No, this is not a D&D-inspired tale, it is straight out of the history of my family...
My late father (1906-1993) was a tinkerer. Defined here:
"3. a person skilled in various minor kinds of mechanical work; jack-of-all-trades."
Ever since I was old enough to descend the basement stairs (we usually lived in houses with basements), I would often find him at his workbench, bringing some device or other back to useful life with his tinkering. There was the 1930s waffle iron he used until he died, for example. My Mom put up with the countless hours he spent in his workshops, probably because it kept him out from under her feet as she kept house.
Dad was a military man, of high field-grade rank all my life, anyway, so he could have afforded to do things like collect cars, play golf at swank country clubs, own a yacht, or some other pleasure of the well-off head of family of his day.
He didn't do those things. His cars became collector items, solely because he kept most of them for 25-30 years, carefully maintaining them and keeping them going, until he more or less had to give up driving when he turned 85. He never played "Pasture Pool", and although expressing interest in buying a cabin cruiser, he didn't. He saved his money, I got a third of it, and am relatively well-off myself as a result.
He tinkered, and tinkered well, too well. My Dad had an eye for well-built things, things that although old and valuable, still could be made to function.
One of those things was the
Hunting Hanger. While we were stationed in England in the mid-50's, he found the sword at an antique place in Portobello Road in London (we made regular trips there, it was a great family entertainment). When he got this sword, it was in OK shape, but the pommel was dismounted, and the haft of the blade had simply been peened over the grips to make the sword stay together. It had no scabbard.

Dad put the sword back together, sharpened it properly to usefulness as a weapon, and "gave" it to me. It was mine, but I couldn't carry it, mainly because it lacked a scabbard, and I was just a lad, not trained in the ways of discipline and war just yet. Besides, D&D hadn't come on the scene just yet, so people with swords hung at their sashes were generally looked upon as strange.
Then, Dad tinkered together a scabbard. He made it the way they used to be made, with carefully shaved hardwood, brass mountings, and all covered with the finest glove-leather.


Note that I've not kept the brass polished, nor the leather oiled. The sword stays in a nice, dry closet.
Now, for the rest of the story!
The sword and scabbard, fine examples of English sword-making as they are, are probably worth little. The sword is worthless because it has been tinkered back to life, not restored. The scabbard is worthless because although it represents a lot of (pre-Internet) research and hand-craftsmanship in wood, metal and leather, it is of modern construction and has no "antique" provenance.
It's priceless to me, though, because my Dad repaired the sword with his tinkering skill (and the then-recent invention of Epoxy Cement), and he built the scabbard, with it's fittings, with brass, Dremel (although his die-grinder predated anything Dremel, we would call it a Dremel today) butane torch, solder and patience, lots of patience.
I do not have that sort of patience, so I am not a Tinkerer. I repair things or Re-cycle them, but I don't tinker much back to life. That part of the family skill-set died with my Dad and his two brothers, all of them were excellent tinkerers.
Tinkering used to be a part of our culture, and it's gone now. It would take a cataclysmic societal upheaval, something to prevent manufacturing of the useful things we need to continue life, to bring it back. That could yet happen, but I probably won't live to see any possible restoration of the art of tinkering.