A word from Chinook Jargon, the trade pidgin of the Pacific Northwest, common in British Columbia and the northwest for strong or impressive, and carried by tool-teardown videos to shops everywhere. A skookum tool has heavy castings, real bearings and no plastic where metal should be. It is the opposite of flimsy, and it can describe people, weather and lunch as well as hardware.
Now that's a skookum vise, ductile iron, hardened jaws and a screw as thick as your wrist.
Calling a cheap import tool skookum is either high praise or heavy sarcasm, and the tone of voice tells you which.
Do not mix it up with
- Chooch: Chooch describes whether something runs and how hard; skookum describes how stoutly it is built.
Related terms
Chooch
To run, work or go properly, as in does it chooch; as a noun, the power or oomph a machine has.
Clapped-out
Worn out from long hard use, still running but loose, sloppy and well past its best.
Pot metal
Shop name for cheap, low-melting die-cast alloy, usually zinc-based, that is brittle and almost impossible to weld.
Belt and suspenders
Using two independent safeguards where one should do, for redundancy or out of extra caution.