Alloy Artifacts is an online tool museum and resource center for information on 20th century hand tools. You'll find thousands of high-quality photographs of different types and makes of tools, with background history on the tool companies that helped shape the industry. We also provide tables of patents and trademarks, logo images to help identify unfamiliar tools, a timeline of tool industry events, and finally a Site Index to help find everything.

Happy 100th Birthday! May 31, 2019. As we noted a while back, today is the 100th anniversary of modern socket tools, based on the release of Blackhawk's interchangeable socket sets in 1919. We hope our readers will take time to review Blackhawk's socket tools, as well as the earlier sockets sets by Bay State Tool, Miller Combination Tool, Mossberg, and Walden.

Responsive Design Changes Complete! May 11, 2019. We've completed our planned changes and hope that visitors with mobile devices are finding the site easier to use. Please let us know if you run into any problems!

Responsive Design Changes Underway ... April 18, 2019. We recently started working on some long-planned changes to make the website more accessible to mobile devices, with the goal of having the site look good and work well on any kind of device. The changes will include features such as scalable images, smarter navigation menus, folding tables, a mobile-friendly index search facility, and various layout changes. As a demonstration of the planned changes, we've updated several pages to the newer design and invite anyone interested to try viewing them on your mobile device, or simply play around with resizing your browser window to watch the response. Currently the updated pages are the home page here and the articles on Duro/Indestro, Mossberg, Hinsdale, and Western Auto Supply. We'll be adding more as time permits.

New Index Search Now Available April 14, 2019. We've added a new feature that lets you search the entire index using keywords such as company names, tool types, or model numbers. Just enter your search terms in the form at the top of the home page and hit 'Search', and a new page will come up with a ranked list of matching links. The search is case-insensitive and will find partial matches, so you don't need to enter the full keyword, and to look for multiple words together you can join them with an underscore (e.g. duro_metal_products).

Noteworthy Events for 2019 Although we usually don't mention the coming of a new calendar year, 2019 brings several events that should be of interest to our readers. The first is that Cornwell Quality Tools has reached their 100th year milestone, and we'd like to offer them a big shout-out: Congratulations on your first century! Cornwell is the first of the modern tool-truck companies to reach the century mark, and we wish them continued success in the future. Cornwell has had many achievements during its long history, but we'd like to mention a couple from their early history: Cornwell was the first company to use alloy steels for substantially all of their production, beginning at their inception in 1919, and Cornwell was also the first company to make hot-forged sockets in the standard 1/2-drive configuration, starting around 1926. A second noteworthy event for 2019 is that the U.S. copyright laws will finally release another year of publications into the public domain. Beginning in 2019, works copyrighted in 1923 or earlier are now in the public domain. Why is this important to Alloy Artifacts? Readers familiar with the slice of history documented by this site know that many of the interesting developments in the tool industry occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. But until this year, anything published in 1923 or later was potentially still under copyright, under the absurdly long copyright period granted by U.S. laws. This meant that publications from 1923 on could not be presented as full text by Google Books, which has greatly hampered our ability to track developments in the tool industry. We hope that Google will act promptly to release materials published in 1923, and that each coming year will bring new resources for historical research. One final event will probably not be noted anywhere else except here at Alloy Artifacts, but we think it should be significant for our readers. May 31, 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of modern socket technology, based on the release of Blackhawk's heavy-duty interchangeable socket sets on that date in 1919. An example of one of these early sets can be seen as the Blackhawk No. 8 Socket Set, and our article on Blackhawk will provide lots of further information.

Tool Sales Underway. The previously announced sale of our tool inventory is now underway. Please refer to the Tool Sale Announcement for details.

Major Policy Change. Please see the new Announcements section for a major policy change regarding our Tool Inventory Policy.

Ten Years and 5000+ Tools Later ... Alloy Artifacts is 10! September 2015 marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Alloy Artifacts website. From a modest beginning with three articles and ten or twenty photographs, the site has grown to offer more than 5,000 photographs of tools, with historical information for dozens of tool companies. Long-time readers may remember the "dark ages" before this site came online, when an internet search for a tool or tool company likely found nothing at all, or at best a mix of speculation and misinformation. Alloy Artifacts provides solid information in the form of photographs, references to printed material, public documents such as patents and trademarks, and (when possible) links to other online resources.

Correcting the record. We've just moved the "Pick-Up" wrench to a new entry for New Britain Manufacturing, based on new evidence that this company was not affiliated with New Britain Machine.

A New Look for the Home Page We've given our home page a long-overdue update, with an expanded slide show of sample photos. The slide show needs Javascript to operate though, so we've also added a warning in case you have Javascript disabled.

Breaking News! We've just found a long-sought example to associate a well-known maker with the Sears "AF" manufacturer's code ... see the Merit 6-Piece Wrench Set for details!

Best Wishes for the New Year! As we roll into 2016, Alloy Artifacts would like wish all of our readers a happy and prosperous New Year. We're glad to have made some important improvements here during the last few months of 2015, and we hope to build on these changes in the coming year. Planned improvements include a more mobile-friendly layout, better indexing, and of course lots more tools.

Please Update Your Links! The old Comcast pages are now gone, and we would like to ask our readers to update any bookmarks or links that refer to the old Comcast address. If you maintain web pages that refer to this site, please make sure that your links point to our new address.

Accessing the Web Pages Our new hosting site is working very well and all pages are now accessible at http://alloy-artifacts.org, with an alternate address at http://alloy-artifacts.com. We've taken advantage of the move to dust off our pages a bit -- fixing broken links and other bit-rot -- as well as adding a few minor updates. The new site will allow us to do some things that are not feasible with static pages, such as online surveys and generated pages. We hope to add some new features and content as time permits.