Yesterday at dawn I drove east into the sunrise, forty minutes from metro Denver, to the high plains small town of Byers, Colorado. A local auction house had advertised a large lot of planes, saws, chisels, and other hand tools. A "collector" had moved east and consigned his stuff to be sold.
It was the second of three lots, or advertised as such. In the auctioneer's ad, photos showed about a hundred iron planes, twenty five or so wooden planes, and boxes and boxes of chisels, bits, augers, and more, with the saws taped up into bundles of a half dozen or so.
I got there early to view everything and was sorely disappointed. Most all the iron planes were Stanley, of course, but with missing parts, rust, damage, welded repairs, and hardly any had handles or totes one would want. But there were sure a lot of them. All had price tags, as the "collector" must have been actually a seller, likely selling out of barns or sheds.
The wooden planes were firewood. Not one had a decent iron, many had none, most that had wedges were done with badly-done replacements, and the bodies were split and cracked.
I looked through all the chisels, maybe 100 of them, and saw no 720s or 750s. Two in the lot were old Buck Brothers. Most had no markings.
My location, metro Denver, is a poor one for antique and vintage tools. In over a year of poring through Craigslist ads for tools and yard sales and estate sales, I have never seen anything offered that seemed worth restoring.