Giving Credit Where Due

I mention this a couple of times in this site already, but it's well worth a blog entry as well.

Ten years ago when I went looking for information about my first two vintage Black & Decker Workmates, I found Kirk Eppler's pages on the photo-sharing service SmugMug. He documented a 2008 meeting of old-tool enthusiasts, the Bay Area Galoots, where they brought their Workmates of various vintages together and compared them side-by-side.

Kirk created a spreadsheet cataloging those fifteen or so Workmates by their features, along with the Type numbers for those that could be identified, and he also posted numerous photos. This was enormously helpful to me as I began studying the variety of vintage Workmates that were manufactured. Since Black & Decker had hardly any information available about these models (which were then 30 or more years old) and no one else had done anything similar, this was the only starting point I found.

The next major resource I found was a lengthy message thread about the Workmate on the Garage Journal forum. When I found it in 2016 or so, it was 25 or 30 pages long; as of today, it is 69 pages. It was amazing to find all these Workmate owner/fans who were asking questions, posting photos, and helping each other with detailed information about their own Workmates.

So, I want to acknowledge how important these two sites were to the creation of this web site; I wouldn't have been able to do it without them!