End of last year, I bought a steel box of random 'Engineers Tools' on ebay via 'Best Offer'. There was one picture and everything was piled up, still in the box.
I spotted a handful of unused HSS blanks, what looked like some relatively unused files, some calipers and verniers (including a handy pocketable little 4" fella) and a load of taps and dies that looked quite shiny. Oh, and the 12" by 6" by 9" box looked in quite good condition.
I offered £20 and the postage was a tenner.
Turned out the box was quite corroded and the 4" vernier shaft was warped just enough to make the movement unpleasantly stiff even after a good clean and oil.
Eh, the HSS blanks were 10mm and 8mm and were uncorroded, the files were pretty sharp (if a little rusty; Evaporust dealt with that), and I covered a fair range of tapping needs with the taps and dies (many of which were virtually unused, some even with the 'wax' still on them). Also, at the bottom was a nice bit of cast iron 6" by 4" by 3", with only a bit of light surface rust on it.
At the very bottom of the box was some milling related stuff that, as I didn't have a mill at the time, and didn't know anything about, I put in a cupboard and pretty much forgot about.
Fast forward to a few days ago, when I got the stuff out of that cupboard (still trying to get my storage sorted) and took another look:
Well that's handy now I have a mill.
Did a bit of googling, and you can still get the collets (posilock) for not much. The chuck's shaft is MT3, which fits my mill, and its in pretty good nick; just needs a bit of cleaning really.
The collet nut
glides on the threads and I've managed to find a picture of the Osbourn Titanic II box that has the instructions on it. I found a bunch of threaded milling cutters, too, in various dia. shafts (8, 10 and 12 mm) in the cupboard. They may well be scrap, mind; need to have a proper look.
The V-blocks are in reasonably tidy condition. No dints or gouges, just a teensy bit of surface corrosion staining.
I have a pretty-much-complete set of ER32 collets, so I'll get an ER32 chuck for the mill at
some point, but it's nice to be able to choose
when I spend the money on that.
Plus I have the sentimental satisfaction of owning a useful piece of apparently well-made, well-looked-after, English-manufactured toolholding; that's nice.
I remember being faintly disappointed with the contents of the box (I think I really fancied that little 4" vernier
![Biggrin :grin: :grin:](/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/biggrin.gif)
) but now I'm quite pleased with the return on my £30 layout.