J Stevens A&T Co.Surface gage.

Here is an extremely small and dainty surface gage manufactured by J Stevens A&T Co..Chicopee Falls Mass USA.The other companions are also made by the same company.Note the three inch scale.The gage is in excellent condition excepting some named " Bresnahan" either scratched or electric penciled his name on top.Other wise it is a perfect specimen.
Everything is so diminutive and perfectly executed.Does anyone else have any J Stevens built tools and post some pics? I've only seen a few..there is a J Stevens tap wrench and various calipers and now a surface gage I've seen.Any other tools? Also were they ALL really small tools like these shown or did they have a whole line of machinist tools? Comments welcomed!

very nice set!

I have one J Stevens A & T gage. Not what you are thinking though. It is a 22lr over 410 gage combination gun. Don't know the age of your set, but they were under that name(J Stevens Arms & Tool) from 1886 to 1920 when savage arms bought them. Savage continued the Stevens name in guns, may have also continued the tool division-I have no idea. That might be a good starting point to date your tools though. Someone on here will probably be able to help you date them.

I agree that is a nice set.

Ben

That is a very nice set Lester. That surface gage, by the looks, has a nice fit and finish. Did any other early machine tools turn up at the swap meet? Jake

I also knew a

22lr over 410 gage combination gun

Click to expand...

many years ago. The Stevens guns in general seemed to me (who doesn't really know much about this) an inexpensive New England line that was heavily purchased by New Englanders. This particular combination (I actually can't recall how it was set up--which was on top) was owned by my old friend Daniel L. Garland, banker, farmer, real estate investor extraordinaire, born 1890, died 1987. Dan had the gun in the sevnties and eighties (don't knbow about its prior history) and he used the .410 to drop porcupines which were then extensive around here. I'm pretty sure he carried it in his truck.

I didn't collect guns but I was pretty sure that was the one of his--he had many--that I wanted, because of its association with him.

There were six pall bearers at his funeral, one was a former lieutenant governor of the state of Vermont, another a former state's attorney of the local county, and another was me.

Stevens were common guns, and Steven's tools were pretty common, too, in my experience. I'd hazard a guess that I have a few in various tool boxes.

Those baby surface gages are super handy. Mine is a Starrett and I probably use it twice as often as the bigger one. Maybe its easy to overestimate the size of surface gage you need and end up with a big one when a little one is handier, perhaps the same argument for height gages. The last job I used them for was transferring offsets to the surface plate for measurement, to center a gear cutter on top of a mandrel w/ blank- distances were on the order of 1/2" and less so the small gages ended up being really handy.

I also have a J. Stevens gauge like that.
Mine is missing the snug and scriber pointer
but otherwise identical. It came to me in a
Kennedy box bought at a garage sale.
I might mount my Last Word dial indicator
to it and see how I like using it like that.

-Doozer

Early Stevens firearms are a whole different kettle of fish from later guns, which are as nothernsinger said, were inexpensive guns for the masses.
Below are a couple of paragraphs that I am putting into my own words because they are copywrited.

"J. Stevens & Co., of Chicopee Falls, Mass., was started in 1864 by Joshua Stevens, James E. Taylor, and William B. Fay. (not of Fay and Scott, or J A Fay of Fay & Egan). The enterprise was started to make the simple "tip-up" single shot handguns and rifles. Joshua Stevens procured the patent, no. 44123, on September 6, 1864.
By 1867, there were 30 workers making firearms and high quality machine tools. Joshua Stevens reformed the company as president in 1886 as J. Stevens Arms and Tool Company, Chicopee Falls, Mass., USA. Or J. Stevens A & T Co. The company existed by that name until 1915. Then it was sold to New England Westinghouse to make the Nagant rifle for Russia in WWI. In 1916 they dropped the "Tool" and became J. Stevens Arms Company, Chicopee Falls, Mass, USA."

Savage bought them in 1920.
Chicopee Falls plants were closed in 1960

I wonder if the author above thinks of "machine tools" the same way we do. Or if he meant "machinist tools". I know Colt made a lot of their own machines, but I've never heard anyone mention a Stevens machine.

Below are a few early Stevens guns. Please excuse my terrible pictures. The earliest is the top one, a Tip-Up target rifle. They stopped making tip-ups in 1895. The other 3 I'm guessing are all before 1930.
Firearms are very hard to photograph well. You really need special light boxes etc. My quick pics don't do the guns justice, but you can see the quality just from the wood on the top and bottom guns.

I had to add this last picture to show what a beautiful piece of wood this is.

Steven A & T co had quite a few connections to Starrett, Charles Fay I think was the one who patented the SG in the original post. He later worked for LSS and the named the Fay type calipers after him. Richardson in who's shop Starrett started in let Stevens manufacture his design of a quick nut for calipers. Shops like Stevens, Standard tool, etc often worked under a contract system, the company supplied the shop and workers and their subs bid on making batches of tools. Ken Cope and I used to joke that Stevens made 6 of something then made a little change and made 6 more and so on. When started studying these tools they were almost all slightly different. In Ken's blue book there is a good description of the company.

A pair of the Stevens calipers came to me down through a hundred years of family -- and were among my favorite tools until passing them along to another generation.

The old style, with the spring elements part of the caliper, are a marvel of forging and heat treating practice. In a well made example, the spring portion has to act like spring steel, the points need to be hard, and the body itself pretty tough. The whole design is elegant -- not the fiddly fly apart designs of later calipers with separate arms and springs.

Could well be that sort of tool making is mostly a lost art today -- I doubt I'd have either the patience or control to produce something like the OP's (or my) examples.

I love those old firearms, Maynah, thanks.

Fay, if some of you don't already know, is a common New England name and has been for quite awhile. There are five 'Fay's listed in my telephone book here, and that's in a book that only has a total of ... not many, perhaps ten or 15 thousand.

I have a J Stevens surface gauge, and a box that looks like it may have been original. I was wondering if it came as part of a larger set, including dividers, etc.




Was hoping to find out more about it...this thread has been helpful.

Tom