Thread: Silex Tool Co

Hi SG,

Thanks for the photos, comparing the key on your bevel guage with the key on the depth stop of the dowelling jig you'd think they came out of the same factory.

The photos posted by woodie one (#8) and mspil (#10) of their bevel guages show them with the "sardine tin" type key and mick c in post #13 mentions a knurled screw on his bevel guage.

I wonder if the wooden box your dowelling jig lives in is an earlier model as the only boxed one I've seen was cardboard.

Since I started this thread back in July I find at swap meets etc I'm not only looking for braces and brace tools but now keeping an eye out for anything with Silex on it. I'd be pretty excited to find a Silex bench grinder.

Aside from this my bevel guage is marked FHP made in Japan No 780. Now that number is coincidentally very close to Silex No 78?

Regards,
Geoff.

I have dug up a catalogue Bert and I knocked out here in Sydney in 1996 for GW

In it we attempted to market a range of tools more suited to the local market than the full size catalogue from the US.

As such we sourced what we could from Oz makers eg Tery Gordon etc.

The Silex items listed and their prices are as follows.

Bevels
08B50.01 Silex 200mm $18.50.
08B50.02 Silex 250mm $19.80.

Gauges
08N50.01 Silex #34 butt gauge $20.70

Dowelling aids.
08K50.01 Silex dowelling jig-metic/imperial $54.80
08K50.02 Silex dowelling jig-Imperial $44.80
08K50.03 Silex dowelling jig-metric $47.00

Accessories
08J50.01 Silex bench stop #13 $10.00


We didn't list the squares etc as we had Nobex,Starrett etc.

I set this up and sourced the local product Hudsons may have been in Bourke St.

I may have some old invoices as after GW folded I continued on my own untill starting with the white shoes.
H.

Hi boringgeoff
I had a look at my Silex #78 Bevel Gauge again, after seeing Scribblygum's photos, and my one has the same type of adjustment screw handle as his photo. The knurled nut in my memory was just another "senior moment' I fear. It is a tool I seldom use.
Mick C

Morning all,
Thanks for that Mick, you're no orphan regarding the senior moments. A few days ago, about an hour before lunchtime, I wandered down to the house to get the keys to my ute. I walked in the door and plonked myself down at the table and darling says "a bit early for lunch aren't you?" I said "oh so I am" and toddled off back up to the shed WITHOUT the keys!!
Anyhow back to the point. I guess we can safely assume that the two styles of bevel adjusting key, that we've seen, are the total and are the result of two different makers or two different eras.
Henry,thanks for your info but please excuse my ignorance who was GW?
Can I assume that Terry Gordon was a manufacturer of Silex Tools or a maker under their own name?
The thing I have difficulty getting my head around is that, according to the Tool Chest article, various firms could tool up to manufacture tools for Silex where the purchase or making of appropriate tooling would be a significant outlay and yet were incapable of marketing their product under their own name. To top it off these "small" manufacturers only a few decades later have been totally forgotten.
Regards,
Geoff.

GW was Garrett Wade a US catalogue reseller of woodworking tools etc who had an office in Melbourne and used to sell their catalogues at the local working with wood shows in the 90s. They set up a shop about a K from my workshop so when I heard on the grapevine they wanted a local woody to run it I put up my hand.
Their range was not a good fit for the locals so we attempted to rectify this re the local products.
Terry Gordon is based in Alstonville and makes planes.
All the silex products we sold were so similar in manufacter and finish I always assumed they came out of the same factory.
One of the old local reps from Pragers etc would know all this info.
It all quickly becomes urban myths once the chalkys and other dilettantes get involved.
H.

Morning all,
Saw this Silex linesmans soldering iron the other day.
I don't know anything about it.
Regards,
Geoff.

I saw one of these at the HTPAA tool sale in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, but I don't think it had a maker's name. Yours looks as though it has never been used.

The chappie who seemed to know all about it said that this tool dated from when we had aerial copper wires for our electricity and telephone distribution systems - probably up until the early nineteen fifties.

To use it you put a large tablet of fuel (solidified meths as for one of those little Ezbit solid fuel stoves??) in the recess under the perforated cap. When the fuel was lit with the cap closed, it would burn slowly and keep the copper hot enough for the sort of soldering a linesman would have to do while standing at the top of a ladder. I'd imagine that it might have been preheated with a blowtorch and I'm not sure how long it would stay hot, but it sounds a lot safer than trying to manipulate wire, solder rod, big copper soldering iron and a roaring kero blow torch on the cross bar of a pole four or five metres (or more) up in the air.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that it is branded Silex and I rather doubt that there is any real link to the tools we have seen in the pictures for this thread, which all appear to be more recent (post nineteen sixty??) and for woodwork. Linesman's soldering irons would have been specified and purchased by utilities such as state electricity commissions and the PMG - I suspect that they might not have been available to the general public as, in those days, linesmen were all trained, employed and had their essential tools provided by those organisations.

Perhaps someone who actually used one of these can tell us more and let us know how well it worked.

I hope this helps,

Cheerio

Hi Woodie One,
Thanks for that info. I couldn't see made in Australia anywhere on it, or any country of origin for that matter. That solidified metho fuel might be right as I was thinking along the lines of the orange cardboard looking fuel as used in puncture repair vulcanising patches.
My brother in NZ was with the PMG there from about 1960 and hadn't seen one before. He made the comment that it didn't look as though it would get hot enough on its own, so I reckon you're right on the money with preheating it with a blowtorch prior to rattling up the ladder.
Regards,
Geoff.

