Mystery tool? *LINK*
David Miller from Iowa
>Some kind of burnisher????
Mystery tool on ebay
Mystery tool? *LINK*
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Re: Mystery tool? *LINK*
#2Wild speculation, in parts
Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>1. A chalk line reel. I've seen drawings of turn-of-the-last-century chalk line reels that look very similar.
2. A really fancy kite-string reel, dating from the Victorian fighting-kite era*.
3. Some kind of wool or textile-related thing that was probably really helpful to whoever owned it. Maybe posting it on Taunton Press' "Threads" forum would yield an answer if this speculation is correct.
*and if you believe that.... As far as I know, kite fighting pretty much stayed in China until the second half of the twentieth century. I just couldn't resist the image of guys in stiff wool suits out on the downs, cutting other people's kite strings with their own and otherwise savaging other people's kites.