My father was born on a farm in North Dakota. In 1937. He grew up watching his father spend hours straightening used nails. Thrift and want were daily companions.
One of my fathers many quirks was that if he had alot of something, anything, he'd say, "I always feel rich when I have alot of......." It could be anything. Matchsticks, M&Ms, split shot or .22 shells. And he actually did.
I just got a package delivered. 6 Magpul 27rd mags for my G17. I felt rich. Just for a second. Then I looked at my "stockpile" of range ammo. I'm poor again.

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The best I can with what I got

/

This sounds like a familiar story. My Dad said he didn't even know they sold straight nails until he was grown. He built our house in 1947 and materials were in short supply with all the veterans coming home and building homes.
We built our barns and sheds out of dunnage lumber out of box cars. I spent many hours pulling nails.

When they moved out here in late '41-'42 my Grandfather tore down the house and barn that were there and used the materials to build a house, a garage, a pumphouse, a smokehouse, a garden shed, a bunkhouse and an outhouse. The funny thing was, none of the doors in the house were the same size.

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The best I can with what I got

Hey! I've got a 3 lb. coffee can of once fired 16 p nails, and another of 20 p nails. I can't seem to find a nail straightener on Amazon. Help please. Am building a garage in the summer and I hear the price of lumber is up. Willing to save on fasteners.

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Some collect art; I shoot it!

I remember straightening used nails out for use after extracting them from old boards and such. I have no recollection of being taught to do so, but I suppose it must have been my dad who taught me.

Go to Home Depot and ask for a "poundy thing".

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The best I can with what I got

My father and his friends were the same way,never threw anything away. One of them even built a very nice chalet and I’d bet 80% of the materials were salvaged
Edit: come to think of it,the one my father built for himself has quite a few 100+ yr old doors in it 😆

We did some church building trips when I was in Seminary, and we always put the kids to work straightening nails. My son and daughter still talk about that, even though they were very young in those days.

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Only a cold warrior

I have straightened my share, thank you.

Have a blessed day,

Leon

When I was a kid I was always building something, I straightened a lot of nails, I did with a hammer and a anvil, I held them with pliers.

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Don

Same here, straightened a lot of nails in my youth. No telling how many times some of those nails were "recycled".

As a kid I spent a good part of one summer salvaging lumber from an old falling down corn crib on my grandpa's farm and using it to build myself a tree house. In SE Missouri farm buildings are almost all built from oak boards and timbers.. I must've pulled and straightened a couple of thousand nails to re-use in my little project.

Ever tried driving a re-straightened nail into a piece of weather-seasoned oak? It is pretty tough to drive even a brand new nail into that stuff. Taught me how to drive a nail though.

I grew up with the philosophy of waste not want not - so don't let anything go to waste.

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Send lawyers, guns & money...

I'm impressed with all you nail "straighteners". But what I'd really like to see is a 3 lb. coffee can-how old is that?

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2 Blessed 2B Stressed

When my two oldest boys were 8 & 10 they started "Building" things from reclaimed lumber. We had a huge supply of Nail Gun 16b nails. (I think it is easier to drive straightened nails!) After I sold the farm, the flipper had every inch brush hogged, He discovered all the forts and trenches the boys built! Driving by, you could see chewed up wood all in a heap or where a tire fell into a trench and scalped the mowing. That farm was a great place for a kid to grow up (just don't ask them!), and now the third family since WWII has 3 little ones running around and climbing fruit trees!

Back to nails, My oldest got a job as a helper on a carpentry crew when he turned 16. They were amazed how well he could drive nails, left and right handed. He thought it was heaven to have New Sinker and New Common nails!

Ivan

Don't never throw away a bolt or screw because you will need it someday. I also remember women cutting out zippers and cutting off buttons on clothes before putting them in the rag sack. A different time and the world was in a different place. Larry

And I quote: "Don't say you're not, say you hope you don't have to . . . "

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

The two main storage containers in the old days were coffee cans and cigar boxes.

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Ron
Southern IL

My wife is gone for the day and I can't post pictures but I have a 3# can. It's a Kroger brand and the price is still on the can. It's about 5/8 in. taller than a Maxwell 35 1/2 oz can but the same dia. The price on the can is $6.69. I assume that is the original price but it might be sticker from something else. I also have a Kirkland 3# can and it is the same dia. as the Maxwell can but 1 1/8 in. taller and on the bottom of the can is "best by 05/10/20" so I don't think it's very old.
Coffee cans are also great for storing pistol reloads. A coffee can full can repel an attack on the fort. Larry

I have glass jars, yes GLASS jars, in my garage full of screws, bolts, nuts and washers, all sorted nicely and on the shelf if ever needed. Wonder where I got the idea to do that from?

I live in Texas now, but lived 67 years in SEMO, Cape Girardeau. We had a farm in Bollinger County with several of those old oak buildings on it. I know the pain.

Fresh out of high school I was working for my Uncle who was the best jerry rigger I have ever met.
I was hurt in an accident and could not walk and thought I would not be able to work for weeks.
With a big smile on his face he whipped out a big crate of used nails and had me straighten them until I could walk again.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I worked in, then managed, a retail store in Manhattan. One of my fellow employees was a Japanese woman. She was a war bride, and a hard worker. Married a black GI. (They had a gorgeous daughter who was 20 or so, and I was kinda interested but that never went anywhere.)

A story she told me, about adapting to life in the US: Shortly after her husband and she returned to the US, and civilian life, one night she was mending her husband's shirt.

He said to her, "What are you doing?"

She said, "I'm mending your shirt."

