Hi, I’m Rick. I spent 22 years as a machinist in a small tool shop in Akron, Ohio, and I still look at old things the way the shop taught me to: who made this, how long did it take, and can it run again?
What I write about
Where my stories come from
My daughters gave me a metal detector for my 50th birthday. In the first two months it found 212 pull tabs and one Mercury dime, and I was hooked anyway. My old tackle box has three compartments: keepers, junk and “ask around,” for anything with a name or a tag on it.
The shop taught me respect for machines that just keep going. Our 1948 lathe, which the foreman called “the retiree,” outworked every new machine we bought.
How I write
I don’t write about what things are worth. I write about who made them and who kept them, and I only write about legal finds.
Off the clock
I live in Akron with my wife, Deb. Our basement holds a train layout called Phase One, which I started for Christmas 2009 and which my daughters say is still mostly chicken wire. Phase Two remains a rumor.
How we check our stories: Editorial Standards and Ethics.
My daughters gave me a metal detector for my 50th birthday, and in the first two months I dug up 212 pull tabs and one Mercury dime. The dime lives in my old tackle box, in the section labeled “keepers.” These 10 metal detector finds came out of fields, yards and the sea, from a 17th-century gold ring to wedding bands their owners never expected to see again.
My dad still uses the bench vise his father bolted to the garage wall in 1952, and he oils it every spring whether it needs it or not. He says tools don’t wear out, people just stop taking care of them. These 12 things have been working for more than 100 years, from a light bulb switched on in 1901 to a clock built in 1386.
My basement train layout has been called Phase One since 2009. It has one finished town, 38 feet of track and a mountain my daughters still call “the chicken wire.” These 12 model train layouts took over basements, garages and spare rooms, and the people behind each hobby count the years and the family members recruited along the way.
The oldest lathe in our shop was a 1948 machine the foreman called “the retiree,” and it outworked every new machine we bought. Nobody in 22 years could remember it missing a day. These 12 spacecraft were built to last a few months or years, and NASA kept getting data from them long after the plan said they should be done.
