I like old tools. They’re my primary focus when antiquing. They have an individual history with their prior owners, which I don’t know about but enjoy imagining, and I feel a sense of purpose when I buy one and add to its legacy. Plus they’re usually made better than their contemporary counterparts, have already proven their durability, and cost less.
And so it was that with the Veterans Day holiday, I went antiquing with Liz and acquired this bench vise:
I wanted to replace the cheap clamp-on that I had been using, which would never stay in place no matter how hard I cranked down its grips. Now I have a bench-mounted beast. 3 5/8, 2″ bolts say that it’s not going anywhere! I even added lock washers.
The old vise.
And for the second best part: researching the crap out of it! Starting with the cast printing, which reads “THE DESMOND STEPHAN MFG. CO.”
The Desmond-Stephan Manufacturing Company was founded sometime over 100 years ago1. It’s odd that I can’t find an exact date of incorporation, even on their own website2. I’m guessing that they don’t use it as their established date because they were probably a family business when they started operations and tax codes back then were somewhat different and they didn’t get an EIN until much later – ergo they don’t view that as their start date and want to proudly claim their lengthier history.
The vise design and manufacturing actually predated them anyway, having been the property of Simplex Tool Company, later Simplex Corporation, and was sold to Desmond-Stephan in 1931, who continued to make the vises until 1964, when they in turn sold the rights to Ridge Tool Company3. I’m assuming then that my particular vise was made by Desmond-Stephan during this 1931-1964 time period.
My vise, with a single-swivel base and a 3.75″ jaw width, is also conveniently listed in a company catalog from 19414. It has a listed price of $15. Adjusted for inflation using CPI, that’s around $320 today5. I got guud dearl!
Additionally, just for more historical nerding out; The Desmond-Stephan Manufacturing Company; which is in Urbana, OH; was just today at the time of me writing this post coincidentally featured in the local news’ callout that Ohio Magazine named the city as one of Ohio’s 5 best hometowns6. So we get a little bit of local Americana as part of the story too.
So there we have it: a chance find on an antique tool for a good price and made by a local company that’s apparently in one of Ohio’s best little towns to grow up in. I will feel honored the next time I have to cut a board or sharpen a lawnmower blade.
(Or dispatch of a murderous sentient doll.)
Can you believe Apple won’t let me take a screenshot of content I’ve purchased through them? I had to get creative with getting this pic.
We’re all familiar with bags of potato chips, having cried out in irritation upon opening a large puffy bag of salty cholesterol, only to find a lackluster final count of individual product settled in oily mylar at the bottom of the false abyss.
Boo! Hiss!
And we accuse Lay’s of shrinkflation, and they say “Nuh uh! We didn’t do that.”
And we post pictures of historical trends in product reduction, and they say “We didn’t decrease the percentage of product to packaging ratio.”
And then we say “Nuh uh! You totally did!”. And while not experts, none of us buy into 1.034569 ounces being a standard serving size, to which Lay’s replies “Okay, we reduced size but it was to be more aligned with healthy serving size diets. See, we’re actually looking out for your wellbeing. You’re welcome.” And we might almost believe that, were it not for the price increase alongside product size reduction.
But potato chips are just the most obvious example, because the size reduction also made slack fill more obvious. When a bag was big and product content was 50%, we didn’t notice as much because faces could still be stuffed. When bags shrunk 30%, it didn’t matter if product content may have actually remained at 50%, because faces couldn’t be as effectively stuffed. And then we noticed!
Surely some government agency is out there to protect us from these shenanigans!
And indeed there is: the FDA:
So presumably, while shrinkflation is totally legal, slack fill isn’t necessarily, so if indeed the percentage of potato chips has remained constant, then Lay’s is in the right, despite the public’s resentment on limited face-stuffing. But they’re still jerks.
Anyway, on to the next point. One might notice that nowhere in this document is the word “medicine” used. Obviously prescriptions wouldn’t fall under this, but one might assume that OTC medications – a consumer retail product – would. And yet, it doesn’t.
Even ignoring the packaging waste, it’s rather egregious that everything in the left highlighted box easily fit into the bottle on the right. And there were already prior pills still in that bottle!
So why don’t these anti-consumer rules apply to medicine? Why did the FDA, whose very name has “Drug” in it, make this decision? I don’t know, because I can’t find any such explanation on their website. Someone tell me if you find out. Until then:
Fuck you, FDA
Fuck you, Lay’s (Frito-Lay/Pepsico)
And fuck you, Astra AB/AstraZeneca
And maybe Costco too, because they might have had a hand in it.
How much thought do you give to the contents of your pockets on a daily basis? Probably not much, because most normal people organically adapt to a practical loadout without much consideration. If I leave the house, I have my phone, keys, and wallet as minimums. Because I’m likely to need those items. I don’t need a schematic.
