Speaker A
I'd be careful with it either way. It'll take skin off you, and it is not something to breathe in a shut-up room.
Ezra Cade explores 10 old-school American supplies that are disappearing, why, and where to still find authentic versions.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Many traditional American supplies have become scarce due to regulatory, economic, and manufacturing shifts.
- Authentic old-school products often outperform modern alternatives in quality and reliability.
- Understanding the history and use of these supplies helps preserve valuable skills and traditions.
- Some items can still be sourced through specialty retailers or secondhand markets.
- Modern convenience and safety regulations have unintentionally contributed to the loss of some traditional tools.
What the video covers
- Ezra Cade discusses 10 traditional supplies once common in American hardware stores that are now rare or unavailable.
- He explains the decline of strike anywhere matches due to shipping restrictions and cheaper lighters.
- Sodium hydroxide (lye) was pulled from shelves because of misuse in meth production, impacting soap makers.
- Nicholson files, once made in the USA, are now softer and less durable after production moved overseas.
- Real gum turpentine, derived from pine trees, has been replaced mostly by petroleum-based solvents.
- Cade shares personal anecdotes illustrating the practical differences and value of these old-school tools.
- He emphasizes the quality and longevity of older products compared to modern replacements.
- The video highlights how regulatory, economic, and manufacturing changes have affected availability.
- Ezra advises on where to still find authentic versions, including online and specialty stores.
- He encourages viewers to appreciate and preserve these traditional tools and supplies.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Safety Warning
- 01:03Overview of 10 Old-School Supplies
- 02:24Number 10: Strike Anywhere Matches
- 04:41Using and Maintaining Strike Anywhere Matches
- 04:48Number 9: Sodium Hydroxide (Lye) and Soap Making
- 06:01Number 8: Nicholson Files and Quality Decline
- 07:06File Quality and Maintenance Tips
- 08:38Number 7: Real Gum Turpentine vs. Mineral Spirits
- 10:02Traditional Uses of Gum Turpentine
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I bought a file about two years ago. Eight-inch bastard file. Same brand Paul bought.
Speaker A
Same brand I used in the mine shop for 31 years. Took it to a matic blade, and it slid off. Wouldn't bite. So, I done something I reckon most folks wouldn't think to try. I got out one of my old
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ones, and I filed the new one. And the old file cut the new file. Went in maybe a 32nd of an inch before it hit anything hard at all. Now, that's not a dull file. That's a file with a soft skin on
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it. And it means the teeth are going to break off at the corners the first real job you give it. Here's the twist.
Speaker A
Number nine got pulled off the shelf on account of what people were cooking with it, and it was never the soap makers' fault. Number three I had wrong, and I'll tell you exactly where. And number one you cannot buy at any price. I've
Speaker A
looked. Ten things that used to sit on a shelf in every hardware store in these mountains. What happened to them and where you can still get the real article. Hit subscribe. Let's count them down. Number 10, strike anywhere
Speaker A
matches. The kind you could drag across a rock, a boot sole, a fingernail if you were showing off. Not the safety match that only lights on the strip. They're not banned. Let me say that plain because there's a lot of foolishness on
Speaker A
the internet about it. You can own them, and you can buy them. What happened is duller than a band, and it worked better than one. The shipping people classify them as hazardous freight. The post office won't carry them at all. The
Speaker A
brown truck and the other one will, but only on the ground and only packed and labeled as hazmat, which means paperwork and training and expense. So, the big stores quit stocking them, and the number of outfits still making a true
Speaker A
strike anywhere match got small. Then, a lighter cost a dollar and lights 3,000 times, and a box of 300 matches cost more than that. That did the rest of it.
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I carried them in the mine, or whatever you want to call the pocket of a work coat, wrapped in wax paper and a bit of inner tube. A match you can strike on anything is a different tool from a
Speaker A
match that needs its own box. And you don't understand the difference until the box is soaked, and you're a long way from the truck. There was a January we got caught out on the far side of the ridge, me and my brother, cutting a tree
Speaker A
off the road, and it come a freezing rain about 2:00 in the afternoon. Everything wet. Everything. And I mean everything, down to the inside of your coat. I got a fire going off the underside of a hemlock limb, and one of
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them matches struck on the back of my knife. A safety match that day would have been a piece of wet cardboard, and we'd have had a considerable long walk in the dark. That's the difference, and it don't show up till it matters. You
Speaker A
can still get them. Farm stores, general stores, some hardware, order online and it comes ground freight and costs what it cost. One more thing on them. There's a deal of confusion about the two kinds, 'cause they look near identical in the box.
Speaker A
A safety match head is one color all the way. A true strike anywhere has a little pale tip on the end of it, white or pink, set on top of the darker head.
Speaker A
That tip is where the striking compound is. Look at the end of the match, not the box. Boxes lie and get reprinted.
