What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

[Dan McCosh]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

A sump for horse manure in the carriage house.

[Nicholas Carey]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

Butter churn:



Lee Engineering Household Flour Mill:

[Jimmy W]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

I am sitting in my childhood home and my parents collected all sorts of stuff. I have many of the things mentioned still here. There's a meat grinder in the water heater room and another out in the barn. Looking around this room, one thing that stands out is the 1842 Springfield musket.

1842 Springfield Musket.jpg

[Todd Bradshaw]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

Console TV

a042f45d64e95b80a98837164fbd1c0a.jpg

[Jim Mahan]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

My old man brought one of these home from work when I was in about the third grade. It banged around uselessly for a few years until I decided it would be handy and I mounted it on a workbench in the garage. Dad wasn't very handy; mom had decided we needed a workbench, and Tom and I built it with her direction. That pencil sharpener was the first dedicated workbench tool I ever mounted. We eventually had two kinds. This one, with the spring-loaded ears that worked a clamp to hold the pencil centered and straight, and the kind that had instead, a front-mounted round selector wheel with graduated sized openings to fit fat or skinny pencils.





This kind on the drafting tables in class.



Now I use a pencil daily but it's a mechanical one like we used in high school drafting classes, and when I need a sharp point on it, I use the handy built-in sharpener. Quick, easy, quiet. This is the one pencil I've been using for everything in the shop and around the house for a decade or so. I use it for marking stuff, and also for making the sketches in my sketch book that I use to figure out how a thing I need to make should look before I start cutting any material.



And this image highlights another common item now that was a rarity then—rare earth magnets. Tiny and powerful they're useful for all kinds of things, and my bandsaw is a giant hunk of cast iron, so a magnet each for a mini-square, a six inch straight edge ruler, a mirror on an extendable telescopic handle for looking under things to find the odd screw that got wings, another telescopic handle with a magnet on the end for reaching and retrieving said lost and then found screw. I keep the tiny hand mirror in that position so I can catch a glimpse of some yahoo creeping up behind me as I saw, because I have a strong startle reflex and don't want to cut off my fingers when said yahoo, or the Minister of the Interior and Exterior, makes me flinch while the saw is running. Just out of frame on the front door of the bandsaw is a mini flashlight, clamped on a flexible shaft with a powerful magnetic base, which I use to focus the light on the spot where the bandsaw blade is running through the work. Since it's on a magnet, I can carry it around to use it, frinstance, inside the engine bay of the car when doing maintenance or whatever.

Another old-timey thing in my shop is a counter-top bell, like what the desk clerk uses in the hotel to get the boy to get your bags (which is why the kid is called a bell-hop), or to get the baker out of the backroom to sell the still warm donuts. I try to get Her Majesty to ding the bell when I'm running equipment and She needs to get my attention. She is resistant. Why the mirror.

[Spin_Drift]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

6858828[/URL]]One of these lived in our basement, next to the "cooler" (a full-size insulated room where we kept root veggies and canned veggies and canned salsa--then every spring we'd chop up the last of the
potatoes to plant):

[ATTACH=CONFIG]137291[/ATTACH]

I'd be curious to know how many people younger than 50 would recognize what it is. Not many, I'd guess.

Tom

I had a milk separator in Finland that looked similar to this.

[heimlaga]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

WI tom.
I am 41 and of cause I recognize a completely ordinary cream separator.

I cannot really think of anything significant from my childhood home that wouldn't be found today. Not because my childhood home was very up to date in the 80-ies but because we tend to keep and use the same old stuff for decade after decade and even generation after generation in my family.
Of case we still have a hand cranked meat grinder and a glass butter churn like the ones mentioned upthread. Our household flour mill is a Mock and not a Lee though it is roughly the same size. The old adding machine from grandfather's bakery is still in storage in case we will need it. Some keronese lams are still in use as backups for when electricity is out. A bunch of two man crosscut saws oiled in so they won't rust can be found in the back of the tractor shed. The dial telephone is still in storage in case it might be needed. And so on.

[Spin_Drift]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

Ink pens and inkwells and blotter paper.

