Beginners Guide to collecting tools

Without tools the human race wouldn’t have evolved and we would be no different to any other animal on this Planet. Tools could be deemed the father of all things, without them everything that is man-made would be nothing more than an idea. Once man created tools it created those all important skilled workers who mastered them, the tradesman was born! There has been an evolution of tools as with man himself, we use tools to make better tools that increase productivity. Somewhere in between there was an era where it was important how tools should be crafted and to what standards they should be created.

Old Tools are collected for a number of reasons and each person collecting them generally has a connection or interest with a certain theme. There are the obvious groups such as carpentry, leather working and mechanical but there are others such as dentistry, architectural, surgical and scientific instruments and many others besides. All subjects have history and I think where there is a practical skill it connects that person to the history of that subject. It’s interesting to know how your knowledge evolved to its current form, history and the tools used is a bit like an ancestry to those skills.