I just found out this morning that Vaughn & Bushnell Manufacturing Co of Illinois has just shut their doors after celebrating their 150th anniversary. They manufactured extremely high quality hammers, axes, crowbars and pry bars among other items too. They not only sold products under their own name, they private labeled for Snap-On, Stanley, Craftsman, Klein etc. I believe there will be over 140 employees out of work and the small town they are located in will now feel the effect.

Apparently there was a buy out deal from another corporation and the deal fell apart. The article is below if anyone cares to read it. Their products were top of the line and will be dearly missed in the tool market place.


150-Year-Old Vaughan Plant Closing after Nixed Buyout - Modern Distribution Management

Bad news indeed Time to keep an eye out for old Vaughan tools at the secondhand stores I frequent.

Thanks for the link. I'll pass it on to Stuart Deutsch of Toolguyd.com as I see he hasn't posted this info yet.

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

American manufacturing has declined to the point of national shame. We were a manufacturing Giant, the Arsenal of Democracy, manufacturing enough equipment for a two front world wide war as well as keeping our Allies supplied. Small manufacturing contractors are at the heart of a robust manufacturing enterprise. It’s shameful to see these smaller companies go under……..

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"Your other right........."

It is not only the small manufacturers, it is all of the medium and small producers of anything that are being run out of the markets. Think family and small farmers.
While the consolidation for the sake of buying and market place power may be good for the survivors of the merger (and their stockholders), is may not be helpful to us, the consumers.
Albertson and Kroeger merger are/were blocked by the FTC, they believed the merger would lead to higher prices, lower quality and harm to the workers of these two companies.
The companies' reason was to keep competitive since the booming growth of Walmart, Costco and Amazon.

How could this be, best economy ever.

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LIVE FROM THE DAWGHOUSE

This is why fast-food workers want a living wage rather than pin money. Jobs that support a family (or even an individual) are getting harder to find. As I have commented elsewhere, the days of everyone having a job are numbered, and the period of change has started and will only get uglier.

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Release the Kraken

You're exactly right. The amount of money a young couple needs to bring in today to have what historically has been a middle class life style is brutal to achieve, at least it is where I live in northern New England. $100K seems like nothing today, wasn't long ago when it was real money.

And yet the universities are filling up with what my gf (in WA) sometimes cynically refers to as, "the precious pearls of the future." She teaches molec. biology and genetics. Some have no seeming aptitude for science and therefore do badly and will be in acres of debt by the time they graduate to face an uncertain future. Some, of course, are genuinely suited to the task and will do well but they're in the minority.

My (widowed) neighbour up the street has 3 kids. The oldest is 20, "has brains for days" and is studying to be a doctor and will do well. The daughter is nearly 19, a real "horse whisper" but also has a real talent for finance and is studing to be an accountant. The youngest is 16 with a learning disability but is brilliant with engines and mechanical stuff and will also do well. There is hope for the future there and I think she will be well provided for in her dotage

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

Me mum was fond of the term "pin money".

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Being a fast food employee has little future. Saw an interesting feature on the news TV yesterday that a couple of California chains are installing automated equipment to replace human workers in response to the new CA $20 hourly minimum. They were demonstrating a new machine that did everything a human could do to fry and build a burger. It was pretty neat. I have read that McDonald's has been prototyping their automated restaurant in Australia for several years. Machines don't get paid leave, sick days, or join unions. Just a little oil every day.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

In Richmond, BC (near Vancouver) which has a v. large Chinese population, "bubble tea" is a big item. One bubble tea shop has installed an android server named Toffee.

YMMV, but gag me with a chopstick.

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

Fast food were never and are still not intended to support a family. They are entry level jobs for high school kids or pension supplement jobs for retired people.

There are numerous reasons why full time jobs in the US are drying up, but I'm not going to step into the "politics not allowed" minefield so Y'all will have to sort it out without me.

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Can open, worms everywhere.

What exactly is this living wage?

