OldTools resources edited by George Langford, Sc.D.

If you are interested in the sorts of information that you see here, try subscribing to the OldTools list, where a thousand or so Galoots discuss the uses and reasons for hand tools. To lurk without actually contributing, try registering with Yahoo! Groups, which you can find with the most handy search engine of all: Google. To get onto the OldTools mailing list, go to Subscribe OldTools. Once you have subscribed, messages can be sent to the OldTools List.

Another popular hand tool forum is located at Wood Central. If you want to search the actual contents of journals, reports and other sources of information, try the following link: Knowledge Management Portal. To look up a patented tool, use: DATAMP, the US Patent & Trademark Office, or Google Patents. In order to see the patent images at the USPTO, Windows users will need to download the free plugin, AlternaTIFF. My favorite hand-tools group is CRAFTS of NJ. My data & tool sources are Sandy Moss, Randy Roeder (see Randy's A Millers Falls Home Page, located at oldtoolheaven.com), Jeff Gorman, Patrick Leach, A.K.A. the Merchant of Ashby, and the late Charles Raymond Zitur. Chuck's fine toolchuck.com domain has become defunct because of Chuck's death on November 8, 2005, but the Wayback Machine has apparently archived it completely, and Old Tools Shop has archived it as well. Lots more information about patented braces comes from Sandy Moss, Ron Pearson and Jim Price. Gotta-see sites: Scott Grandstaff, Tony Seo, Stan Faullin, Ken Greenberg, The American Precision Museum, The Davistown Museum, and Tremont Nail. My favorite antique-tools auctioneer is Barry Hurchalla. My favorite other source of antiques is Brimfield. My book sources are ABE Books, MJD Tools and The Astragal Press. Lori Goucher is the contact person for Parts at Stanley Tools. For a remote view on old hand tools, see: HTPAA.

Nathan Lindsey once had a dandy Sawset Museum. Nathan's more recent sawsets.com domain has disappeared. However, the WayBack Machine has archived many of the pages and images: The raw index, Vintage Saw Tool Museum, Aiken Saw Set, Buckeye Saw Set, Cook Hammer Set, Disston Side Filer, How to File a Cross-Cut Saw (in pdf format), Leach's Patent Saw Set, Morrill Saw Sets, Saw Setting Machines, Stillman Saw Sets, Taintor Saw Sets, and, best of all, Unique Saw Sets. Not every image will load, but you might get lucky by copying the image's URL into the WayBack Machine's search window. It works for many other broken URL's as well, of course.

My favorite forums for old machines are: The Practical Machinist and Old Woodworking Machines. Other more specific groups that I like are the Grizzly/mini-benchmill (moderated by Barry Young), The Model Engineering List, and Atlas Shaper & Milling Machines. Dave Ficken's website is very helpful for old metalworking machines. TonyLathes is the most complete archive. Or, on the lighter side, see: Lin's Kittens On Canvas.

To search free public databases, try: Search Systems. To search sources of scientific literature, try Linda Kosmin Langord's compendium of freely accessible bibliographic databases. Linda also has a list of eJournals available free on line. To search the legal literature and case law, try: Find Law.

To combat phishing (fraudulent attempts to steal personal financial information) study: MillerSmiles.co.uk. To find out where that nasty email came from, use: Complete WhoIs or easyWHOIS. To find out which IP's are blacklisted and by whom, as well as to find out the best reporting address for abuse issues: OpenRBL.org [Note: The OpenRBL.org domain has lapsed; a fine resource has been lost - GL]. Domain Dossier is now my best resource for finding addresses for reporting abuses. To find out how to interpret suspicious emails, see the FTC's Spam for Consumers. For those clearly illegal spams, report them to PIRT@castlecops.com, scams@fraudwatchinternational.com, reportphishing@antiphishing.org, spam@uce.gov or to: United States Secret Service. My favorite spam combating service: SpamCop.net. When it looks as though the abuse desk of the IP hosting the ofending site isn't going to be responsive, consider reporting the email to the Upstream Adjacencies, which you can find by entering the Autonomous System Number that you have obtained into the Selected AS Report window at the bottom of the CIDR-Report. Then, go back to OpenRBL.org to get the reporting address. If you get a phish with an odd-looking URL containing lots of % signs or just one big number with no punctuation, it will have to be decoded from hex (the former coding) to alphanumeric or to base 256 (the latter obfuscation) so that you can find out the canonical name or IP address, respectively. Another method for demystifying strange URL's is to use TraceRT from voa.his.com, which automatically decodes many obfuscated URL's and even finds the canonical names of numerical IP addresses quite often.