------- THE SHOPSMITH Around 1950, my father saw an advertisement for The Shopsmith, a combination table saw, router, lathe, disk sander, and drill press. It cost $200 for the basic tool. A bandsaw, jigsaw, joiner and other accessories could be added at additional cost. He didn't have $200 for something like this. Not long before, he and my mother had debated over spending $10 for a used lawnmower. It was a nice thought. He considered similar purchases in the years that followed: a metalworking shop, watchmaking tools, and a celestial telescope, among others. He bought none of these. He did eventually buy a Casco, a small electric drill, roughly the size and shape of a potato, which took dozens of small cutting and grinding bits. I tried using it and never found that any of the bits did very much. When he was older and wealthier he treated himself to a series of fairly expensive cameras. I doubt that my father ever had much need for serious woodworking equipment, or that he necessarily had anything in mind do with it. He liked tools and built himself a substantial workbench in the basement of our house in Ferguson, Missouri. I don't recall how we acquired the crude workbench in Westfield, New Jersey. Probably it was in the house when they bought it. By that time my father was too busy at his office to think much about home handicrafts. He and I did what repairs were needed around our large Dutch colonial house, and he limited his craftsmanship to oil painting and furniture refinishing. In his retirement, he did exquisite embroidery and made attractive and imaginative small wooden objects that sold well at church fairs. I inherited most of his tools when he and my mother moved to Florida. Some of these were in poor repair by then, and nearly all of them have since disappeared. Our children were highly satisfactory in most ways, but they were hard on tools. When Nancy's father died, I acquired the contents of his workshop. It was much like my father's: old tools, some orginally of good quality but now rusted and broken. I took what I could use. I've bought a few tools for myself over the years, always cheap ones. Some tools were given to me by my children, occasionally to replace those they broke or lost. My parents bought me a circular saw, at Snows in Orleans. We were at the Cape on vacation, and I had just announced that I was putting an addition on our house in Pennsylvania. I don't think they had much faith in my ability to carry this through, but they must have felt they should make a gesture. I still have the saw, in good condition. I may also have bought the electric drill which I use now. I don't remember. I do recall, with regret, having to leave my father's huge 1/2 drill in Florida after his funeral, to be given away to a friend. It was too large and heavy to be brought home on the airplane. It looked like something the Terminator would have carried. Perhaps an arrangement could have been made, but none of us was thinking clearly at the time. I can't imagine what he used it for in their elegant 5th floor appartment. I have a strange mishmash of tools now, many of them acquired in informal ways: found in houses we lived in or lying in the street, discarded at the dump, and bought at yard sales. I use nearly all of them, often in ways they weren't meant to be used, and I take reasonably good care of them. If I'm allowed a few more years of peace and good health, I may leave an orderly and respectable workshop. I've already built a sturdy workbench in our garage and another in the basement, both entirely out of recycled lumber from the town dump. The hanging lamps over the workbenches are from the dump as well. I regret having left my sledgehammer in Pennsylvania, although I haven't needed it yet. A few weeks ago, at the October Fellowship pot luck, Rosemary Abbot said to the table, "Does anybody want a Shopsmith?" "How much?" I asked. She looked surprised, as well she might have, our average age being around 76, but she quickly said, "Fifty dollars." I bought it. I had just received my $107 check from the Town of Eastham, for 2 1/2 days of work as the Eastham Miller. $50 was already dedicated to the purchase of a Japanese bird bath that I have admired for 5 years at the Birdwatcher's General Store. The rest I planned to use for restaurant meals. But we can eat out any time we choose, Nancy suggested, and we probably won't anyway. She's right. Nothing more was said for a week. I wanted the Shopsmith and fantacized about it's appearance and condition. I had only the vaguest memory of seeing a picture of one 50 years before. I was pleased with my patience and was rewarded finally by a phone call suggesting we go look at it in Debbie's garage. Debbie's garage was full of old power tools, welding equipment, moribund bicycles, and general junk. The Shopsmith sat in the midst of this, in depleted glory. It was old and thickly coated with grime. $50 seemed near its fair value. I poked it. It weighed a ton, 300 pounds at least. "I guess you'll have to take it apart," Rosemary said. She didn't sound entirely happy. She hadn't seen it for some years apparently. I dismantled it, enough for the four of us to lift it piecemeal into Rosemary's old truck. We delivered it to our basement, where it lay, a heap of scrap metal. I thanked them and was left alone to contemplate it I spent the afternoon scraping a thick layer of grease off the wooden bench and wiping down the various metal assemblies. Gradually, something like a steel butterfly emerged from its cocoon of grime. The metal castings were massive and strangely elegant. The milled steel rods and bars cleaned up like...well, like new. Unscratched, almost unused. Beneath the grease, the wooden stand had a handsome patina. The machine was clearly old, the grey paint on the castings was dull and scratched in places, but it was altogether in excellent condition. I reassembled the various parts, by myself now and with considerable difficulty. Holding one hundred pound assembly while sliding it smoothly into another was as awkward as I had expected it to be. I took my time. When it was assembled, checked, and tightened, I pugged it in and flipped the switch. It hummed with understated strength. There were parts missing, I realized, notably the drill chuck, one piece I could hardly do without. As has become a reflex these days, I looked up "shopsmith" on the web. The company is still in business. There was even an historical section on their web site where I learned that my model, the 10-ER (for "experimental revised") was manufactured from 1947 to 1953. Surely a machine tool that old could be considered an antique. It was sold through Montgomery Ward at first. Shopsmith didn't begin its own marketing until it developed the Mark V in 1954. The Mark V is still sold, nearly fifty years later, under the same name, in what I consider to be an amazing display of conservatism. Why not the Mark 10, or the MARK 50? It even looks the same, although the belts are enclosed now for safety. Parts are not available for the historic models, but the $36 Mark V drill chuck would clearly fit my machine. It would still have been a good purchase at $86, but it occured to me that we hadn't looked around Debbie's garage very carefully. "Any time," Bill said. "It's never locked." I found nothing at first . There were lots of tools, parts, drill bits, etc., but no Shopsmith pieces. Finally I noticed a large and battered cardboard box, shoved to the back of a shelf under the workbench and buried among other boxes and assorted junk. I dug it out with difficulty, and there it all was, everything: the drill chuck, a dozen circular saw blades, a joiner, disk sander, drum sander, dado cutter, joiner blade and carrage. The jigsaw attachment I already had, the largest and heaviest jigsaw I've ever seen. I still haven't used my machine to drill a hole or saw a board. I built the basement workbench to hold the accessories using only hand tools. Maybe I never will use it. Maybe I'll just polish it and admire it and show it to my friends and think of how much my father would have enjoyed owning a Shopsmith.