Appreciation post: That weird little website about antique doorknobs

Three years ago I found a site run by some retired guy in Nebraska cataloging doorknob patents from the 1880s and it turned out to be the only resource that helped me date my whole front porch restoration, now I check it every month.

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan65316d ago

...and that's exactly the kind of thing that makes the internet still worth having. I had a similar situation with an old house we bought, needed to match some brass mortise locks from the late 1800s. Found this guy's site who scans old hardware catalogs page by page. Not a pretty site, just lists and blurry scans. But I found the exact lock set I needed, down to the latch bolt style. Turned out it was a Yale patent from 1878. The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes tops to track down. Would've taken me weeks driving to salvage yards without it.

lucas16516d ago

Respectfully, I see it a little different, ryan653. Those niche sites are gold mines for sure, I won't argue that. But the thing is, they're getting harder to find because Google buries them under a pile of ads and AI-generated fluff. I spent two hours last week trying to track down a wiring diagram for an old furnace, and the top ten results were all pages written by bots that just reworded the same wrong info. The real guy who actually knew his stuff was on page four of the results. So yeah, those sites exist, but you gotta dig through a lot of trash to get to them now.