One mans trash... said:
Hunting your own information is largely a matter of coming up with the right terms to search Yahoo or Google with. There's no one site or even a handfull. Of course, it helps if you can figure out what the thing is to begin with. Sometimes you have to take some stabs at it. It can be hard to hit the right sites even when you know what it is. It might be clearly a cast metal bank, but you're guessing what others would have called it or what the "official" description is. Take a look at the "odd token" that's posted. Tough one. Probably a token of some kind. The word "Festin" is feast. The other word above it means nothing, so far as I can tell. So it could be a cafe. The logo on the back, the "F" with the design work and the three circles above didn't turn up with any way I could describe it. Trying "crowned F" just hits a bunch of old coins. The characters around the rim look familiar, but I don't fit them into any writing system I could find. It looks vaguely Greek, but they don't all fit. It seems to have turned up in Michigan, so it might be one of the writing systems developed for a Native American language. Or it might mean nothing. We had a medallion the other day that was modeled on an ancient coin, but the letters were faked.
Look back at the "curious Crowe tool." You can see immediately how it works, but it took someone who knew the terminology of valves to hit it. Often, you just won't hit it from even the best description. That's when you come here and use the collective brain. Someone may well know exactly what it is. The "rocket looking thingy" was like that. You can search around for rocket-like things all you want, but you're not likely to just hit on the fact that it was mounted as a Lone Ranger "atomic" ring that had a bit of Plutonium inside to make sparkles in the lens. But someone here had seen one before. Sometimes it's just piecing things together. You have a belt buckle with what appears to be Polish with some religious symbols. You check an online dictionary and find one word means Knights, and another means Michael. But it looks like the sort of belt buckles that are commonly made in the US. You search for Polish-American fraternal groups and find a list that has the Knights of St. Michael on it.
Use the Advanced search facility with the search engines or learn the syntax to build the same search in one line. It's kind of a pain sometimes, because everybody and their dog has built sites that show eBay listings, and you have to wade through them. They're usually old, and the items have often expired. eBay can be a good research tool, because a lot of sellers will use the same terms you might come up with to describe something. It's most useful if you have an eBay account and can search completed auctions. And there are a bunch of specialized USENET newsgroups. And rec.antiques has a bunch of really experienced people who can often nail an identification. As with all USENET groups, don't ask for an email reply. If you're going to ask on their group, it's expected that you will follow the thread on the group to see if you get an answer.
