Many Workmate fans have a general idea of which 79-001's are easiest and hardest to find these days, but so far no one has quantified this. After more than three years of collecting data about 79-001's provided to me from their owners or listed for sale around the U.S. and Canada on the usual sites, I'm confident enough to give some estimates. The following is based on detailed observations I have collected on about 700 Workmate 79-001's, supplemented with casual browsing of a couple thousand more.
Although I'm giving you specific percentages here, realize that these are rough estimates, with an unknown standard error, so feel free to expand them to sensible percentage ranges if you wish. The Type 2 is far and away the most common 79-001, accounting for very roughly 43% of those found today. This makes sense because it had the longest production period of all the Types, from May 1975 to June 1977. Second most common is the Type 4, at very roughly 21% of all 79-001's. The Type 2 and Type 4 together comprise almost 2/3 of the 79-001's I have found. Next most common, vying for third, fourth, and fifth places, are the Type 6, Type 7, and Type 8, at about 8 to 10% each. That means the five most common Types—Type 2, Type 4, Type 6, Type 7, and Type 8—make up about 90% of the ten Types of the 79-001. That leaves the other five Types as rare ones. Almost half of those are Type 1's, putting it in sixth place at perhaps 4% of the overall numbers. Three more compete for seventh, eighth, and ninth places at about 2% each. One of these is the rarest Type manufactured in North America, the 79-001 Type 9. The other two were made in England and Ireland—the Type E and the Type 3 respectively. That brings us to tenth place, but wait—if you've been keeping track, you realize that the estimates I present above have already totaled 100%. My rough estimate is that there are so few of the made-in-Ireland 79-001 Type 5 out there that it would barely be the rounding error on estimates of the other Types. I'll just call it less than .5% of the overall quantity, and I actually doubt it is more than .25%. In years of looking, I have found just four 79-001 Type 5's, and I currently own two of them! (Title inspired by Leonard Cohen's raincoat)
In my quest to document all ten Types of the Workmate 79-001, the Type 3 and Type 5 had me stumped for quite a while. This was largely because of the general lack of info about all of the Types, exacerbated by the rarity of these two. Since I knew that the 79-001 had evolved gradually through the Types, the 3 and 5 logically should have looked very similar to the Types 2, 4, and 6. However, aside from some part diagrams for them on Black & Decker's website, there was no information about them to be found anywhere. But eventually luck came my way. I spent a little time looking the part diagrams over, but the ones for the Type 3 and Type 5 didn't seem to help much. The line drawings didn't reveal any differences from the Type 2 and Type 4 that jumped out at me. As I will explain, there are clues in the part diagrams that could have helped me, but I didn't see them. So the Type 3 and Type 5 just remained as unresolved issues. In my research, I would occasionally run across pictures of unusual blue Workmates with cast-aluminum H-frames. From their similarity to the 79-001, I could tell they were from the right time period, but they always turned out to be from Europe, not the U.S. Since all of the 79-001's that were manufactured in Canada for the North American market were either bare metal or painted gray, I expected the Type 3 and Type 5 to be gray as well. Then in May 2019 I came across a blue Workmate with aluminum H-brace for $75 on Craigslist in what looked like good condition, and with a surprise -- it wasn't European! The label on the jaws was the same style as that of the Type 1 and 2, but said it was a 79-001 Type 3! I contacted the seller immediately. He said he had owned it for about eight years after inheriting it from his uncle. His uncle had been in the TV repair business and had used it only as a stand for working on electronics, not for anything rough or dirty. The seller had used it very little himself and felt it was just taking up space. I drove about 100 miles to get it and fortunately it was in just as good condition as it looked in the photos, and complete with all its feet and swivel pegs. The seller somewhat apologetically told me that the price was firm, while bargaining was the furthest thing from my mind! When I got it home, I looked at the bottom of the jaws and saw that "79-001 TYPE 3" was also stamped there. In addition, there was a marking on the metal step "WM625 TYPE E02, MADE IN REPUBLIC OF IRELAND". That fit perfectly with the model numbers on the blue European models I had run across in pictures. So I had one more piece of the 79-001 puzzle—the Type 3 was an import that Black & Decker had brought over in small numbers from the Kildare, Ireland factory and marked with the 79-001 model number, similar to what they had done previously with the English-made Type E. I posted my fantastic find on the Garage Journal forum and got a totally unexpected reply. Another member replied with photos of his TWO blue Workmates. One appeared to be exactly like mine, but the other was slightly different in some minor ways. Neither of his had a label on the top of the jaws, so he had no idea what model they were. Thanks to my posting, he looked at the bottom of the jaws for the first time. One of them was stamped as a 79-001 Type 3, like mine, and the other was stamped as a "WM79-001 TYPE E05"! I had found the Type 5! Like the Type 3, it was stamped "MADE IN REPUBLIC OF IRELAND", making it the third, limited-number import in the 79-001 lineup. In studying my Type 2 from the Brockville factory and the Type 3 from the Kildare factory side by side, I discovered many detail differences in the parts. This sent me back to the part diagrams, and now I could see what I had missed earlier. The key was in the part numbers. First, on the Type 2, Type 4 and others with gray steel parts, I noticed that the parts that are painted all have a suffix "-01" on their part numbers. It's very common for manufacturers to use a suffix of that style to denote a color, so I guessed that "-01" must be for the gray paint. I checked the part numbers for the Type 3 and Type 5. Sure enough, the painted parts for them have the suffix "-38", which would identify the blue paint. Second, apart from the color suffixes, many of the part numbers for the Type 3 and 5 are in an entirely different numeric range than those for the Types that we know were made in Brockville. Looking again at the Type 2 and 4, most of the 6-digit part numbers start with 975 and 993. On the Type 3 and 5, about twenty of the corresponding parts all have numbers starting with 723. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this is because the factory in Kildare, Ireland that made the Type 3 and 5 was using almost entirely different parts than were used in the North American Workmates. In the U.S., the Workmate 79-034 (also known as the 400) was introduced in 1982 in a shade of blue similar to the UK models, while the new companion models 100, 200, and 300 continued the gray color of the 79-001. The blue was a short-lived experiment here and after a few years all the U.S. Workmates changed to black. All UK models continued as blue until 1986 when they also became black. |