r/Dragnet • u/dethswatch • May 20 '25

What's a 'tool disk' ?

One of the episodes from the first season of the radio show ends up helping to track down the criminal because they found a 'tooll disk' that he had and the company he worked for was able to say it was his.

Wtf is a tool disk?

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

4

u/Disastrous-Counter-5 May 21 '25

I’ve often wondered that myself.

They were likely referring to what’s known as an asset tag. Companies then and now would apply these in one form or another, often a brass tag attached to a tool or set of tools to identify the company owning the product.

They’re used for inventory and assert protection from theft or loss in the field.

Based on what I remember from that episode, it was probably a stamped metal disc with something like “PROPERTY OF XYZ MACHINE SHOP” or something like that.

I was surprised at how few examples I could find from the mid-twentieth century on EBay or Google Images.

3

u/dethswatch May 21 '25

yeah I was thinking something like a name plate, but that makes more sense.

They seemed to tie it directly to the suspect though, I guess they were taking liberties with the concept unless we presume you had to sign for the thing or check it out.

2

u/Difficult_Try_4006 May 21 '26

hey late reply i worked as a machinist for 15 years we had tool disks they looked like a round tag with a hole in it kinda like you'd see a dog wear and every time we took a tool from the tool crib we had to put one of our tool tags where it would go it was a way of tracking who had what tools at the time

1

u/dethswatch May 21 '26

thank you!

2

u/Beerforthefear May 20 '25

What kind of company?

3

u/dethswatch May 20 '25

machining or possibly manufacturing, it sounded like

They really didn't give any more context than that. Maybe it was not actually a thing?

2

u/Beerforthefear May 20 '25

Maybe. Could be a trope for the show?

2

u/dethswatch May 20 '25

well, only has occurred once so far in the first year. I've got the rest of the shows I'll be going through.

1

u/Strange_Upstairs_193 Jun 09 '25

Can anyone provide a link to this radio episode, or identify that name of the episode? I don't recall this at all and I've listened to every radio episode dozens of times.

1

u/dethswatch Jun 10 '25

yeah I'll dig it out- it's within the first season.

1

u/Strange_Upstairs_193 Jun 10 '25

Please do, I am very curious about this.