Some years ago, after I moved into my own house, the house across the street was purchased by an elderly couple. Immediately, a ramp was built to the entrance for wheelchair access. The man who lived there was not very mobile. Not long after they moved in, however, ambulances were at the door and took him away. I had never talked with him or even seen much of him.

The house sold earlier this year.

So, one morning last week, I happened to look out and see that the new owners of the house had moved some large items to the end of the driveway, presumably to be discarded. That’s what people do here: anything big they don’t want, like a dresser or washing machine, they leave at the end of their driveway and it disappears fairly quickly. You know, one person’s trash…

Anyway, I recognized right away what this stuff was. So, I went over and took a look. There was, most strikingly, a cast-iron tablesaw top, minus the motor, but with a decent blade. There was also a rolling metal cabinet and a strange-looking rolling chest made of wood.

I decided to rescue the tablesaw-top. It is nothing special, but I think I can do something with it, even if only to redrill the side extensions and add them to my own saw. So, I brought that over to my own driveway.

The rolling metal cabinet did not interest me. The wooden chest did, though, so I went back to take a look in it. Once I opened it, I realized what it was. This was the jobsite toolbox of a carpenter. It had two doors with storage in them and a drawer on the bottom that was swelled shut. Inside were a number of items, including a tell-tale-blue hard hat (all the old carpenters wear blue hard hats on jobsites).

I didn’t particularly like how rusted everything was. I have no idea what storage conditions were for this stuff, but wherever they were, they were wet at least some of the time. I think perhaps the old man had put them into a shed when they moved in, since they were obviously his. So, I didn’t exactly want to take them, but I felt like I had to take them.

Why? In part because this actually looked like my own stuff, if I was more of a masochist and made tool chests that were 60 pounds when empty to drag around to jobsites. Everything in there looked like stuff I have in various containers in a similar state of disarray, perhaps not as rusty, but just as used.

Also, partly because of the state of my father’s workshop after his death. But, to tell the truth, he couldn’t even come close to caring about how anything was stored. I’m not sure there was ever anyone who cared less about tools (or things, for that matter) than him, in spite of his being a carpenter and always wanting to do stuff.

Anyway, I dragged everything, even the rolling metal cabinet, over to my own house.

I immediately tasked myself to clean out the cabinet, since I knew it was full of some kind of crap. And I was not mistaken. I filled a garbage bag with odds and ends and bits and pieces, including the remains of a broken window.

Oddly enough, the only stuff I found worthy of keeping from the cabinet was the guy’s collection of files. I don’t know why anyone would have nine virtually identical files. But he had that many in the cabinet.

Once I moved onto the tool chest, the first thing I discovered: two more files.

So, eleven files.

I found some router bits in the doors of the tool chest. They were a bit rusty but still sharp. A minute with sandpaper cleans them up and puts them back into service. And a couple of them were nice long straight bits, which I consider too expensive to buy.

I eventually had to use a screwdriver to pry open the long, shallow drawer on the bottom. When I did, I discovered many router bits. So, I felt vindicated in my choice to rescue the chest from the roadside.

Many router bits were coated with protective rubber, but not the shafts. In the centre of the photo is a bit I cleaned up a little with sandpaper and a rub with oil.

So, now the chest is sitting in my workshop. It’s not to my taste, really. I would never make something so massively heavy and awkward to bring my tools to a job. But obvious thought and care went into the making of it. There are signs of it having had other features at some point, but I can’t figure out what they would have been. Whatever they were, they didn’t work for him, so he ripped them out.

So, because of all this, I would like to mount a router in the saw top and add it to my tablesaw. The top can be made to fit easily, but I would need to find time to set a router in it. This is something I may never do, but it’s an idea. In the meantime, I’ll start to bring these old discarded tools back to life. After all, even though the guy could no longer walk, he still thought these things were important enough to keep.