Tenite

[rusty]

Looking for the hacksaw got me looking through the Millers Falls catalog.

1960 seems to have been the year for shiny clear plastic. you can almost build a shop out of pretty red Tenite handled tools. Conspicuously absent are wood planes tho....

Interesting, and confusingly, Pretty red handled screwdrivers come in 2 types, Tenite, and Permaloid, both red, and both indistinguishable from each other in a tiny catalog picture.

[stanley62]

Millers Falls also introduced the "Buck Rogers" type handles in 49 or 50 with what they call Tennessee Eastman Tenite #2.  They are more of an opaque bright red and guaranteed unbreakable (or so their ad says).

[rusty]

>Tennessee Eastman Tenite #2. 

Interesting, elsewhere it says Tenite was a development of Kodak (eastman). I suppose it makes sense, , the film folks were trying to find something better than celuloid for film...

[kxxr]

There are some red ones pictured here that for what ever reason did not appear in catalogs, according to the article.
http://oldtoolheaven.com/bench/buckr.htm

[Aunt Phil]

Tennessee Eastman was the chemical manufacturing division of Kodak.  Why it was set up in Tennessee nobody has ever been able to explain to me, and I've been around Dakers for 30 years now.  The greatest probability seems to be the abundant power available cheap from TVA, which could be had at a lower cost per KW than Kodak could make themselves in Rochester.

When Kodak Park was built George Eastman built his own power plant as a cost control measure, and later reached agreement to trade power with RG&E the PoCo since Kodak Park could schedule demand and profit by selling electricity.  Eastman despised utility companies and fought a 15 year battle with Rochester Telephone insisting it was his right to own and operate the phone system within his buildings.  Eastman eventually won in Court and became the base case many telephone equipment cases such as Carterphone -v- AT&T were decided upon.


Kodak film left celluloid behind in the 1920s, replaced by a film made by dissolving cowhides in huge cypress wood vats of caustic and then flowing the resulting compound onto 30 foot diameter cast iron wheels that were 4 feet wide.  One of the wheels remains as a monument to the Kodak machine shops on Ridge Rd.  The shops are just concrete slabs now thanks to the taxing policy of the City. 

Plastic primarily developed from Casine (milk) resins developed in WW-II to replace glass in aircraft.  Lucite when it became manufacturable was learned to have a unique light conducting property then known to no other material which led to Lucite tank periscopes which were more rugged than glass and didn't require precision grinding.  A lot of the work developing plastic lenses was done during the war years at Kodak's Lincoln and Hawkeye plants in Rochester.  Dakers who worked at either of those plants were firmly convinced they needed to worry about bombers dropping bombs on the building. 

Plastic remained a dirty word through the 50s and into the 60s because it was fragile, and industry was still learning to extrude plastic into usable parts that had some life and didn't wear.  Tennessee Eastman was a leaded in development.  Some of the earliest successful extrusion was done by Kordite Corp in Macedon NY where 500hp DC drives extruded soft plastic coating onto cotton clothes lines to make housewives happy.  Kordite was sold to Mobil in the 60s without the UV problem ever getting solved, and Mobil increased the size of the plant 30 fold to manufacture Baggies and poly film.  Mobil also developed the "Boil In" bag at Macedon.

Most if not all of the plastic on the 1960 Miller's Falls tools appears to have been machined to shape.  It pretty much would have had to be given that injection molding in 1960 was severely limited in terms of the size of object that could be molded.