Originally Posted by Boringgeoff

I was thinking along the lines of the orange cardboard looking fuel as used in puncture repair vulcanising patches.

I have vivid memories of these - clamp the patch over the cleaned puncture, scratch the heat pad to roughen its surface, light with a match and stand well back. I recall that they burned rapidly with lots of fiery spits and plenty of acrid white-grey smoke (especially the big ones used for tubes in truck tyres), but were more than hot enough to melt and weld the patch on to the tube most of the time (sometimes through to the other side of the tube).

I reckon that something burning so aggressively in this tool would have been a sight to behold - devilish stuff indeed! I'd have my doubts about the safety of putting such easily ignited fiery stuff into a preheated tool, so perhaps they used a special fuel mix in a tablet that kept the iron hot for a while, with slightly less spectacular pyrotechnics.

Also, when I look at this tool, I wonder about the purpose-made grooves on either side of the blade. Perhaps these enabled the hot tip to heat two wires simultaneously so they could then be soldered together. They could also have been provided so the tip could be pushed along between two wires so as to separate a previously soldered joint.

Very interesting nonetheless. It would be great if someone who had used one of these could tell us about their experience.

Kind regards

Hi Woodie One,

Yes all the trucks had a vulcanising clamp and patches on board and they usually had an electric one in the workshop. I think the inclusion of talcum powder inside the tube was to help stop welding the two sides together. Happy days.
Tyre technology has come a long way in 40 years, now with tubeless tyres all you need is a tyre plugging kit.

A friend of mine was with the PMG here in WA for a good few years, thinks the fuel for the soldering iron was in a metal container which you placed in the recess of the tool and then ignited with a special match that came with it. Still a fairly risky business, I should think, on a preheated iron, but the remote handle for opening the cover seems consistant with it being hot at the time.
He said they would remove the galvanising from the two wires to be joined with hydrochloric acid. (spirit of salts?) After cleaning them they would wrap the overlapped wires with copper wire then solder the join. The trough in the head of the iron would be held under the join and moved along as the solder was fed into the wire from above. All the area of wire previously degalvinised had to be soldered to prevent rusting.

Perhaps the soldering iron is one of the tools imported by Howard F Hudson Pty. Ltd. from Silex Electrique of France prior to 1940 as written by Frank Ham in the 1996 Toolchest article?
If that was the case, I'd have thought the writing on the tool would have been in French?

Would the person(s) with the answers to these questions please step up.
Regards,
Geoff.

Thanks Geoff!

I think we've moved a bit off the track of the original theme of this thread, but it's been interesting travel. I recall using Spirits of Salts (dilute hydrochloric acid) as a flux when soldering tinplate, so I can well imagine it being used as your friend describes.

The suggestion that these linesman's soldering tools may have come from France is an interesting one - perhaps there was a line of specialised French tools with this name prior to WW2, and some enterprising Aussie brought it back to Australia after that as a "good idea at the time". This could open up another line of inquiry: "what is the origin of the name?", to complement "what tools were produced under the Silex name?"

Au revoir!

Hi Woodie One,

I don't think it matters if we've got off track a bit, the point of the exercise is we're talking about an old tool and gathering information about it. Anyway we're going to run out of steam shortly unless someone comes up with some new info.
The heating fuel for the iron is the elusive element and my ex PMG friend wonders if it was phosphorous based? That sounds pretty dangerous to me, but we are talking about 50-60 years ago.

Regards,
Geoff.

Hmmm. Phosphorus-based - would have been really nasty stuff to use and store. White Phosphorus would be highly combustible, toxic and very dangerous indeed (I think it was a component of some rat poisons). Red Phosphorus (as in matchheads at the time) would also "not be very nice", due to its easy ignition through friction, impact, etc. Both forms produce toxic fumes when burned. Perhaps the absence of any user's comments in this discussion could be taken as confirming that some "very nasties" were used, and these caused the early demise of linesmen.

Another remote guess could be that a pellet of thermite-based fuel was used. Thermite was in common use by railway construction crews, where it was used to butt weld short lengths of rail together in situ. Thermite flares and creates a very high temperature in combustion - high enough to melt steel, so I think the reaction would have to be slowed down chemically so as to avoid melting the copper.

My preference / speculation from all these options would be the solidified metho-based fuel - easy to store and safe to handle, burns well, doesn't flare and probably generates enough heat to melt solder, but not enough to damage the copper of a pre-heated iron.

Can anyone enlighten us??

Best wishes

There was a poison for killing wild pigs they used in NZ when I was a kid which I think had phosphorus in it. From memory it was a clear liquid that would self combust on contact with air and the user carried a container of copper sulphate as an antidote. Nasty stuff alright, poor old pig would scoff the bait, usually a skinned possum in our case, and die in agony. I think that may have been banned in the late 50s.

What the hell has that got to do with Silex I can hear the purists thinking.

I'd have my doubts about thermite as a fuel, I've seen it in action and its a bit like a mini volcano. You'd have to have your iron tied to a long stick to avoid injury. I think it may contain magnesium.

I'm surprised that there are not more forumites putting their two bobs worth in here, industrial chemists etc.
A linie who would have used one of these irons regularly would be pretty old now and may not necessarily have known what the fuel was anyway.

Regards,
Geoff.