Inherited a shop full of old iron. Built an AI app to help me ID the machines.
I recently inherited a workshop with heavy older machinery (like this green wood lathe) plus a wall of vintage hand tools. I wanted to start restoring and actually using them, but a lot of the data plates are scratched off, painted over, or just gone, and tracking down manuals or compatible parts was driving me up the wall.
I'm a software dev, so I spent the last few months building a computer vision app called ToolSnap that tries to ID a tool from a photo and point you towards compatible parts.
Under the hood it's the GPT-4o Vision API doing the heavy lifting, which means it's pretty good on stationary shop tools and hand tools where there's enough training data, and it gets noticeably worse the further back you go.
Pre-1950s stuff with no markings is genuinely hard and it will absolutely guess wrong sometimes...I'd rather say that upfront than oversell it.
Full transparency on the business side: the API costs me money per scan, so it's a paid app, but there's a 7-day free trial if you want to throw your worst-case piece at it.
What I'd actually love from this sub: what's the era or brand you've found hardest to identify when the paint and logos are gone? I'm trying to figure out where the model breaks so I know what to work on next, and y'all know this stuff way better than the model does.