Hi there,

So, it’s been a minute. Longer than a minute, if we’re being honest about it.

The short version is that the house ate my summer - and a good chunk of the spring before it. It started in March, when the roof of our 116-year-old house decided to give up and let water inside. That was followed by a much-needed repainting (and partial re-siding) of the exterior cedar shakes.

Painting prep, window glazing, handrail sanding, a paint shaver and a whole lot of siding - the kind of work that fills every dry weekend from May onward and leaves you too worn out to write about anything, let alone restore anything. None of it was interesting enough to post about (there is no charming way to describe scraping paint for six weeks), and so the site just sort of… sat there.

Anyway. I’m back, and I’ve got something good.

Last weekend I went to Second Use and Earthwise looking for a small table for the front porch. I did not find a table. I found fourteen old tools instead, for a grand total of fourteen dollars - two Perfect Handle screwdrivers out of a bin, and everything else in a plastic tub sitting outside in the rain.

Then I did something I hadn’t tried before: I photographed the whole pile and handed the same images to three different AI models, and asked each of them to identify what I’d bought.

I got three confident answers. They did not agree.

One of them told me it could read a patent number stamped on the hammer, walked me through the filing and reissue dates, and pushed its estimate back a couple of decades on the strength of it.

That patent number is not on my hammer.

And here’s the part that actually stuck with me: it isn’t a made-up number. Pat. 16820 is a real Estwing marking, it just isn’t on this hammer - so the model didn’t invent something out of nothing, it reached for a real thing and put it somewhere it wasn’t, and then built a whole dating estimate on top of it. That’s a harder failure to catch than an obvious fabrication, and it’s the one I keep turning over.

→ Full write-up with photos: https://thetoddmark.com/salvage-haul-fourteen-tools

Coming up

The whole lot (minus the hammers) is soaking in Evapo-Rust as I type this. Belt sander, steel wool, WD-40, paste wax - the usual. A proper restoration entry is coming once they’re cleaned up and I can see what I’ve actually got.

And a project idea I’m genuinely excited about: Second Use has big slabs of hard maple pulled out of an old bowling alley. I think I’m going back for one to see if I can turn it into end-grain cutting boards. Full of nails, apparently, so that’s going to be its own adventure.

That’s issue three. More when the next one’s done.

Mark

thetoddmark.com