Came home the other week with a free box full of bits to sort out and to keep any of them I felt would be handy.
Lot of work cleaning years of storage dirt and some rust to reveal many items never used and mostly very good serviceable condition.
Top row- 4inch dia tin full of assorted sized steel round head rivets. Stainless precision ground reference Angle Plate. Bronze/Copper Gauze and below that is a superb 0-3/8" Jacobs Chuck with a strong detent wheel for up to 30 degree indexing at the other end in a precision ground steel body.
The PS Stubbs files, Machine Reamers (H6/7 grade) are mostly unused. The Slocombe Bits (Centre Drills) are the retained good ones, I junked a lot of them.
As for the 2 Tins in the centre they were completely blackened with age. I resisted opening them until I had carefully cleaned them to find the printed images underneath.
The Meggezones one dates from the 1930s and contained finely ground HSS Lathe tools and Tool Blanks. The other tin has shakeproof, Single Coil, Double Coil Spring Washers and 1/8" Roll pins-
Final challenge was to try and rescue a Plunger type Dial Indicator from around early 1950s made by British indicators Ltd. It's had a hard life and is quite heavy (plated Brass)
It was a mess and took a long time to carefully clean and polish the Clear bezel lense as it was so badly scratched and opaque, I could not see the Dial.
All very loose parts and a flickering needle. dismantled and adjusted as much as poss and reassembled to find it working smoothly, although the small hand needle is still out of sync with the Dial markings, but is irrelevant to my use as it counts the 4 main needle rotation limit (0.040").
It measures in 1/10,000 ths of an inch and I've since checked it against my Lathe dials, Digital readout on the Mill and the Victor Lever type D.I. , so it's as good as I'll ever need, real pleased as I needed one. Dial is 1 5/8" (41.3-ish mm) -
Got to make a soft storage box for it now and reduce the slack in the Bezel rotation. Only too glad to give these bits a good home after knowing they once belonged to someone with similar interests.