
I call it my bag of tricks when I can locate the part and as my shit that might come in handy someday pile when I cannot.
More often than not it’s someone else who needs the part than I do.
@ Tom Dually THURSDAY, 27 MARCH 2025, 19:05 AT 7:05 PM
I finally got rid of my Mach 1 parts a few years ago. I had a few NOS original Ford pop open gas caps. Made a mint off those.
I had a half gallon of mercury (HG) in the bottom of a safe at mom’s house. The scrap dealer paid me handsomely for that. I used to use quite a bit of it, since I hadn’t used any in twenty years I figured a few ounces was a lifetime supply ant that point and divested of it.
The problem is that when you finally throw it out a week later you need it.
Hah! 20 + years? Amateur. I’ve got stuff from when I was a kid back in the 60’s. My day will come, it’ll come.
I even have a 21½ mm swivel socket for the crown nut on a 1923 Hupmobile four barrel, fuel injected, side draft carburetor.
Although, I’m not sure I can find it right now.
@JD – What year?
I have a 69 Mach 1 351W. Got anything left that might fit?
The women’s equivalent of this is makeup that we try and think it doesn’t work for us, but we throw it in the drawer for “just in case”.
We also do it with clothes.
We will have entire wardrobes of two sizes on either side of the size we currently wear. Just in case.
And we are just as reluctant as the guys when it comes to getting rid of the stuff.
A man’s junk follows the ideal gas law – it will always expand to fill the space provided.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir64EcRkf5Q
.
A commonly accepted measure of a woman’s craziness is the number of cats she owns. But how many jars of old, rusty bolts and screws does a man need to have in order to meet that criterion?
In the 1970’s I worked at a hardware store. I swept the floors every evening after school. When I passed the loose hardware drawers I would always sweep up screws, nuts, washers, etc with the broom that customers had dropped while searching for the one they needed. It was a waste of time to try to put them back so I would put them in my pocket and take them home. I have a huge plastic pail full of that hardware that probably weighs 10 pounds. To this day, almost 50 years later, I still reach into that pail occasionally and find the screw, nut or washer I need.
Jethro
Bro you need to visit my shop. 38 plus years of machining aerospace parts. Including hardware instillation. Standard protocol is order plus 10%. We have racks and racks of MS hardware. We gave up tracking it all about a year ago. That might be my retirement. LOL
@Uncle Al…
I bought a new jeep wrangler in 2018, and one of the selling points was old-school rain gutters on the roof. I went on Craigslist, and lo and behold, somebody had two pair of really classic rain gutter roof rack mounts. They were attached to pieces of wood with ugly orange carpet strips, but they were exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the seller never responded.
I called my dad, who lives two hours away in another state and asked him if he had the ones we used when I was a kid. He’d gotten rid of them twenty years ago when he moved, so I asked him to BOLO for some around his area, seeing as he haunts the thrift shops every week.
A month later, I went to visit him, and when I got there, he told me he had found some roof racks at a thrift shop. There on his shop bench were the same racks I’d seen on Craigslist, complete with the ugly orange carpet. I have hauled canoes, kayaks, sailboat masts, ladders, drywall and plywood on those things that were new when Kennedy was President.
If a dad doesn’t have it right at hand, he knows how to reach out into the void and find it, without the danged internet, thank you.
Mr Kakalogical has a stash of various items, some found on our daily walks, some left over from any number of projects, and some that just magically appeared.
We have these “no way” moments regularly.
These stashes come in handy when you live in a 115 year old house.
When my long-deceased dad worked in aerospace, he obtained a BUNCH of rejected titanium screws. He had to sign paperwork promising not to use them in critical applications. This was back in the 1960’s. He never used them for anything. When he passed I inherited them. Thousands of them. When I die, my son will probably inherit them. Every once in a while I find a use for a couple of them.