But prepping has now infiltrated our pants. I need to carry, at a minimum apparently, a small version of every possible tool I might need in the remotest of circumstances. I might need to break a window, bandage a gunshot wound, and set off a visual SOS beacon…on my adventure to Home Depot to buy a 2×4. Suburbia is a jungle!
I mock these dweebs and the EDC community. Being prepared is one thing, but obsession only leads to anxiety. Why do people post pictures of the items they regularly carry? How starved are we for acknowledgment as to solicit feedback from an anonymous public on my Swiss Army knife?
After leading a comfortable life there appears to be a need for street cred. So you completed medical school, and that required sacrificing a particular lifestyle – one that demanded some ruggedness and the potential for violence, so you’re not a real man. So you buy a gun and carry a knife. You know you’re a poser, so you overthink what this missing lifestyle entails and emulate it, but because you know you’re not genuine you need the validation. It’s compensation.
This is why normal product searches have turned into exercises of lexiconical stupidity. I wanted to buy a pocket flashlight because, as a homeowner, I always seem to need one on hand. There’s always a dark crevasse that something rolled into, or that contains a screw I need to tighten, or a deer that needs to be scared out of my vegetable garden at night. But could I find a pocket flashlight that met my desired specs? Not at first. Because I had to search for “tactical” flashlight. As if I’m going to whack a Taliban in the skull with it. Again, suburbia is indeed quite the jungle! Or, sandy battlefield.
So let’s all just stop with the nonsense please. I carry a folding pocket knife, not because of those marauding Taliban. And it doesn’t need to be named “The Stabinator 3000” or some other retarded name. It needs to cut boxes and packaging and garden produce. It doesn’t need to be a self-defense tool, and neither does my flashlight. Sigh.
Anyway, here’s what I got:
To its credit, it was not marketed as tactical, though it was the marketing term I used to find it.
Sigh again.
And it fits nicely against my tactical keychain in my tactical cargo pants.
Now that I’m 40, I’ve done some reflecting. In all, I don’t have too many complaints when I really think about it. I mean, America’s golden age – at least in recent history and the era we still seem to consider the gold standard (hehe) – was the 1950s and 60s, and a time in which the war and postwar generations saw large economic growth.
Just look at those GDP spikes, compared to 2007, when I entered the workforce full time! Sure there were some recessions, and the Boomers still whine about how bad interest rates were in 1980 (and how so many of them were almost drafted for The Vietnam War), but look at the growth recovery following each of those events, compared to the 2008 Great Recession.
And studies which I won’t bother to cite because you have a search engine too have long mockingly laughed at my generation’s plight, as those who enter the workforce in a recession are doomed to never make much money. And yet, here Liz and I sit, apparently as 12%-ers. And also apparently I’ll be a multi-millionaire at retirement according to projections. And like most of my generation, I normally don’t discuss my financial situation, because we just don’t want to get into it with a boomer. But sometimes I think it’s healthy to brag about one’s accomplishments and this one in particular is contrary to everything I was told was going to happen, thanks to boomer generational masturbatory article headlines (“Your kids are lazy and won’t get a job and they’re moving back home to take your money”).
But I started off on a tangent. I meant to post some cheap laughs at becoming older, but I’m apparently so adversarialy positive about my situation that I got distracted with everything good that’s happened on my journey to becoming middle-aged.
Oh well. Fodder for my next post I suppose, since I’m almost hitting 400 words here! Next time – how long it takes to grow out a damaged fingernail! Woo!
And its history and cultural significance. Also: should civilians be allowed to own one?
AR-15s. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Yes, this needs to be done, for once by someone who doesn’t feel strongly about them either way.
But first, let’s begin with the gun’s origin. As in, guns in general. The gun, having been invented after humanity’s shift from hunter/gatherers to farming and ranching, did not originally serve the primary purpose of food attainment. It was quickly adapted of course, but it’s imperative to understand that the design of guns has not historically considered hunting as its primary function. They are, above all, intended to kill people. They are weapons of war.
But many guns are also built on adapted platforms in order to boost their hunting and target-shooting efficacy at the cost of human-killing practicality, and I’m glad myself because these pursuits certainly interest me more than people-perforation. They became popular with rural dwellers because their environment benefited from them. Shooting crows and raccoons was necessary to protect crops. And hunting, while not necessary, added meat to the table. My father was a farmboy and taught me how to hunt. Gun ownership, for recreational non-people-killing uses had become cultural in our evolving society. Their use had changed in their civilian functions.
But now it’s shifting back away from practical civilian rural use and into military. Family farms gave over to conglomerates and our economy doesn’t support rural life nearly as much as urban. Simply put, the gun culture of practicality waned, and far fewer people now grow up familiarized with guns. Now, most peoples’ initiation into the gun world is through watching, rather than doing. And guns in media lean heavily to the people-killing variety.
