This man's career's worth of tools find their new home at Windsor-Essex schools

A retired tool maker has left a generous gift for local shop classes.

Harjinder Bhambra has a career's worth of precision tools that almost ended up boxed and forgotten after his retirement.

Through some digging and diligence, the Toronto-area man and his family found a way to give these valuable tools a second life and donated them to the Canadian Tooling and Machining association, who are using them to teach high school students in Windsor.

Bhambra worked in the tool-making industry for over 40 years, mostly in the Toronto area. Over that time he collected and crafted a lot of tools he needed for work.

"I made them over the years. You know, you need these tools every day to make your life easy to do the job, so I made a bunch of tools. They were no good to my kids," said Bhambra.

The tools are specialized for machining and tool making, such as micrometers for precision mesauring, cutting tools, drills, clamping devices, and custom work holding systems.

Search for a new home

When he decided to retire, he wanted to pass his tools on, so he contacted a number of schools and colleges in the area he lives in, but there was nothing in place for schools to take unsolicited donations.

That was until his son, Nav, contacted the Canadian Tooling and Machining association.

ItsCareer Ready program provides machines and put those expensive used tools in the hands of high school students, including the Greater Essex District School board, which has been involved since the beginning.

The program was struggling, however, due to only having old machines and tools, said Robert Cattle with the association.

"It was a machine class in in Windsor. I went into a shop in a classroom there and the teacher said 'welcome,' he says. 'I'm the machine shop teacher and also the museum curator,"' said Cattle.

"I look around and there were machines that are 50 years old, in in all states, some were working, some were not."

He said the state of some machinery made it difficult to motivate students, so he didn't think twice about scheduling a meeting with Bhambra.

"School boards, they do not have a good a high budget to buy these things. So anything that they can they can get and use is so well appreciated. And Iknow that when we deliver the tools and and the tooling packages to the to the teachers, they're over the moon," said Cattle.

After handshake and a photo, the tools were loaded into a van to be passed on to the next generation of skilled workers in Windsor.

"I feel very good, you know, somebody gonna take the tools and use them where they belong to, these kids will use them," said Bhambra.

Institutions should 'do more' to bridge the gap between new and old generations

The tools the Bhramba donatedwill be divided amongst the nine high schools in the Greater Essex county District School Board, and that makes him happy.

But his son,Nav, would like to see more done.

"The government should do more," he said. "You have all this intellectual property with my dad's age group and all these gentlemen that have put all of this hard work into society and it's a shame that they can't actually transfer that knowledge to the young generation."

He said he'd like to see the gap between the two generations bridged.

"Even the schools, whether they're secondary or post secondary they could probably get my father into coming once a week and just kind of lecture them," he said.

"I think that's valuable information you can't learn in a textbook because you got 40 plus years of knowledge."