Hazard A Guess: Week of October 23, 2003.

Hello from Hazard!

It’s good to have readers like Donn White of Wooster.

Donn wasn’t content to have Item No. 693 become an unsolved mystery, so he did a little digging and found a photograph and description of our unidentified tool on mjdtools.com, the Web site of Martin J. Donnelly antique tools.

Item No. 693 is a bench stop, also often called a bench dog, Donn says. It was used to hold work on a work bench. Many examples were hand forged.

The photocopied page Donn included in his note shows several bench stops. One looks exactly like our item, but there are several widths shown and some are shaped more like a “T” than a “Y.”

Many thanks, Donn!

* * *

Donn may have to go into extra innings this week, as Item No. 694 sparked two different answers from readers.

Vivian Kosto of Chester, W.Va., identifies the tool as a meat tenderizer. “I had two of them when I sold my collection of 60 meat tenderizers,” she writes.

But Lawrence Bittikofer of Bucyrus, Ohio, tells us it’s a corn sheller used to shell one ear at a time. “I have one in my tool collection that I bought at a flea market several years ago.”

We’ll show Item No. 694 another week, so we can clear up the identity crisis.

Can anyone help? Write: Hazard a Guess, P.O. Box 38, Salem, OH 44460; or e-mail us at: editorial@farmanddairy.com.