Vintage Craftsman Tool Pouch Restoration.

Before I get started, I would like to wish the 30 people out there who still read woodworking blogs a Happy New Year! I’ve always felt that the New Year, as a holiday occasion, is overrated, but that is another matter entirely. Regardless, I have no major furniture making projects planned for the next few months, but I have been in the midst of several home renovation/carpentry projects. While it is unlikely that I will write about these projects (unless I come across something worth noting), I will be busy, nonetheless.

In any event, what I wanted to write about today is a minor but perhaps overlooked area of restoration: tool pouches.

For those of you who have been reading this blog on a somewhat regular basis, you might be aware that nearly two years ago my step-father, Jack, passed away. He spent most of his adult life as a packaging mechanic and maintenance person, and he accumulated a very large collection of tools over the course of his life. For more than a year I have been helping my mom go through these tools in my spare time, and last year I detailed on the blog and in videos the restoration of two of his smaller tool boxes. Just when I thought we were finished, during the Christmas break we discovered yet another bin of tools. Thankfully in this case there weren’t too many and we were able to quickly pass the tools onto new homes. But there was one item in the bin that I decided to keep, and that was a small, vintage Craftsman leather tool pouch.

Jack had a half-dozen or so pouches of similar size, and all were filled with an assortment of wrenches, Allen keys, and screw drivers. I am guessing that he had these small pouches filled with the specific tools needed for the basic maintenance of specific machines. Rather than lug a heavy tool box to each machine, it seems that he set up a series of small pouches that he could just grab and go whenever one of the packaging machines needed a quick tune up, with each pouch corresponding to a respective machine, or a specific aspect of said machine….time is money in the production world. I discovered most of the pouches last year, so I brought them home along with their tools and cleaned them. Most of these pouches were made of Cordura (I think that is the correct name of the material), but the Craftsman pouch is vintage and made of leather, so I decided that it might be interesting to see if I can really clean it up and get it looking like new again.

First things first, I did not take a true “before” photo of it. When I brought it home the pouch was quite filthy and smelled awful…a combination of must, old machine oil, mildew, all held together with a faint but definitely distinguishable layer of tobacco odor, which makes sense as he spent several years working for a company that packaged cigars. The smell was so bad that immediately I emptied the pouch, vacuumed it, wiped it down with some soapy water, and hung it outside in the frigid temperatures to air out…yeah…it smelled that bad.

The initial cleaning did little to alleviate the smell, so I poured some baking soda into a coffee filter, bound it with a rubber band, and shoved it into the pouch. For good measure, I also stuffed the pouch with around a dozen tea bags, including the front pockets and the belt loop. As far as using teabags to remove odors from leather, I’ve seen some recommend steeping the bags in boiling water and letting them dry before using them; others recommend using them dry, and some recommend lightly misting the bags before inserting them.  In this case, I decided to lightly mist the bags that I placed inside the main pouch, while leaving the bags dry in the smaller areas. After a few days of brewing the smell of the pouch improved, though it didn’t disappear.

The next step was cleaning the pouch with a lather of saddle soap (which you will see me do in the video link below). This cleaning removed years of grime…..and it also brought back the smell with a vengeance. As is often the case, the deeper cleaning revealed just how dirty the pouch was, and while its outward appearance has improved a great deal, it smelled just as bad as it did when I brought it home. So rather than having this tiny pouch with its disproportionately sized odor stink up my garage, I once again stuffed it full of tea bags and baking soda and hung it outside to air out. To help, I also sprayed it with an enzyme based boot cleaner. Generally speaking, a good idea in cases like this is hanging the pouch in warm, indirect sunlight for a few hours, but because it’s January and the average temperatures are generally barely above freezing, warm sunlight isn’t an option for the time being. Adding tea tree oil to the baking soda “tea bag” is also an option, but as of writing the post I haven’t tried it yet.

While the tool pouch was “brewing” I placed most of the tools that were inside it in a bath of water and citric acid. Many of the tools were rusty, grimy, or a bit of both. A few of the smaller wrenches were relatively clean, so I only gave them a scrubbing with steel wool and 3 in 1 oil, and that improved their look and feel considerably. Once the rusty tools were finished soaking in the citric acid bath they also received the 3 in 1 treatment, after which I polished them using a fine wire brush attachment on the drill press, and they look much better for it.

I cannot find any real information regarding exactly when Craftsman sold this particular model 9 40463, but I would guess that it was during the 1990s, but it may very well be older. The pouch leather, awful smell aside, appears to otherwise be in fairly good condition. There was also a swivel snap hook, that I initially thought was a part of the pouch, but it turns out that Jack added it “after-market”, by punching a hole in one of the screwdriver slots. For the record, I don’t care for modifications such as this because they will eventually tear and degrade the leather. Luckily I have a small leather repair kit, and if I can get rid of the bad smell I will attempt a repair.

When I brought home this tool pouch I thought the restoration was going to be a simple matter of good old-fashioned elbow grease and patience; this has not turned out to be the case. I can sincerely say that I don’t know if I will be able to get this pouch back to usable condition. Lord knows how long it was sitting in a dank corner of the basement, and the odor may be too ingrained to remove. It may seem strange to put so much time and effort into restoring a tiny tool pouch, especially when considering that I have a newer one that is almost identical to it. But it does have sentimental value in that it not only belonged to Jack, but I also had a similar pouch “back in the day”.

Regardless of sentiment, I also firmly believe that a real craftsman takes care of his tools. I’m not of the mindset that tools and their storage mediums should be abused. Some tradesmen feel a kind of shame when their tools and pouches appear to be too “new”, but I was never one of them. Wear and tear is one thing, as they are a sign of a tool that is being used, but dirt and grime are another. A professional looks like a professional, and that means a tool kit that is clean and well maintained.