So what does this mean for the AR-15? Well, now let’s look at modern military gun design.
M1 Garands – a battle rifle. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
If we begin the story with the standardized bullet cartridge design, then I can confidently say that the first modern guns were battle rifles, which are defined as single and semi-auto full rifle cartridge weapons. They have long barrels and large bullets. They hit hard and have a long range, but are unwieldy in close quarters.
M1 Carbine. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
So the carbine was developed. Arguments abound on their definition, but I would say that they’re short rifles designed around pistol cartridges, although they certainly have their share of custom-designed rounds. They sacrifice power and range for maneuverability.
Browning Automatic Rifle – a light machine gun. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
To support these weapons, light machine guns were developed. They took the power and range of battle rifles and added automatic fire. Obviously they were not maneuverable, but that automatic fire was also then employed for…
Thompson submachine gun. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Submachine guns. They sacrificed even more power and range than carbines in favor of maximum maneuverability and automatic fire, using pistol cartridges so they could be somewhat manageable.
StG 44 – the OG of assault rifles. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Herein lied the gap. An intermediate weapon was needed that was somewhere around a carbine in terms of maneuverability, but with more powerful rounds and fully automatic capability. And so, in the later stages of WWII, the assault rifle was born. It uses an intermediate rifle cartridge that’s controllable under automatic fire, with the bonus of adding a select fire switch so the user can choose between firing speed and accuracy tradeoffs. It became the base for all modern military loadouts. And one of these designs became the M16, the US military’s standard light arm until very recently.
M16 – the American assault rifle. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Ah, but the M16 isn’t the AR-15. True. The AR-15 became a civilian variant of a rejected military design to build a semi-automatic full rifle cartridge battle rifle/carbine hybrid, originally the AR-10, (losing out to the M14), but its design was later used as the base for the M16. The AR-10, which fired a full (short-stroke) rifle cartridge, was also later produced as the AR-15, which uses the smaller assault rifle cartridge. Thus began the US military’s switch from battle rifles to true assault rifles.
M4 carbine. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Furthermore, the M16 later underwent an adaptation into a reduced frame version, the M4, as urban warfare became the more common engagement environment, highly resembling the civilian AR-15.
So where are we at now?
As stated above, gun culture has shifted from recreational to paramilitary, and as a result people buying guns now gravitate to ones that resemble military guns in form and function. And the primary American armed forces gun in use for decades matches very closely the AR-15. And with its design patent expired, it’s also now cheap and widely available. Hence its popularity.
And now, with the AR-15’s origin explained along with the history of America’s shifting gun culture adopting it, the question remains: should civilians be allowed to own one?
Not so fast. Now we have to explain exactly what it is.
Politically-motivated pedants will be quick to point out what it isn’t: an assault rifle. They do this to discredit their opposition, who often refers to it as such. Because the “AR” in “AR-15” doesn’t stand for “assault rifle”, it stands for “Armalite rifle”, it’s original designer and manufacturer. Yes – it’s an easy mistake to make, and while I hate the smugness of those who make that correction, it is an important distinction. The original AR-10 design – a battle rifle – became both the M16 – an assault rifle – and the AR-15 – not an assault rifle by definition. Technically, it’s called the AR-15 carbine, but I think this is wrong too. I consider a true carbine to be a reduced frame battle rifle. No, the AR-15 is a reduced frame assault rifle, which needs a different definition (there is also the PDW, which I’ll just quickly define here as a submachine gun that shoots reduced-intermediate assault rifle cartridges), but even then there’s some inconsistencies with the definition because an assault rifle has automatic fire capability selection (I consider burst-fire automatic fire).
So we can’t define it on existing definitions. There – I said it. It’s a hybrid weapon: an assault rifle/carbine. It doesn’t fit into a nice box.
So should civilians be allowed to own one?
Promoters call it a “modular weapon platform” or other such weasel terms. Fine, I’ll agree with the platform being modular, but it’s this modularity that detracts from its credibility in the civilian gun culture. Sure you could eradicate varmints with it, but it’s overkill. And if you went hunting with it, you’d get your ass laughed out of the woods by old-timers. And its cartridge isn’t even legal for deer in many states, so I dunno what game you’d take with it.
The self-defense promoters lean on its people-killing effectiveness, which I can’t argue against. And that’s the double-edged sword right there. Defense…or offense via mass shootings?
And the Second Amendment-ers simply say it’s their American right. Which is dubious ground to stand on, even if a valid argument.
That question, I’m not going to answer. If the answer were easy, it would have already been answered. But hopefully this will provide some background on the damn thing’s origin and culture of ownership.