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Wax them yourself, and they'll take a creek crossing. Dip the head, let it set, scrape it with your thumbnail when you need it.
Speaker A
Number nine, real lie. Every bar of in this holler come out of a can of lye and a kettle of hog fat. And for most of a century, you bought it at the grocery store for pocket change. Then it went
Speaker A
off the shelves, and it wasn't the soap makers that did it. The brand everybody knew was Red Devil, and it got pulled from retail because sodium hydroxide is one of the things people were using to cook methamphetamine. Store after store
Speaker A
quit carrying it. I'm told the maker got calls from soap women all over the country, and it didn't change a thing.
Speaker A
Now, I don't blame anybody for that. I've seen what that drug did to towns not 30 miles from here, but it is worth saying out loud that the people who lost something were grandmothers making Christmas soap. Soap day was in the
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spring, and I hated it as a boy because it was mine and my brother's job to keep the fire even under that kettle for the better part of four hours while Ma stirred.
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Not too hot, not letting it die, set her, and fade it. You learn to stand upwind of it directly. Lye fumes will take the breath out of you, and I've got a white mark on the inside of my left
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forearm yet from being 14 and careless with a ladle. You can still get it, bulk sodium hydroxide, online, 99% sold for soap making. Costs more and comes in a bigger sack than you want, and the old way still works, which is the thing
Speaker A
worth knowing. Hardwood ash leached with rainwater gives you lye. It's potassium hydroxide instead of sodium, so you get a soft soap rather than a hard bar, and it's harder to judge strength, but nobody has to sell it to you. Ma tested
Speaker A
hers with an egg. Floated with a spot the size of a dime showing, and it was ready.
Speaker A
Number eight, a file that's hard all the way through. Back to where we started.
Speaker A
Nicholson was the name. American files made in American plants, and the one I bought new in 1970 would still cut today if I hadn't worn it out. In 2011, the company that owned the name shut the Cullman, Alabama plant and North
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Carolina and Ohio and moved to making of them to Columbia and Mexico and Brazil.
Speaker A
That's not a rumor, that's a matter of record. What came back was softer. Machinists and saw filers have been complaining about it ever since, and it lines up with what I found on my own bench. Teeth that break at the corners,
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a skin that's hard and a middle that isn't. Now, I won't be fair. Some fellows say theirs have been fine, and I've read that, too. It may be it varies plant to plant and batch to batch. All I
Speaker A
can tell you is what happened on my Maddock. A file is a simple thing, and it either is hard or it isn't. There's no arguing with it and no fixing it. I dressed bits in the mine shop for years.
Speaker A
A file is what stands between a sharp tool and a man swinging a dull one all shift, and 31 years underground will teach you to care about a file more than most people care about a truck. A good
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one bites on the push and rings a little. You can hear when it's cutting.
Speaker A
A soft one skates and goes quiet and polishes the steel instead of removing it, and you'll stand there pushing on it thinking you're doing something, and you're not. Anyhow, what I do now is buy old ones, flea markets, farm sales, the
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bottom of somebody's toolbox, a dollar or two a piece. A 100-year-old file with life left in it will outcut anything hanging on a peg at the store, and I've got a coffee can of them. Clean the swarf out with a piece of soft brass or
Speaker A
a card and never let two files touch in a drawer. That's what kills them faster than work does. Number seven, gum turpentine. Real turpentine comes out of a pine tree. You cut the bark, you hang a cup, the sap runs, and it gets
Speaker A
distilled. That's the whole naval stores business, and it fed a good part of the South for 200 years. What sets on the shelf now that says turpentine on it is mostly petroleum, mineral spirits. It's a fine solvent, and it is not the same
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substance. The gum industry died slow, starting in the '60s, and by 2001, American turpentine production had stopped altogether. Brazil and Portugal make the world's supply now. There's still real gum spirits to be had, but you're ordering it, and you'll pay for
Speaker A
it. Paw used it in about six ways, and I never saw him buy a solvent in his life.
Speaker A
Thin in paint, cleaning brushes, on a rag for pine sap on your hands, which nothing else touches. Mixed with beeswax and a little linseed for a furniture polish that smells like a church. They tell me the difference is that the pine
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stuff has resins in it th
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Paw kept his in a green glass bottle on a shelf in the shed with a corn cob in the neck of it for a stopper. And that bottle was around my whole childhood, and I never saw it empty, and I never
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saw him buy one. Pine sap on your hands after a day of cutting is a thing nothing will touch. Soap won't, water surely won't. A rag with turpentine on it takes it off directly, and leaves your hands smelling like the woods for 2
Speaker A
days. I'd be careful with it either way. It'll take skin off you and it is not something to breathe in a shut up room.