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Sure you did

Mike—It depends on how much you like fast woman and slow ponies!

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Possum—The other white meat!

The music has been playing for decades, most people just arent paying attention. We are not the juggernaut of spending that we were following WWII, it reached a pinnacle years ago when smaller countries began to flood our market with cheap alternatives, cheap but well made. The auto industry is a good example. I can remember leaving my folks house with a modicum of tools that I had collected to keep my cars running, bought my first house and did nearly all of the repairs, collecting more tools along the way to get the job done. My neighbor kid is in his early 30's, walked into my shop and said "Where did you get all these tools?" Think about it all of the old tool companies have folded over the years and are now collectible, when it comes to axes and such Vaughn and Plumb, etc. were what you bought in order to get quality. I remember when Snap On started selling Blue Point which I think were from Taiwan, excellent tools, just not quite up to Snap On quality. I bought my first set of ratcheting box end wrenches made by Blue Point and have never had a lick of trouble from them.
There isn't nearly the market for hand tools that there used to be following our generation and before, some Millenials are interested but not to the degree we were. Home ownership used to mean work, at least at my income level it did. That was referred to as "sweat equity".
People today want to snap their fingers and get stuff fixed, they don't buy old furniture and repair it, they go to Ikea. Even the new appliances are not built to be repaired, just replaced. I used to change out lower heating elements on our water heater due to the high mineral content about every two years or so. There was a place in town that specialized in appliance repair parts, you could fix anything, they went out of business twenty years ago.

Given the huge differences in the cost of living across the US, YMMV applies big time. The median house price in Vegas is now over $400k, and a search on Zillow reveals that typically means a single family home of 1600 sq ft or less. At current mortgage rates that a monthly payment of ~$2600. Dial in some property taxes, the fact we have some of the highest car insurance and registration costs in the nation, and you can run the numbers on what a family with a couple of kids needs to bring in to live.

OK, so rent an apartment, many might say. In the cheap non-soundproofed ghettos they erect here, good luck with that.

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Release the Kraken

Pretty soon, very little of anything will be made here.

Hoping someone gets back in, tariffs the hell out of foreign produced garbage and forces companies back here because it'd be more cost effective...

The US is in need of a serious revival of American Manufacturing.

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Go ahead... make my day.

America has to be in the top 3 countries that manufacture internet content. Seems like every other “success story” in the media showcases the latest “Whizz-content-creator” worth millions overnite with 20 million followers. Joe

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Wisdom chases me; I'm faster

Producing very little of any real value…

There is no magic wand.

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Sure you did

The fly in the ointment being that we (and that includes us here in Canada) have become used to the lower prices of foreign-made products. (And not all the foreign stuff is garbage. I believe Hilti products are made "over there" but the quality is still high.)

A year or so ago I bought a brand-new pair of Malco locking-jaw pliers, made in the original Vise-Grip factory, which Malco had taken over. They were not cheap. Alas, Malco apparently couldn't make the arrangement work and closed the factory after only about a year. A few US-made ones may still be available rom Harry Epstein Ltd., but the US-made line is gone for good.

Doesn't always apply, though. I don't buy Bosch drill bits because they are made in China, preferring Cle-line, Chicago Latrobe, which are still US-made, or Jet, from Japan(?) but the price is about the same. And I read recently that the parent company of Cle-line, Chicago Latrobe etc. was recently sold by their previous Chinese owners to Walter Surface Technologies, which is in Québec.

Sad times.

Yep. Clearly the future lies in "influencers."

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

We don't have the "Do It Yourselfers" we once had. Harbor Freight suits them just fine. Lots of folks buy a tool for one job, so they don't care about quality. Recently I was helping my grand daughter fix something on her car. I didn't have any tools with me and I was at her house. I told her to bring me a flat head screwdriver. She brought me a butter knife. At least it worked. One of my favorite gifts to relatives is a hand tool set...except my SIL. He is a welder and builds warships. He's got lots of good tools. I still have many quality hand tools that I bought over 50 years ago. I started with Craftsman, when they were still made here, and went up. If we ever get into another major war parts are going to be hard to find. I often wonder how many Chinese bots are hidden in our war machines. Check your pawn shops. Most have a used tool bin and lots of them have some really good stuff. I look for broken tools that have a lifetime warranty. Almost free tools.

