traveling + tools = travelingwithtools

Almost two months have passed without an update here. This is a tiny refresher for the front page while major remodeling continues in the back of the shop. Pictured is a Duesenberg Model J crankshaft, as I file the stubs off the counterweight bolts back in 2009. I don’t recall exactly the circumstances… I think we prepared the crank and line-bored the babbitt main bearings, sending it back to…

I hate clickbait. I really do. But I’m working on a major site redesign, and I haven’t published any content at all this year. This post is just to say, I haven’t gone away. I’m working really hard. Really! Traveling With Tools is going to split off and focus on traveling and fly fishing. The car content is moving to a new site, One Day in the Shop. It has been in progress for several weeks…

There was a lot a variety in 2025 to keep things interesting, with new-to-me projects as well as changes to my personal rolling stock. I started the year with a Jaguar XKE engine, a 4.2 liter for a vintage racing E-Type. The previous engine that came with the car blew up early in the new owner’s possession, and I rebuilt it with a completely new bottom end… block, crank, rods, pistons, sump. It…

I’d spent the last several days staring at the surface of the river. I was on the Henrys Fork of the Snake at Last Chance, Idaho, and I’d been there for two weeks. The Harriman Ranch stretch of Henrys is world renowned as a dry fly fishing paradise. On opening day, June 15, you can expect to see a crowd of dry fly purists searching the water, looking for the noses of big rainbow trout. The fish…

I started the month down on the Crow Reservation, on the Bighorn river below Yellowtail dam. Cottonwood camp was the base for the first few nights, then I moved to the Bighorn access point downstream. A nasty thunderstorm blew in and threatened the huge tree I was parked under, so I beet feet up to the campsite right below the dam, snatching the last open spot on a Friday afternoon. (click any…

I wrote last summer about my visit to my old favorite honey hole on the Gardner river in Montana, and this year I decided to hike into the park from the North Gate in the Town of Gardiner. The old road through the park from Gardiner to Mammoth Village was destroyed by the flood of 2022, and the new road is way up on the hill above the river. The Old Stagecoach dirt road was quickly paved and is…

A brief look at one of the more unique cars ever to come through the driveway at Phil Reilly & Co, on the day that Jay Eitel brought his Ford hot rod by for the crew to ogle over. Jay was an engineer and inventor, best known for creating the cherry picker, those trucks with a bucket on an extendable boom that are most widely seen working on utility lines these days. This project had been started…

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks on Hebgen Lake, near West Yellowstone, chasing callibaetis-eating rainbows and browns. Today, on my last day on the lake, I found an honest to God “gulper”, a fish that’s eating bugs on a steady tempo… about one every three seconds. That allows you to predict where to place your fly, so that the fish might take it on the next gulp. In all my previous visits,…

My last post had me dreaming of dry fly action on the Henrys Fork, and sad to say, it was a two week exercise in “hope springs eternal”. Maybe tomorrow the bugs will come out and the fish will start looking up? Apart from a few nights of substantial brown drake hatches, where I at least landed a big drake-eating whitefish, the trout just did not cooperate for me. Other anglers? Seems like the guy…

Working With Iron and a Cautionary Tale Several years ago, I went through a Type 40 Bugatti engine that had had a hard life. Its recent days hadn’t been made any easier by the chap that took it apart, using a dead blow hammer to break free the joint between the cylinder block and the crankcase. Not a crazy idea, to use a soft hammer to shock the iron block to break the seal. Modern RTV silicone…

The clock is running down on my stretch of work in 2025. I’ve got a date with a river in Idaho, opening day on the Railroad Ranch, at the little fishing community of Last Chance on June 15. Looking back, I think I’ve only hit the opener once, in 2021. Lets see, in 2015, my first year on the road, I was stuck in Reno sorting out issues with the then new-to-me Funmover. I didn’t get to fish the…

108,000 miles, $17,500 OBO, Willows, CA A hard to find toy hauler in a class C format with a ten foot long garage in the back. This Four Winds Fun Mover has been my full time home since 2015 and has faithfully carried me from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast and back every year without fail. It is fantastically useful to be able to carry all your stuff around the country in a relatively…

April 9, 2019: Today I paddled out for the third day in a row, an unbroken string of sunny skies and bearable winds. Yesterday was almost prime, though the water clarity was still off from the last northern. After almost 4 months in Texas, hoping for a chance to sight fish to reds, I finally had a shot. A massive fish lazily drifted towards me, nosing up clouds in the mud. I saw it so far out, I…

Three Big Bugattis and a Little Peugeot Every day at Phil Reilly & Co was something special, some days more so than others. This day was probably just another average one, though a search of the archive contains over 600 photos from that month in 2013, so it could go either way. Two of these cars were included in the first episode of “One Day in the Shop”, and in fact this image is from the same…

2024 was the ninth year that I’ve been a full-time RV’er and I have been looking to upgrade to a new model for the next ten years. My business has been good this last year, or rather you could say I worked more than I wanted. A happy result is that I’ve saved a substantial fund for a newer RV. The sad result is that I didn’t get to my favorite fly fishing waters until after the peak hatches had…