[Canoeyawl]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

One of these lived in our basement, next to the "cooler" (a full-size insulated room where we kept root veggies and canned veggies and canned salsa--then every spring we'd chop up the last of the
potatoes to plant):

[ATTACH=CONFIG]137291[/ATTACH]

I'd be curious to know how many people younger than 50 would recognize what it is. Not many, I'd guess.

Tom

If it's a Delaval, I have the Lawson engine and attachment to power it

[Ralphie Boy]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

0ADF84E6-F61D-476E-8FF3-54877471FE7D.jpg

[jpatrick]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

Glass milk bottles.

Metal trash can.

Smaller, metal, garbage can.

Printed newspaper.

Jeff (funny: I always put my name at the end of my post. But this time, my name/myself, is part of the list/post. In the sense that I'm no longer found in or near my childhood home.)

[Dan McCosh]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

The "not found today" actually eliminates my post about the manure pit, since it is still in the floor of the carriage house. Also remaining is the opening in the chimney for the wood-burning kitchen stove, and a plaque on the back sleeping porch door that says: "No peddlers". The coal-storage bin now is an exercise room, but the chute opening remains. The broadcast TV antenna is in the attic, also still in use.

[WI-Tom]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

If it's a Delaval, I have the Lawson engine and attachment to power it

Aren't you fancy! We used the hand crank. Only a small dairy herd (can a single Holstein be "a herd"?), so not so bad.

I don't think ours was a Delaval, but I think the one in the photo I posted is--good eye.

Tom

[Scrib]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

A milk box for 2x weekly deliveries plus the milk man of course with his ice cooled truck. Always fun on a hot day for a mud to get a chunk of ice to chew on.

And the in-ground garbage pail that was emptied once a week by a local pig farmer.

[John Smith]

Re: What random item found inside/outside your childhood home that isn’t found today?

My old man brought one of these home from work when I was in about the third grade. It banged around uselessly for a few years until I decided it would be handy and I mounted it on a workbench in the garage. Dad wasn't very handy; mom had decided we needed a workbench, and Tom and I built it with her direction. That pencil sharpener was the first dedicated workbench tool I ever mounted. We eventually had two kinds. This one, with the spring-loaded ears that worked a clamp to hold the pencil centered and straight, and the kind that had instead, a front-mounted round selector wheel with graduated sized openings to fit fat or skinny pencils.





This kind on the drafting tables in class.



Now I use a pencil daily but it's a mechanical one like we used in high school drafting classes, and when I need a sharp point on it, I use the handy built-in sharpener. Quick, easy, quiet. This is the one pencil I've been using for everything in the shop and around the house for a decade or so. I use it for marking stuff, and also for making the sketches in my sketch book that I use to figure out how a thing I need to make should look before I start cutting any material.



And this image highlights another common item now that was a rarity then—rare earth magnets. Tiny and powerful they're useful for all kinds of things, and my bandsaw is a giant hunk of cast iron, so a magnet each for a mini-square, a six inch straight edge ruler, a mirror on an extendable telescopic handle for looking under things to find the odd screw that got wings, another telescopic handle with a magnet on the end for reaching and retrieving said lost and then found screw. I keep the tiny hand mirror in that position so I can catch a glimpse of some yahoo creeping up behind me as I saw, because I have a strong startle reflex and don't want to cut off my fingers when said yahoo, or the Minister of the Interior and Exterior, makes me flinch while the saw is running. Just out of frame on the front door of the bandsaw is a mini flashlight, clamped on a flexible shaft with a powerful magnetic base, which I use to focus the light on the spot where the bandsaw blade is running through the work. Since it's on a magnet, I can carry it around to use it, frinstance, inside the engine bay of the car when doing maintenance or whatever.

Another old-timey thing in my shop is a counter-top bell, like what the desk clerk uses in the hotel to get the boy to get your bags (which is why the kid is called a bell-hop), or to get the baker out of the backroom to sell the still warm donuts. I try to get Her Majesty to ding the bell when I'm running equipment and She needs to get my attention. She is resistant. Why the mirror.

I have a pencil sharpener mounted on the wall behind where I'm now sitting. Also one in the basement. They came with the house and, on a few occasions they've come in handy.

Side note: spell check re-appeared just as it had disappeared a week ago, for no apparent reason.