Ruthie keeps this in her car.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

You buy from Harbor Freight now. We have all you need. Send Yankee dollars to Peking.

Yep ! Just glad many years ago, just out of high school, I worked for a Jeep dealer for a couple years, and we had a Snap-On tool truck show up every 2 weeks. Bought a hell of a lot of tools back then, and sometimes some Craftsman as well . I still have them all today ...much better quality that today's foreign junk.

This scares me, especially since most are devoid of personality or a soul, and don't produce anything of usable content or useful videos...

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Go ahead... make my day.

I am content paying more for better quality. Plus I don't like giving money to Big Red over in the East.

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Go ahead... make my day.

re the Vaughan closure, as I mentioned above, I alerted Toolguyd about this and he posted it on his website with chief38's link, and is trying to get more information. Also a number of comments from readers there. So far he said:

From the reports, if they’re accurate, it’s unclear if Vaughan is closing their main factory, or if Vaughan is closing and shuttering their factory along with it.

I could not find any announcement, or any WARN notice, which would be required for a mass layoff.

I made several calls to Vaughan but was unable to connect with anyone who could confirm these reports or provide clarity. I emailed several people at the company and have not heard back yet.

...Vaughan hasn’t confirmed or denied reports of their factory closure, but things aren’t looking optimistic.

It’s not good that news reports are talking about Vaughan closing down “at an unannounced date,” and even worse that nobody at the company has since come out to say “no – we’re all good here.”

I also couldn’t confirm that there will be a job fair exclusively for Vaughan employees and factory workers, as the Bushnell Recreation Center doesn’t have a public page or calendar.

At this time we don’t have all the facts, but things aren’t looking good.

He's pretty good at ferreting out information and has a number of contacts in industry, so it will be interesting to see what he comes up with.

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

My fathers advice was to buy quality tools as you need them to do a job. I did that and had quality tools for the jobs I did.
However, I then had 2 kids, they grew up and became teenagers, then 'adults', along the way they borrowed my tools.
Now, I have very few of my tools and neither do my kids.
Learned a valuable lesson - don't have kids....

That doesn't work for most of America in the current paycheck-to-paycheck society.

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Release the Kraken

If I had the disposable income to purchase American made hardware I would but my budget dictates otherwise.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Buy once cry once as the saying goes.

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Sure you did

I was fortunate to have a job where I could buy from Snap-on and MAC tools. When I retired I kept enough to work on My stuff and sold the rest to the Company. Lots of specialty tools that I would never use. Didn't loan them either.

I could afford to buy a tool from time to time off the Snap-On and MAC truck. I already had a full set of old school Craftsman stuff but ever now and then the guy would be holding a ratcheting screwdriver that just buzzed when he spun it, must have had 60 locking points or better and to top it off was signed by Dale Earnhardt hisself, had to have it and to this day I will grab that screwdriver and mess with the bits just because it ratchets so sweetly. I picked up both my 3/8" and 1/2" Snap-On torque wrenches from pawn shops, I did the same with nearly all of my air tools and had them refurbished by a local dealer, last the rest of my life.
We had guys that would take their annual tool allowance and go to Harbour Freight to buy new tools every year, they could have instead bought quality from Snap-On or MAC and had those replaced they broke or needed repair and then given the dealer twelve monthly payments equal to the total allowance. Most of the mechanics never saw their tool allowance, it just went right to the Snap-On guy...they were buying Snap-On rolling tool boxes with built in battery chargers. Most of my guys had over $20K in tools, that was twelve years ago when I was still working as their Union Rep.

Large companies lobby the government to enact regulations that smaller companies cannot afford; thereby increasing prices or running them out of business. Regulation correlates nicely with the decline of American manufacturing.

