Happened upon an interesting tool in an interesting place last weekend.
Wishing to condense my Christmas shopping into one lightning fast day I head Eastward toward Columbus, Georgia to take advantage of their very large, very well stocked shopping centers. On the way I noticed this out my window from the interstate.
Feeling the urge to explore slowly overtaking my senses I exited the highway and begun hunting down the building in question. Finding it was rather simple, most 1/5 mile long, abandoned buildings rather are. Parking the car and wandering around the grounds I found a few people to ask my myriad variety of questions. Turns out the building was an old Mill, the largest in the country at one point and now divided into a few different businesses. There is a Convention Center, a Boutique and a Thrift Mall. The mill itself is freakin' huge, it just begs to be explored.
I hit the Convention Center purely on accident and after speaking to one of the staff there was directed to the Boutique. Wherein I found two very friendly ladies who gave me a small tour of their building and of the mill itself. The mill is mostly empty and is sealed off into sections. The section I saw was on the ground floor and was maybe 100x200 feet in area with a 20 foot ceiling supported by large columns every 24" or so. Quite impressive. They in turn directed me to the thrift mall, located in the mill proper. We come now to the main point of this post, if you don't like pictures of abandoned buildings.
Poking around the thrift mall I found this little guy.
Imagine that, a multi-tool amidst piles and piles of junk. For 4.00$. Seeing the tiny light on the end I snapped it up. My fascination with tools/lights in growing daily and this example was the most interesting one yet.
This tool is old enough that the light is an actual tiny incandescent bulb. Powered by a AAA battery the light produced is extremely weak. It works for up close reading by is so dim it cannot be used navigate around the house in darkness. Dim.
The tool contains four different implements. A Wharncliffe knife blade, a smallish flathead driver, a philips driver and a bottle opener. The implements are typical old-school Chinese. Soft lines on the tools but functional. The tools look like the are held in a slipjoint fashion but are actually just held by rivet tension. Tool clumping is not an issue. Now, this is at best a light use tool (you may have guess this already
), it actually creaks like an old screen door when you torque any of the drivers at all, very funny. The tool has a pocket clip, it is thin plastic and seems very fragile.
A size comparison, because I think it is quite funny, compared with a cigarette, a lighter, a Spyderco Captain and a Gerber MP600.
All-in-all not a bad find. I am actually edcing this tool for awhile because I am smitten by the form factor. Seems to be an almost perfect blend of tool/light with neither one overtaking the other.
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