I am staggered by the amount of bureaucratic work it must have taken to put that publication together. It's hard to believe that it was all necessary just to purchase wrenches.
Dad was in Procurement in the Navy during World War II (part of the time; he did other stuff, too, including serving as a beachmaster during the Iwo Jima landing). For some reason, when he finished his service, he held onto a book on uniform standards during the war, which I stumbled across as a teenager. Fascinatingly strange reading: here we were, fighting on two fronts against two enemies and in two different environments - Europe/Africa being mainly a land war, the Pacific Theater being mainly a war of the Navy and Marines - and some set of bureaucrats have the time to compile a book on uniform standards, going into the date on which the thread count for combat and dress uniforms altered from XX count to YY count? And not just an informally compiled booklet; it was bound into a regular paperback book.
I suspect it was one more step on my path to political awareness, in its own odd way.
It kind of makes sense, thinking back about it now: companies need to know the standards for the contracts they're satisfying, and the procurement operations need to know what quality they're auditing for when they examine shipments. But it still feels nuts.
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Back to the original topic: intriguing book. I could spend more time than I have to spare on the pages around page 300, above and below, where the torque wrenches are listed. I didn't realize how many different kinds of torque wrenches exist(ed), and I also didn't realize that the click-stop type, with the micrometer-type adjustment done by turning the end of the handle dated back to the 1970s. I sure didn't see them showing up in the consumer catalogs until later (although I may have skipped over them, not having the money at the time to buy anything that expensive, and relying on beam-type wrenches for many a year).
