Gas, tires, oil.

This is the flyleaf from a 1940s copy of “Audel’s Machinist’s Handy Book”. Machine shop lore says that the lathe is the only tool that can reproduce itself. I think that’s a bit of a stretch though, it would have to be a particularly well outfitted lathe with a milling and grinding attachment.

In with the diecast cars mentioned a couple posts down, was this very strange toy.

Anyone have an idea what it is? The individual pieces aren’t to the same scale, but are made from the same plastic (and were tied together with string).


It seems that something is missing, but I have no idea how its supposed to work. The legs on the figure can move independently, but don’t seem to be spring loaded.

So my landlord decided to redo the roof last week, he tore off the shingles Thursday and Friday. Saturday morning, 4:30 am, we wake up to find water dripping out of the light fixture onto our bed. Of course, it was raining. One of the things this prompted me to do was clear off a shelf in a closet (to get to the attic). I found a box of Matchbox, Husky, Corgi and Tootsie toy die cast cars that I had bought at a yard sale a couple years ago. The guy wanted a dollar a piece, I paid $20 for all (48 pieces). I’ll post pic of some of the nice/rare ones soon. Here’s poorly lit shot of a few.

In the foreground is a studebaker film car, behind you can see 2 Monkees GTO wagons from the tv show as well as a “Man from U.N.C.L.E” and James Bond car (they have a missile launcher and ejection seat, respectively, with several missiles and ejectees).

We picked this up at a recent yardsale for $2:

I figured that even if the kids didn’t play with it, the hardware was worth that much (even one set of hinges will cost that at the hardware store).

Actually, my 3 year old played with it for about 2 hours straight on a long road trip. He gave it such a workout the the hinge pins fell out of a couple hinges. I’ll have to make new ones from some 3/32″ brazing rod.