Yes, but it’s not organized…So I question its importance.  To me, it’s a junk drawer, or bin, where you throw things that you think you’ll one day use and never do.

Mike

Or your relatives put it in ebay as “lathe parts – M?yford Boxford” starting price £50.

Reminds of one day many moons back, at the workshop my society used to rent.

Members would donate things they thought the club would find useful… we all know the inverse-proportion laws apply, especially with one chap, a member for only a couple of years or so. He was a metalwork teacher who imagined we could use second-hand soluble-oil and hacksaw blades with the centre three inches totally blunt. Since the club’s stock-in-trade material included old bed-frames, perhaps not. Then on this day, he was up-staged:

Someone turned up with one of those foot-cube tins that shops like Woolworths used to sell sweets or biscuits in, and which made ideal cases for ‘Primus’ picnic-stoves. So having dated the story…

He’d been given this rather battered specimen by a friend clearing a shed, possibly post-mortem. Like that storage-box in the photo, it was full of come-in-handy fastenings and unidentifiable metal something-or-others, but mostly too rusty for any decent work.

When we tipped the lot out onto a bench and started to salvage the perhaps-useful from the totally-useless, we were shocked to find a couple of dozen revolver rounds among it all. Luckily another member at the time was a Police Officer, and he happened to be present as I recall. He removed them for proper, legal disposal.

We never discovered why that box of rusty old tat had live ammunition mixed up in it… and we did not want to know!