He said, "You don't have to do that, honey. We'll just buy another one."

She said it made her realize what a rich country the US was, and how fortunate she was to have married her husband and moved here.

My parents divorced when I was 7 or so. We grew up dirt poor living with my mom. Father never around growing up. Mother passed away several years ago and I ended up with an old mantel clock they had from Germany where I was born. I now care for my 90 year old father and "inherited" a cheap Montgomery Wards grandfather clock. The kicker is neither of them works! My total inheritance, have them both in my basement for now.

You oughta get 'em fixed, Huskerguy.

(Come go think of it, one of our members, maybe more, collects and fixes old clocks as a hobby. Very often the things that mean the most to us aren't about monetary value.)

I used to keep screws and small nuts and bolts in glass jars, I would screw the covers to a beam over my work.

Sent from my LGL455DL using Tapatalk

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Don

The summer I turned 4 my dad and two older brothers who were 15 and
16 built a barn using green oak. I remember being afraid they would fall
off the rafters and playing with my dad's bird dog pups.
The barn was never painted and is still standing straight. My nephew owns
the home place and has had to replace some of the sheet iron but not that
oak lumber. The oak logs were cut on the farm and hauled 2 miles to a
saw mill using a team and wagon, hauled the lumber home the same way.
All those trees were cut using a cross cut saw. The foundation was poured
using gravel from the creek and some kind of cement mixer with an engine.
The world has turned a lot in those 70+ years.
I salvaged a house, built before the war between the states, in Fort Smith,
Ar. and still have some of the lumber. Full 2 inch lumber, mostly pine, and
put together using square cut wrought iron nails. I've pulled a lot of those
nails and have a couple jars with different sizes.
And of course, my wife claims that I'm a hoarder.

A friend was a carpenter. When he was an apprentice, new to the trade, one of his jobs was straightening out nails for re-use. Dad, (RIP), always held on to fasteners. "You never know when you might need this." There were jars & cans of assorted screws, nuts, bolts, cotter pins and the like all over the basement and garage. He grew up during the Depression, I figured that was the reason.

My parents married at the height of the depression so everything mentioned here has been a part of my life. Saved lumber, nuts, bolts, screws, straightening nails, mending clothes, darning socks, reusing Christmas paper. My mother had a little gadget that she bought at the county fair in the late 40's or early 50's that could fix the "runs" in her nylons. It worked quite well.

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Super Snooper

Don't forget baby food jars.

So true. I got a bunch of my dad's shirts after he died 5 years ago and I wear them now all the time as a remembrance of him.

So true, I have a fake Persian fur coat that was one of my Dad's few "nice" gifts to my Mother. I wear it occasionally, my daughter wore it to her Senior Prom (she was very close to her Grandma)
And aprons!

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Super Snooper

My sub-roof is recycled plywood from a house I tore down, mostly attached with the used nails that held it in place at its prior location.

I tend not to throw anything away that 'might' be useful. Visiting my parents last Christmas, could barely move through the garage, when you going to clean this up? 'When we get some more storage sheds (they have 5) to put up in the backyard, never know when we might need this stuff.'

Guess I came by it naturally.

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SWCA #2817

Sorry if it is too much of a drift, remove if necessary.

Grandma's Apron
The principal use of Grandma’s apron was to protect the dress underneath, because she only had a few, it was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material, but along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven.
It was wonderful for drying children’s tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears…
From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.
When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids.
And when the weather was cold grandma wrapped it around her arms.
Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow, bent over the hot wood stove.
Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron.
From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables.
After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls.
In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.
When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.
When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the men-folk knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.
It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that ‘old-time apron’ that served so many purposes.
Grandma used to set her hot baked apple pies on the window sill to cool.
Her granddaughters set theirs on the window sill to thaw.
They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs were on that apron.
I never caught anything from an apron…But Love. (Author Unknown )

I recall in the very late 1950s, my dad going to a nearby abandoned farmstead and tearing down buildings for the lumber in them. Then he built a shop and chicken house on his and moms new farmstead.some of those buildings are still standing but are looking pretty ragged these days.

I still do this. I have buckets, coffee cans, and boxes full of mixed screws, nuts, washers, etc. I even removed every fastener I could from the body of a Jeep I scrapped last year before hauling it to the recycler.

One time we remodeled our bathroom and I took the hinges off the old broken toilet seat and tossed them in one of my bolt buckets. A few years later when my wife sat down on the "throne" one of the seat hinges broke. I looked at it and said "I think I have one of those."

A few minutes rummaging around in the shop and I came back with a replacement, and a few minutes later it was installed.

She looked at me in amazement and said something like "I guess now I can't ever give you a hard time about keeping that kind of 'junk' again!"

That was 30 years ago, and she never has...

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Send lawyers, guns & money...

I have made quite a few crooked nails in my life. I guess my hammering ability ain't all that good. However, I can't remember ever throwing one out. I never saved any of them. I just pounded it straight and put it back in the hole right then and there.

I learned that from my Grandpa. Now that he is on my mind, I just remembered that he would have been 125 years old this month...

(some times I hate this forum - it makes me too nostalgic)

I remember an older neighbor when I was a kid who kept all his old reusable screws, nails, and such in mayonnaise jars. He had screwed the lids to the underside of a shelf and stored the jars by screwing them onto the lids. I remember thinking he was a genius when I was a kid. Once when I was pretty young he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for nearly two weeks. The day after he came home he was up on his roof tearing off shingles to re roof his house. He got it done in less than a week by himself. I asked him if I could help, but he said no. Truthfully, I would have just been in the way, and he knew that.

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Or something like that . . .