What is this tool?

[Jon]

What is this tool?

[mklotz]

Don't have a clue so I'll guess.

It's an upholstery hammer used for driving decorative tacks that secure cloth coverings. The built-in scale allows the user to place the tacks evenly for good visual appearance. The problem I have with this guess is that I've never seen furniture with the tacks set three or four inches apart.

It also looks a bit like a jeweler's planishing hammer but I can't think of any use for the scale in that use.

[Jon]

A good guess, but for once - incorrect

Not for upholstery or jewelry.

[mklotz]

Well I may not be very good at guessing but I'm a whiz at searching...

It's a locomotive inspector's hammer...

https://www.mwtca.org/whats-it.html

[Jon]

Argh, I need to get better at this. Are you searching by image? I can obfuscate it a bit if necessary for future posts.

Also, I can select tools that haven't yet been identified on other sites.

[mklotz]

All I did was type this...

"what's it" + hammer

into Google and the first hit is the one I listed.

("what is it" + hammer was tried first and didn't yield any useful results.)

How does one search by image? That sounds like a useful thing to know?

Tools that have not yet been identified doesn't sound like a good thing. How will you be able to tell if I'm right (or wrong for that matter)?

[PJs]

Boy Howdy, Marv! What was that 2hrs 10 minutes with a best guess in between. Great link to all those other odds and sod tools...very cool. Liked the Printing Pens and those Crab Pliers (that's what I think they are).

Good Luck with that Jon! I'd also appreciate knowing how to search by image if you feel up to it.

[Jon]

To search by image, go to Google Image search: https://www.google.com/images

Then click the camera icon on the right of the search bar. Then you can either paste in an image url, or upload an image.

So, in the future, we would either have to obfuscate the images against the similar image tool, perhaps by overlaying a grid on them or something like that, or just use tools that are still genuinely unidentified on the web. If we use mystery tools that have not yet been identified, then in many instances we simply won't be able to positively identify the tool, which I suppose is fine.

[mklotz]

To search by image, go to Google Image search: https://www.google.com/images

Then click the camera icon on the right of the search bar. Then you can either paste in an image url, or upload an image.

So, in the future, we would either have to obfuscate the images against the similar image tool, perhaps by overlaying a grid on them or something like that, or just use tools that are still genuinely unidentified on the web. If we use mystery tools that have not yet been identified, then in many instances we simply won't be able to positively identify the tool, which I suppose is fine.

Wow, that is simply über-kewl ! I'm sitting here mentally kicking myself for never having experimentally clicked on that camera icon before. I can't tell you how many times in the past I could have made use of that feature.

I tried both options - pasting an image URL and uploading an image stored on my computer - and it was able to find them easily. Just imagine the software sophistication necessary to do that !

It does make playing "What's this tool" more problematic. If you do an overlay you would have to be careful not to obscure details that might help identification. I wonder if you cropped a bit of the image from between the overlays and searched using that if Google would be smart enough to still find it?

I've never been religious but if somebody put a gun to my head and said I have to choose something to worship I suppose I would choose Google.:-)

[Jon]

We can crop, overlay, or even add additional objects into the image, like a logo or generic tool image. However, any photo manipulation we can do to the image can be undone. For now I think our best bet is to search the various forums and blogs for the best such mystery tool discussions, and post about the ones that are still genuine mysteries. If someone can, through clever searching, determine the identity of the tool, than we can consider that to be valid detective work, and a perfectly legitimate solution to the mystery.

I don't remember when I first started using the similar image search, but I will say that the camera icon's purpose eluded me for a while. It seems to say: "This is an image search", rather than "Click me to search by image".