Whether you arrive at The Toolbox from the east or the west you will be struck by the peaceful atmosphere of the village of Colyton. The Tool Box is on the bank of the river Coly next to a single span bridge.
There are usually a couple of patio chairs outside the shop so your wife can sit down and watch the ducks while you spend an hour or so browsing in the shop itself. Ample off road parking is available.
Gerry Dawson established the Tool Box in the early 1980’s. David Fouracre, the current owner took over in 1992.
Various Tools
Entering the door you see a display cabinet with various tools in it. Moving into the shop you will probably pass a lathe or band saw on your left. In front of you are large cabinets with drawers of taps and dies, reamers and various other small tools. On top of this cabinet you will find the accessories that are so vital to model engineering. There is usually a Myford vertical slide here, several different chucks, both three jaw and four jaw types, parallels, squares, steel rules and vee blocks.
Turning right there are more cabinets containing imperial and metric milling cutters. To the left is the main counter that is glass fronted and it is always worth a look inside. Straight on and you are in the woodworking section and also see more cabinets filled with High Speed Steel tool bits. If you turn to the right again there are shelves of books to your left and a display cabinet filled with measuring instruments to your right.
The Main Display
Going through the middle of the shop you come to the main display of second hand machine tools. It is potluck what is in stock at any particular time but usually there are a couple of lathes, a milling machine, a small compressor or possibly a circular saw. At various times I have seen shapers, a Clarkson tool and cutter grinder, both Unimat 3 and Unimat SL lathes and an engraving machine in this section.
Go up the stairs and you will see the magazine section. Model Engineers go back to the forties, both individual issues and also quite a few bound volumes. There is a good selection of Engineering in Miniature as well. There are usually 2 or 3 magazine files with Model Engineers Workshop in them although the earlier issues are rare.
David offers a worldwide postal service on all the magazines and tools and recently exported a very large Emco Super 11 CD lathe to Australia.
The shop also stocks a wide range of model engineering tools and measuring equipment, various sizes of silver steel bar, and a large selection of woodworking tools.
Whether you want to buy a copy of Model Engineer from 1957 or a Myford ML7 lathe The Toolbox should be your first port of call. If you are selling your workshop, David will collect from all over the South of England and will also travel as far as Wales.
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About the Author
Hi There I have spent most of my working life in engineering machine shops.
I started in engineering at age 15. I became a power press setter setting up manual and roll feed power presses up to 150 tons. One of the main components made was the top ring of shock absorbers for the Armstrong Patents Company in Hull. Another large customer was Vauxhall motors. We produced components for Rickman motor cycles, British Sagull outboard motors and many others.
l moved on to a company called Willcox and Gibbs. They were an American company who had a factory in High Wycombe and another factory in Poole. I went there as a drilling machine operator. This was at the time of the 3 day week. We ran out of work and all the men asked to be made redundant. I was asked to stay on and became factory foreman at age 17. I taught myself to machine industrial sewing machine components to very tight limits, often less than 1 thou. This included milling, drilling, turning and surface grinding. I also kept cutters sharp on a Clarkson grinder.
When they shut the factory down after several years, the manager bougt the machines and took over he premisies an we started looking for sub contract work. We produced some items for a lock company in Bournemouth. These made up into a lock controlled cartrdge insertion machine to bolt onto the top of safes. This was mainly sold to garages so staff could put money into the safe without having access to it.
l also also managed to get British Seagull to give us a chance. They gave us a drawing and a pair of sand castings to machine a crankcase for the new 170 outboard. We were a standby as the Seagull buyer had given 5 sets of castings to Villiers. Villiers installed a new CNC machining centre to produce these crank cases and we used a knife and fork. We produce a perfect crankcase and Villiers produced 5 crankcases covered with 4 jaw chuck marks. We received the contract for the new crankcase and went on to get the casing tube line, the gearbox line, the cylinder hads,the casing tube (drive shaft tube) and many other components. The casing tube line included producton silver soldering so I have problay done more silver soldering than most of the people reading this. We probably used about 50 sticks of silver solder a day. When Seagull went bust, the boss closed the factory down due to ill health.
i found a job as a self employed miller on a bridgeport turret mill. This helped me to mill very fast and very accurately. I remember scrapping two components in 3 years. I remember because it cost me money.
I moved to Aylesbury about 3 years later and found a job as a CNC miller. I had not done CNC milling before but had always been interested in computers. I taught myself to CNC mill using the manual. I was supposed to have been taught but the chap eaching me was off sick for six weeks.
I have had many jobs programing and operating CNC mills over the remainng years producing such varied item as military and aircraft components. The only aircraft I would have liked to have produced bits for was Concorde but apart from special purpose jacks for the wings, I never got to do any bits. So basically I started of producing very small sewing machine components and every size up to 4 metre long beams for the Airbus super guppy wing fixture and also many weird ad wonderfull parts of machines.
I am now sort of retired due to ill health and now do next to nothing.
