These are the items that caught my eye amongst the (few) items that arrived as
donations this week. (As you'll see, I'm not picky.) (1) A Miller wire stripper, utterly
mundane except that its maker has disappeared: K. Miller T. & M. Co. Springfield Mass.
(2) A pair of well made pliers "A.F. & Co. FRANCE". (3) Another mundane item, an offset
screwdriver marked "BMC Mfg Co Binghamton NY", a company that apparently started out
as a car dealership ("Botnick Motor Corp") and ended up making wheeled toys, but
in between made a visegrip-type plier and offset screwdrivers. (4) A rethreading tool
marked Lyndee 3 / Seidel Co / Berkeley Calif / US Pat 1382841 (pat. 1921). (5) A small
Goodell-Pratt chuck which I thought at first was a 4-jaw pin vise but is more properly a
2-jaw chuck (with each jaw split) designed to hold the proprietary flanged bits that
came with G-P push drills (?). And (6) a nice "bell punch" for marking the center of round
stock. I'll probably set the chuck aside, since it's pretty useless alone; buy the bell punch
myself; and put everything else up for sale at next week's thrift sale. ... But does anyone
know anything about the French pliers?
