Unusual GPO hammer?

Following on from Vic's thread about hammers it got me thinking about this little beast! It looks like an old UK GPO (General Post Office) tool. The markings on one side say GPO 68, I presume made in 1968. The other side says 'Highgate' I presume this is the main GPO depot in London.

So if there are any GPO engineers on this site which could shed some light on this hammer I would love to know its purpose, because it looks like a hammer for a very specific use. It has a curved wedge shaped head, maybe for levering something? I use it for delicate precision destruction.

I did notice that Youtuber Clickspring has one very similar but I think he made his, maybe from this design?

Ian

I used to be GPO engineer back in the early seventies, as an apprentice (TTA, trainee technician apprentice) we were given a toolkit in a large leather bag. In the bag was a hammer (similar but not exactly the same as yours), we called them toffee hammers and they were for banging in the little clips to secure cables along skirting boards and around door architraves.

So it's not a Generic Planishing Object, then?

Everything had a number, that should be a hammer (use it was meant for) number 68, never seen any tool with a depot name on it but then London was always a bit special.

Long nose pliers were Pliers Wiring number 81, we just called them 81s.

Oooh 81s! Lindstroms were the best, cutters, strippers & 81s all in one. A pair of those and a No2 screwdriver and you could fix anything.

Remember the old Rate Book? I used to work at Dollis Hill, designing RF equipment. We wanted some coil formers with screening cans and adjustable cores. They obviously had them because one was on display behind glass showing all the things they stocked. after a lot of trouble we managed to ascertain that the adjustable cores were known as "cores, dust" while the actual main item we wanted, the coil former, was known as a "mounting, core, dust".

I was always amused that a good old terminal block was listed as a "block, terminal", which everybody eventually spoke about as if the block was the noun and terminal the adjective - of course then it should have been listed as "terminal, block"!

Back in the 1960s one of my work colleagues had previously been a GPO Linesman. He told us that his toolkit included a hammer, I don't know what it looked like. He said that the most important use of that hammer was, before climbing a telegraph pole, to give the base of the pole a smart wallop. If the resulting sound was 'dead' you didn't 'go up the stick' . The 'dead' sound indicated a rotten pole.

My apologies if I've misused any technical terms - I'm reporting second hand and it was a long time ago!

Best regards,

Swarf, Mostly!

All the old GPO kit seemed to be named arse about face, meter multirange, pliers wiring No2 etc etc. For those of us who worked on Strowger kit (2000 & 4000 type 2 motion selectors) we had loads of machine specific adjusters and gauges to keep them fettled. Each one had a proper book name but was usually known by another name. One tool I remember was a little device for adjusting the contacts on relays, this was invariably known as a tweaker, another tool which did the same job was a saurus (cos it looked like a tyrannosaurus head from the side). Happy days, going into the exchange and knowing which switches had failed overnight by the pile of bits on the floor and the smell of burned out relay coils.

I thought as it were a small hammer the GPO meant "gentle percussion only".

(now taking cover)

God's Poor Orphans when i worked for them. I did pretty much all of the job types mentioned above, and quite a few more during the 33 years I was with them. Quite a few hammers were shortened to fit inside a tool wallet no. 3 which was the one carried by most linesmen (I was one of them too for a while).

Don

In the forces, REME, we had.......Wheels, Fly-type, One. Also probably....Boxes, Gear.

M

Edited By Watford on 28/09/2019 21:22:12

A bit off thread, but my wife was a GPO telophonist in the early 60's, she was having her hair done yesterday when the young hairdresser asked what she did before she was married. My wife replied ' a telephonist' .... whats that? asked the hairdresser! How times have changed.

Aaaah! - Government nomenclature! Auntie Betty's Flying Circus was similar plus a whole vast array of paper vouchers, inckuding Issue, Exchange and Return. Memory (VERY fallible nowadays) suggests Conversion vouchers - MOST useful for making good inventories which had become depleted. Oft repeated was the old Storeman's ability to 'Convert' HangErs Clothes to HangArs Aircraft! Even so, it was well-founded wisdom to be good mates with the Stores chaps! One such genius, at Tern Hill somehow managed to 'vanish' 10 Tables, long ,library plus one Simulator, Helicopter, Training which I had signed for but had never set eyes on!!! Made Paul Daniels look positively pedestrian!

rgds

Bill

"Block, Terminal"... or I think sometimes just "BT". (That organisation of that name being far off hence.)

The noun-adjective-adjective system is common elsewhere. It can be very useful, too, as this shows:.

I am trying to teach myself TurboCAD, but have had to Come To An Arrangement that if I avoid the mysteries like Layers or its Dark Side (3D), it won't bite me. It does have an on-line "Help", which invokes a document called a "Manual"; but like many software "Help" sites, Helping users is not in the designers' remit.

The difficulty with this document (apart from it not giving too much information away) is its sketchy, rather random layout, reflected in a Contents list but no index.

However...

Surprisingly for a pdf file, I found I could copy the Contents into 'Word'. (Usually, pdf image files insist I rent Adobe's converter at over £30 a month. Do they think I'm made of money?)

The layout used long lines of "......." to join words to page-numbers. Laboriously, l replaced them all, line by line, with single commas. If you use 'Excel' you'll now be ahead of me.

Next, after tea, I re-wrote the titles in GPO / Military noun-adjective-adjective style.

My punctuation changing allowed Excel to read the plain-text 'Word' file as a .csv (comma-separated-variables) file, hence 2-column spread-sheet: Titles and Pages. Now, I could Sort it alphabetically, correct and refine, re-Sort... eventually reaching a full, proper Index I could print.

I keep the print to hand so it leads me straight to topic, detail and page number when using the on-line document. Some hours of work, but using that GPO-style title format has paid off.

At work, the establishment's Intranet directory of Safety Data sheets and the like was a mess, with a lot of duplication making it hard to search, partly because no-one had had the forethought or indeed experience to use the n-a-a system.

Some great replies as usual thanks, never thought about the number 68 being a part number.

And talking of REME reminds me of the EMER's store system on microfiche took me ages to figure out what the heck they were on about!

Still none the wiser as to what the curved pointy bit is for though!

Ian

.

I looks like a fairly ordinary Jeweller’s / Watchmaker’s Hammer to me

Lightweight and well-balanced ... use it for what you will.

I thought the ‘unusual’ bit was the G.P.O. markings.

MichaelG.

.

Cookson Gold lists something fairly similar [‘though less elegant], as a ‘riveting hammer’

**LINK**

https://www.cooksongold.com/Jewellery-Tools/Riveting-Hammer-60mm-Head-prcode-999-89M#description

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 29/09/2019 08:52:06

The "curved pointy bit" looks very like the shape a tinsmith would use to persuade sheet-metal over a wire in order to create a rolled edge..

Just found this wonderful new [to me] tool-shop: **LINK**

https://www.toolsntoolsuk.co.uk/product/quality-watchmakers-hammers-swiss-style-watch-hammer-repair-jewelry-90-mm-head/

Check out their range of hammers

MichaelG.

We called the armature adjuster a knacker cracker.