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SWCA #3356, SWHF#611

Kinman, I agree with most everything you have said, except the remark about Snap-On Tools line of Blue Point Tools being made in Taiwan. I don’t know your age or background but I spent 47 years working on cars and trucks, starting in 1957. I quit finally in 2007 and still work on my vehicles and a friends vehicle once in a while. When I graduated high school in 1959 my Mom and Dad bought me a nice Snap-on Tool Box (4 drawer, top tray) full of Snap-on tools and some Blue Point tools, box ends, combination, open ends, sockets, both 1/2” drive and 3/8” drive and screwdrivers and Pliars and crescents, and ratchets. Over 50 or so years I purchased mostly Snap-On tools but also Mac, Matco, Craftsman, and many more. I agree that we don’t make anything in the USA like we used to and it’s a shame.

Snap-On’s line of Blue Point Tools were never made in China to my knowledge. Unless something has changed the Blue Point line was made in the USA. I’ve posted 2 pictures of Blue Point open end wrenches with USA shown on the reverse side. I know you remember when Snap-On dated they’re tools from year to year with numbers, then alpha prefix and I don’t know how they’re dating system works now. Notice the number 9 shown on the back side of the wrenches. These Blue Point open end wrenches are from my original set manufactured in 1959.

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James
On the Llano Estacado

from "Toolguyd" yesterday, who contacted Vaughan:

I have been unable to connect with any marketing and communications contacts, but heard back from customer service on 4/16/24:

All I know is we are still accepting orders; unfortunately, I do not have any information to share with you at this time.

We are hoping to find out more details soon, but at this time, I do not have any more information than what you already heard.

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"I drank WHAT?" (Socrates)

James, With all respect I am not intending to start an argument. I have a set of combination open/box end ratcheting wrenches in both metric and standard that are on one side marked BLUE POINT, on the other side they are marked BOER and in very small print TAIWAN. These wrenches were purchased off the Snap-On truck at the maintenance facility I worked at probably in the vicinity of 15-20 years ago. It was explained to me when I questioned the dealer that Blue Point was Snap-Ons entry level. I was attracted to their all metal construction and fine gearing, contrary to many tool manufacturers going to plastic switch levers. I have found in many cases that compared to some American manufacturers tools manufactured in Taiwan provide much more bang for the buck. I will use Delta vs Jet electric tools as an example. Years ago I was researching a purchase of electric tools not only for myself but others. I found that although Delta and Jet were basically the same tool when it came to Lathes, Drill Presses, etc. Jet produced in Taiwan was still using copper windings in their electric motors, Delta was trying to save money and used aluminum. Copper is far superior and produces a cooler running and high efficiency motor. I went with Jet and have never had a lick of trouble with any of my large electric tools.

My nuts have no idea where my tool was made.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

From past experience in reviewing Quality control audits of respiratory equipment manufacturers all over the world, Taiwan is above average in QC. Chinese plants are marginal. I find my tools that came from Taiwan acceptable, many are very good.

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Kind regards, Heinz

I don’t recall seeing Made in China in the fire service.

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Sure you did

Kinman, an argument was not my intention. I’ve not bought any Snap-On, Blue Point tools in the last 20 years. It’s clear to me by what you said that some, if not all, of the Blue Point tools are made in Taiwan. I do know that Snap-On tools removed the USA that was stamped on their 1/2” and 3/8” drive ratchets and sockets about 8-10 years ago and the technicians and the general
public questioned why. Were Snap-on products being made in China they asked. Nothing but rambling answers from the Snap-On tool truck drivers and owners.

chief38 posted the information about Vaughn-Bushnell Tool Company closing their doors after 150 years of operation. It’s certainly sad to read that another USA Company cannot stay in business after all these years. It just seems that our country doesn’t make anything anymore compared to what our country is capable of manufacturing. The USA was once the manufacturing giant of the world, but not anymore.

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James
On the Llano Estacado