We found a museum in Haines, AK that contained only hammers--the proprietor had stories to go with many of them. If you stopped to look at any given hammer for more than a second he'd tell you not just a history but an entertaining history of it. Highly recommended:
There's a great tool (and everything else hand-made) museum in Pennsylvania, The Mercer Museum [1].
> The Mercer Museum is a six-story reinforced concrete castle designed by Henry Mercer (1856-1930) and completed in 1916. Today, it is one of Bucks County’s premier cultural attractions and a Smithsonian affiliate.
The museum complex features local and national traveling exhibits, as well as a core museum collection of over 17,000 pre-Industrial tools. This permanent collection offers visitors a unique window into pre-Industrial America through sixty different crafts and trades, and is one of the world’s most comprehensive portraits of pre-Industrial American material culture. The museum also features a research library that is a center for local history related to Bucks County and the surrounding region, with its roots dating back to the founding of the Bucks County Historical Society in 1880.
A few years back I found a youtube channel about unusual guns.
And it was fascinating because they had all these zany, really distinctive guns like four-barrelled shotguns and revolver-rifles.
Unfortunately they ran out of such weapons pretty quickly and the channel devolved into a lot of "this gun that looks and works just like every other AK-47 is interesting because it was made in Hungary, and most Hungarian AKs received an upgrade but this one didn't" which I personally felt was a bit of a snoozefest.
But if you're interested in seeing a great many very minor variants of mundane items, you might like gun history.
I wonder if you are talking about forgotten weapons with Ian McMullen. I could understand if you would get tired of seeing 50 different iterations of the same rifle. I take it as it is interesting to see how each country in the Warsaw pact or countries that the Soviet union supplied technical packages to, such as North Korea, China, or Vietnam, iterated on the design. How did they improve the design or what were there limitations in manufacturing. What can be learned from the changes they made.
There’s an interesting museum in Cody, Wyoming that has thousands of guns, including some very interesting ones like whaling guns from the 1800s. Well worth a visit if you have an interest in firearms, especially from the ‘Wild West’ era!
It’s also one of a set of four museums, all of which are very interesting: Art, Natural History, Firearms, and Buffalo Bill.
There’s a restaurant in Orinda that has a collection of antique firearms on the wall a revolver rifle, an elephant gun, some weirdo pistols with knives on the barrel. It’s super interesting to just see them in person. I’ve never asked for any of the stories.
The evolution of firearms is quite interesting because it reflects centuries of progress in chemistry, metallurgy, mechanical design, warfare, and so on. You can definitely tell a compelling story and keep going for a good while.
The problem is that collecting often devolves into obsessing over insignificant details, simply because there's more of them - and if you run out of, you can invent new ones. Look at people who collect coins or stamps and fawn over minor minting or printing defects, etc. The same goes for art collectors, comic collectors, you name it.
I feel hardware stores went the opposite direction.
They show the popular, common things.
I sort of miss stores before the internet. You would get large stores that carried everything, so if you went there for one thing, you would find all the other stuff in the middle.
For instance, hardware stores before home depot/lowes usually had plumbing for all the homes in town, even the really old ones. Lots more brass than plastic.
Nowadays it's like trying to buy a computer at best buy.
Also in large “Home improvement” stores forget about asking for something non-standard of for any unintended application. For example if you tell an employee that you need “something to hold this part here but cannot be a screw because the back is hidden” they will look at you as if you were speaking in mandalorian.
Most large auto parts stores are the same.
When doing e.g. vehicle mechanics you need like 4 spanners of different shapes and sizes for each nut size, and like 3 different sockets of different lengths and tap width for each nut size.
My wife accuses me of buying slightly different tools for fun (which I do), but, like, you really need those slightly different tools.
I go shopping for, like, a pair of tweezers, and for some reason come out the other end with a kit of 27 different kinds of tweezers for $19.97. And then I stare at them for an hour and tweeze stuff in all the various ways. Then pick one and put it in the desk drawer, and all the others go in a baggie in a box marked "small tools". And every once in a while I think contentedly about how rich I am in tweezers.
My first thought is that this is kind of ridiculous. BUT. I bought a cheap pair of tweezers like 15 years ago and they are fantastic. The amount of flex is perfect. They're easy to use, but you can also apply a fair amount of pressure with them. It's just the one pair, and in a panic after misplacing them for a week I tried to find a back-up pair. Well, now I have a lot of tweezers. Cheap pairs. Expensive pairs. Made in Japan. Made in U.S.A. But still only one good pair. Dammit.
I have a lot of tools, especially specialty tools for electrical, and most of my hand tools are a piece of steel shaped slightly differently. Many variations on pliers, hammer, wrench, screwdriver.
It is filled with hundreds of slight variants of different tools.