🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Black <mbl...@pubnix.net> writes:

> On Wed, 28 Jun 2018, Mike Spencer wrote:
> 
> [big snip]
>
>> It's getting to be commonplace that when I go to the hardware store,
>> nobody under 50 has even heard of the thing I want to buy.  The old
>> guys may remember seeing the product but not for mumble years.
>> Waterglass?  Cheap fireproof stickum handy if you do stuff with open
>> flames.  Never heard of it.  Is there an app for that? :-\
>
> There used to be small stores that had been around "forever" and still run 
> by the original owner, or a descendant.  There was no liability to keeping 
> the old stuff around, so you could go there, someone would know about the 
> old stuff, and it was still around.
> 
> But a lot of those places are now closed, the owner dying or the rent 
> getting too high, and no small  stores taking over the territory, just 
> those big box stores.

I was just a year or two too late to get parts for my aging tiller.
There was a business like that in Truro, NS that was a dealership for
TroyBilt.  I had long counted on his having that back room full of
decades worth of parts.  But he got old, sold ths biz and the new guy
said, "What is all this crap?" and sent it to the the scrapyard.

There used to be an industrial supply biz in Halifax that had
evernthing: every type of file that Nicholson ever made; rolls of a
dosen kinds of gasket material; rolls of a dozen kinds of wire mesh;
babbit metal and putty; ever fastener you ever heard of and some you
haven't, stuff I couldn't identify but the geezers knew where and what
everything was.  Shelves to the ceiling, piles in the corners.  They
had a forge and fab shop, too. Heaven.

Went in one day, found a single young guy in a room with nothing but
waist-high retail display tables.  Nothing whatever there that I
couldn't buy in a dozen or more supply shops all over NS.  And the
young guy was *proud* and *boasting* that he had gotten rid of all
that old crap -- got $5,000 for all those Nicholson files -- and now
had a nice, tidy modern business.  Just like all the others. All the
others were easier to get to and had better parking.  RIP.

> Every so often I read about people finding such stores, they'd closed down 
> but the owner had kept things intact, paying the rent  (or maybe owning) 
> the property) until he dies and it's a goldmine of old stuff.  So in the 
> antique radio hobby, people find places like that and come home loaded 
> when the stuff is finally cleared out.  Or someoen finds a stock of old 
> toys because they were left in the back of some old store now being 
> cleared out.

I happened on such a 2- or 3-generations family hardware store of that
sort having a close-out sale nearly 50 years ago.  Bought stuff I
reckoned I'd never see again, even if I would never need it.  Some
things I'm using about now for the first time.  Broom maker's needle.  
Or have always been the only person I know that has some. Special
files for sharpening brace bits.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada