MTFCA Forum

Went to go send my rims and hubs off the other day to get them rebuilt and started hunting for a box to ship them in. Out in the shop, I had my radiator box saved to knock down flat (glad I didn't) for something to lay on when working on a car.

Found that it held all four rims side by side, so I wrapped them up, placed the hubs in the middle of them and pushed it all in the box.

Sent it all off to Stutzman's. Can't wait to get it all back.

I was always fascinated by the shelves of old fruit jars behind the man door into
my Grandfather's garage, each filled with different kinds of nails, washers, screws,
etc. I took to hunting down early fruit jars at a young age, and by the time I had a
place of my own to work on stuff, I had replicated Grandpa's shelves of jars with
sorted gubbins. Just last night I needed some stainless screws for some stainless
shower hooks I made. Shur-nuff, ... found what I needed in an old midget pint
jar with the CFJ intertwined initials and the Mason's patent date. Saved me a few
bucks and a trip to the hardware store.

Grandpa was a Buick man. In the garage sat a 53 Super coupe, a 56 Roadmaster
coupe, a 59 Electra 225 convertible, and Grandma's new 63 Skylark. It was a pretty
magical place, being out there as a small child. A family story went that Grandpa,
while on a sales trip far away from home, slid his "old" Buick off the road and into a
ravine in a snow storm. He walked into town, bought a new one, and never went back
for the old one. This was 1926.

By the time my father was my age, he had saved thirty some fruit jars full of nuts, screws, washers, & clips. I have none ! What have I been doing with my life ?

I inherited, from my father and grandfather, the habit of saving every fastener that I came across. I even canibalize things like old appliances for fasteners before taking them to the recyler. I started out using jars for storage. Then my stash got too big for jars so I bought a set of used plastic bins at a garage sale. I found myself dumping out the bins all the time to sort through them to find what I needed.

About the time my bins were overflowing, I found a metal drawer set (looks to be from the 1950's or so) at a garage sale and moved my fastener collection to it. It took me about two weeks, but I organized everything by type and size, just like a hardware store, and put the whole thing on casters so I can roll it to my project then push it against a wall at the end of the day.

I love this thing almost as much as I love my cars. Need a 1/4 - 20 bolt and nut? BAM....there's a drawer for each....zero time spent sorting through bins. I've accumulated such a gigantic stash of just about every conceivable fastener that I don't think I'll ever need to buy one from the hardware store again.

It's 10 drawers wide by 10 deep. Everything is old, heavy metal and the drawers are removable so I can still dump the drawer of say, split washers out to find the perfect one, then sweep them all back into the drawer and put it back.