Grandpa was a carpenter...

Well not exactly, he was a cabinet maker, but still, like the John Prine song goes, he was "level on the level and shaved even every door." When I was a young kid, my family moved in with the grandparents so my mom could take care of them. While Grandma was fine with it, my Grandpa, well not so much. Having two wild indians like my brother and I running around probably wasn't high on his retirement plans. But we coexisted as a blended family for almost ten years before he died. He had a wood shop in the basement and would spend most of his time down there working on his projects. I don't know if he made stuff to sell or it was just to get away from us but he did a lot of wood working in his time. After he passed, his son (my uncle) came over and cleaned the shop out, taking whatever he wanted. Most of the power tools and a lot of the hand tools disappeared but he did leave some stuff that eventually wound up here with me.

These are the tools I remember getting from him. Probably the most used has been  the brace and bit. When we first built the cabin, there was no power to the site, so I hand drilled a couple of hundred holes in the logs to drive the spikes into. It still works great. The scissors are kind of interesting, not sure what he used them for, cutting patterns maybe, they're real heavy duty.

These were some of his projects. Apparently one his things was to glue different types of wood together and turn them into shape on his wood lathe. My brother sent these up to me when he moved from the midwest to Florida.

This was the one thing gramps made that I always liked. I remember playing with the ship in a bottle when I was a little kid and my mom telling me to be careful and not break it (Google: impossible bottle). It's a good thing she kept an eye on me or it probably wouldn't be here today.