Dating a LN Scraper
David Miller from Iowa
>First, let me say I like the new format.
Now - there is guy in my area, I saw him at auctions a lot and always bid against him. He knew his tools and when I saw him at an auction I knew I wasn't going to score big on some obtuse tool that only I recognized. I approached him a couple times to chat and he was very standoffish - the only thing I knew was that he wasn't an MWTCA member and didn't like to talk about his tool collection, or to anybody about much of anything.
So my brother tells me that someone has been selling a collection of tools on commission, a little at a time, at a local cabinetmakers shop. This has been going on for some time and only 15 miles from my house (this was the first I heard about it). Went over there and the cabinetmaker says a fair volume of tools passed through and several locals, who knew little about tools, had been scoring them and putting them on eBay. He said the owner had something going on in his personal life and really needed money. All the old tools were pretty much gone, but there were a bunch of "new" tools that the eBayers didn't want because they presumed new tools didn't have the arbitrage that old tools had. There were several LN tools, new in the box, for which they were asking about half the (original) retail. I bought several.
I had been congratulating myself for buying a bunch of LN tools early in the company history, when they just wrote the numbers on a generic box with a magic marker. Type 1s perhaps, 50 years from now.
I was interested in getting your take on one item, a LN #212 scraper, original price $122.50, bar code on the box. Any idea the year this #212 was made based upon the price and presence of the bar code on the box?
Thanks, David