Speaker A
Number six, boiled linseed oil. That's actually just oil. Here's one that'll surprise people, boiled linseed oil, the kind in the metal can at every hardware store is not boiled. What it is is raw linseed oil with metallic dryers stirred
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into it so it'll set up in a week instead of a week. That's it. The name is left over from a process nobody uses anymore. The old way was to actually heat the oil which changes it and thickens it without adding anything to
Speaker A
it. Polymerized oil if you want the word for it. Takes longer, costs more and there's not many selling it. Does it matter? For a barn door, no. For a gunstock or a handle you're going to sweat on for 20 years, I'd say yes and
Speaker A
I'd say it mostly because I don't care to rub heavy metals into a thing I hold all day. I done a hickory handle with raw oil one summer back when I was coming up on retirement and had the
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patience for it. Coat a week for 6 weeks. Rubbed in with the heel of my hand till it was warm, wiped back near dry every time. That handle is on an axe in the shed right now and it has never
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raised a blister on me. The trick is you put on almost nothing. People slop it on and it stays tacky for a month and picks up every bit of sawdust in the county.
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Raw oil, no dryers at all, is still sold and still cheap. It just wants a week between coats instead of a day and you have to be willing to wait. And here is the Rags with linseed oil in them generate
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heat as the oil cures and they will catch fire on their own with nobody near them. Not a story. Lay them flat outside till they're stiff or drown them in a bucket of water.
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Number five, cut nails. A cut nail is sheared out of a flat sheet of steel, so it's a wedge, square in section with a blunt end. A wire nail is cut off a round rod and pointed. That's what's in
Speaker A
every box you can buy. The difference is holding power, and it is not close. A square cut nail is reckoned to hold about four times what a wire nail holds in the same wood, and it's a shape that
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does it. A pointed round nail pushes the wood fibers apart, and they lay back against it. A blunt wedge shears the fibers and drives them down, and they bind against the flats. You've seen this without knowing it. Every old floor in
Speaker A
these mountains that's still tight is nailed with cut nails, and every deck built in my lifetime that you can pull apart with your hands is wire. We took up the floor in the old house in about '78 to get at a seal that had gone.
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100-year-old heart pine, and them nails did not want to come. Pull one, and the board come with it. You'd have to work a bar under and take your time, or you'd tear up a board you could not replace at
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any price. I've pulled wire nails out of 10-year-old work with my fingers. Tremont up in Massachusetts started in 1819 and is the last American outfit still making them. You can buy them today, mail order, for restoration work.
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They're not for everything, and I'd not want anybody going off and nailing a whole house with them. They're brittle compared to a wire nail. Hit one wrong, and it'll snap instead of bending. And in a place where a nail needs to give a
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little, a wire nail is the better, too. Where they earn it is flooring, trim, anything you want tight in 100 years, and anything on an old building where a modern nail looks wrong and works worse.
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Set them right, or you'll split your board. The wedge has to run across the grain, not with it. Turn the nail a quarter turn from what feels natural, and it'll hold instead of splitting.
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That's the whole trick, and it takes about one board to learn it. Number four, cast iron that was machined smooth. Pick up a skillet made before about the war and run your thumb across the cooking surface. It's slick like a
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piece of glass with a grain to it. Pick up a new one, and it's like a sidewalk.
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The old foundries ground and polished that face after casting. It's a machining step. It costs money, and it got dropped. Modern pans are sold rough, and the maker tells you the seasoning will fill it in. And it will,
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eventually, if you cook enough grease into it for about 10 years. Or you take the new pan, a sheet of coarse paper, and a sanding block and do the step yourself in about 40 minutes. Then season it. I've done three that way, and
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they cook like the old ones. Ma's number eight sat on the back eye of that stove, and I don't believe it come off it more than a handful of times a year.
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Cornbread every evening in it. She never washed it with soap, and I never saw an egg stick to it in my life. I've got it now. Set it on the scale one time out of curiosity, and it's lighter than the new
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one I bought, and thinner, and it heats more even because of it. They made them thin because they could machine them true, or whatever the reason was. The new ones are heavy because heavy is cheaper than accurate. The old pans
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aren't gone. That's the thing. There's a hundred years of American cast iron out there, and it does not wear out. Estate sales, flea markets, the back of a barn, a rusted skillet is not ruined. It's just dirty. Vinegar bath, wire brush,
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season it, and you've got a pan that'll go to your grandchildren. My old cook don't want her whole life that come to her from her mother, and I've got it, and it is better than anything I could buy new for any money. Number three,
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Arkansas whetstones. And this is the one I had wrong. I had this on my list as going away. Natural stone out of Arkansas, quarried since the early 1800s, the standard for putting a finish edge on a tool. So, I went looking to
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see how bad it had got, and it hasn't. The people who study the rock say the supply is still plentiful, not close to run out. They were shipping 300 ton a year out of Hot Springs back in 1875,
Speaker A
and there's plenty left in the ground. So, that's me corrected, and I'd rather tell you than let it stand. What did happen is that industry went to synthetic abrasives, and synthetics are honestly fine, and now most people sharpen with a diamond plate or a
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ceramic rod, which are also fine. So, the stone isn't scarce. What's scarce is anybody who can use one. Knowing the angle by feel, knowing when to quit, being able to tell by dragging your thumb across the edge, not down it,
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whether you've raised a burr on the far side. Paul set me down with a stone and a pocketknife when I was maybe nine, and did not say much. Held my wrist the first few passes, so I'd feel the angle,
Speaker A
then turned me loose and went on about his business. I run that knife, rounded the edge clean over inside of a week because a boy pushes down when he ought to be pushing across and there's no telling him different. He has to feel
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it. Took me the better part of two years to where I could put an edge on a thing and know it was right without looking. I can hand you a stone. I can't hand you the 20 years. Number two, a hickory
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handle with the grain running right. Look at the buddy end of an axe handle.
