The Whole Garage Catalogue: A Cheap Little Spanner

Sunday, December 9, 2012

A Cheap Little Spanner

The small end at the left is 10mm. The end at the right appears to have been filed for some particular application -- it's sort of 1/2", but the jaws aren't parallel. I'll see if can improve that end, and clean this thing up. Maybe I'll even give it a paint job, just for the heck of it.

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Here it is all fixed up.

I had a little bit of dark blue spray paint left, so I used that. It's actually not a bad colour for a tool. I drilled a hole through it so it can hang on a nail with a few other small spanners. (Also, the hole was needed as a place where I could 'screw' the thing onto the very first thread of a long wood screw, so I'd have a means of holding it for spray painting. That accounts for the slight flaw in the paint job right at the hole.)

I squeezed the large end in the vise to correct the parallelism of the jaws. That turned the large end into a slightly oversize 12mm spanner.

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Introduction

This blog is in honour of my deceased father, Nick Gaspick.

It sprang from what had started out as merely a post on my workshop blog, Rouge River Workshop. Here's my introduction to that post:

"My son has been clearing out my deceased father's garage, so he'll have a place to restore an old car, and he's been finding all manner of stuff. I've begun one post about an old woodworking vise that I mean to restore. This weekend, my son brought me four toolboxes full of items. As a small honour to my father, I'll 'catalogue' them in this post, in no particular order, little-by-little as I go through the boxes."

The nature of the post was for it to grow ever longer, and that can be dangerous. Blogger has some quirks that I've experienced in the past, and I was getting tired of always backing up the entire post so I wouldn't lose it should Blogger vapourize an editing session. I finally decided to make a full-blown blog with an index out of the post. Here it is.

I'll leave the original post as it is, where it is, but I'll bring over all the items in it so far as individual, indexed posts here as well. Needless to say, new material will only appear here.

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A Little About My Father:

My father emigrated to Canada with his family from Croatia at about the age of seven. His family took on a homestead up Sudbury, Ontario way, and made a living there through the great depression.

My father loved school, and yearned to continue his schooling past grade eight, but that was not on. He had to leave school to make a living -- trapping, mining, whatever. Eventually, he and his made their way to Toronto -- the big smoke in Canada.

My father was built like a brick shit-house; he was a sturdy guy, unlike scrawny me. My father was a guy who could clear an acre of Canadian bush before breakfast, have it tilled and planted before lunchtime, with the plants sprouting before dinnertime.

Jesus H. Christ!-- a guy like my father ought to have lived forever!