Kinsler: All this stuff isn’t really mine

The tool chest is oak, and once had a fine finish. Its drawers are lined with green felt, the better to cushion the gleaming, precision measuring tools used by elite machinists, tool-and-die makers and “set-up men,” who build, align, and test machines for grinding automobile crankshafts or drilling out aircraft fuel nozzles. Inside its hinged lid is mounted a small mirror that you’d use to check if there was any grease on your face when you left the plant for the day.

Our friend Elise, in whose garage the chest rested for 20 years, tells me that it originally belonged to her father-in-law. Elise’s husband Ed chaired Ohio University’s physics department for years, and from the inscription “SHOP STAFF ONLY” on its lid I divined that in a second life the chest held special tools used at OU’s physics machine shop.

Now the tool chest is mine, and I seriously wonder if I can ever live up to its standards. I approach it gingerly, occasionally borrowing and then cleaning and carefully replacing one of its center-punches or micrometers, as is proper when borrowing a tool from someone else.

Our house and garage contain collections of tools and parts from several guys, guys (with the notable exception of David M. Kinsler) whom I’ve never met and who, like Ed, are now working on projects in Guy Heaven. If I had any sense of organization, I’d have long since broken these down such that all the bolts are in one place and all the wrenches are in another. But whether through laziness or superstition, I have not done this, and so what I have is a collection of other men’s collections, inherited or purchased over the years.

There is, for example, the big brown steel chest that sits on the garage floor. If I need something like a hinge or an L bracket, I can generally find one in there, thanking the fellow who collected it all when I do so. And there are two or three nut-and-bolt collections gathered by guys who probably got most of them from their own fathers, who inherited from their fathers. I believe that if I dig to the bottom of one or another of my bolt-filled Maxwell House coffee cans I may discover quarter-inch lock washers made of flint.

And these collections reside on a garage workbench built by Mr. Crook, who owned our house for decades and further bequeathed the baby-food jars filled with screws and faucet washers nailed to our basement rafters. That is another collection that I occasionally borrow from but feel compelled to leave undisturbed.

Although I’ve made no specific plans to do so it is likely that I too shall eventually go to my final reward, and all those tool and part collections shall go to theirs, whether at a flea market or some estate sale. And then some dreamy tinkerer like me, not yet born, will find just the part he needs somewhere among them.

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives in an old house in Lancaster with Natalie and the cats. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com. David M. Kinsler was born 100 years ago this month.