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You'll see the growth rings and they'll either run more or less straight up and down through the handle or they'll lay across it flat. You want them running with the plane of the head, straight up and down as you look at the butt with
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the axe standing on its head. That's the whole thing. A handle with the rings running the wrong way will break and it'll break at the head and it'll break when you're swinging hard. Same wood, same tree.
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Wrong orientation. You cannot get a store to select for it. They come in a barrel and you paw through them and take the best of a bad lot. And I've stood in a store and gone through 40 handles to
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find two. I broke one when I was about 17 splitting for the winter and it come apart at the head on the downswing and the head went past my leg close enough that I felt the air off it. Paul looked
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at the butt of what was left of it and didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Well, you picked it." And that was the entire lesson and I have looked at the buddy end of every handle I
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bought since. The other thing to look at is the runout. Follow one line of grain from the head down to the knob. If it runs off the side of the handle part way along, that's a break waiting on you. On
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a good one, the grain runs the whole length. Paul could pick a handle out of a barrel in about 10 seconds and I never once saw him break one. It took me years to learn to see what he was looking at,
Speaker A
and I still take longer at it than he did. Number one, somebody behind the counter who knows. This is the one you can't order. There was a hardware store in the town below us, and a man in it
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who had been there since before I was born. You'd walk in with a problem and not a product. My gate's sagging. My chimney's drawing wrong. And he'd ask you two or three questions and then walk back into racks and hand you something.
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He didn't sell you the expensive one. Half the time he told you not to buy anything and go do such and such instead. He knew what was in a hundred little drawers, and he knew which of it was any good because he'd used it. And
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because when something was junk, the people who bought it came back and told him so. I went in there one time with a stove that wouldn't draw right, and I was fixing to buy a whole new length of
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pipe. He asked me what the weather did when it was worst. I told him. He asked me was there a tree come up alongside the chimney since it was built. There was. A poplar. 30 ft of it on the
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windward side. He sold me nothing. I cut the tree, and the stove drew fine for the next 20 years. That's the thing that actually went away, and every item on this list is downstream of it. Nobody at the register now can tell you the file
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is soft. They've got no way to know. The information used to live in a person standing between the maker and you. And he'd been standing there 40 years. And it went both directions is the thing people forget. He'd ask you how the last
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one held up. If you told him that brand of hinge had rusted in 2 years, he wrote it somewhere in his head, and the next fellow that come in asking about hinges got told something different. He was running a survey, and nobody called it
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that. You cannot get that off a website. A review tells you whether a thing showed up in a box. It don't tell you whether it was still working in 19 years because the fellow who found out quit thinking about it and never wrote it
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down. He passed in the '90s and the store went to somebody else and then to nobody. It's a vape shop now, I think. I don't go down there much. I can tell you which brands to buy and it'll be out of
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date in 5 years. What I can't give you is a man who's been paying attention since 1950 and has no reason to lie to you. Find the old fellow at your farm store. Ask him something. He's been waiting for somebody to ask. Here's my
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challenge. Pick one and go find the real article. Go through a barrel of handles till you find one with a grain running right. Take a rusted skillet out of a flea market for $4 and bring it back. Or
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just take a file you own and drag another file across it and see for yourself what you got. Then tell me in the comments, and I mean this one specific, what's the one tool in your house that come down to you from
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somebody? Whose was it and what county did it come out of? I'd like to know what's still out there working because none of this was ever about the old days being better. Half of what we had was a
Speaker A
misery. It's that some of these things were made right and got made worse for money and a person ought to know which is which before he buys. They knew. Now, it's written down.
Topics:Ezra Cadeold school suppliesstrike anywhere matchessodium hydroxideNicholson filesgum turpentinetraditional toolsAmerican hardwarevintage toolsdisappearing supplies
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