Toyo Steel Y-350

The Y-350 is a small steel toolbox for carrying hand tools: a box about 37 centimetres long, 16 deep and 12 high, with a hinged lid that rises in a shallow hipped roof. A folding steel handle lies along the top, the words TOOL and BOX are pressed into the sloping shoulders on either side of it, and a single hasp closes the front. Inside the lid are pressed the maker's oval badge, MADE IN JAPAN and the model number. Lid and base are each drawn from one sheet of steel, without a seam, and the standard colour is blue.

Its maker, Toyo Steel, grew out of a metal-pressing shop opened in 1965 and was incorporated in 1969 at Higashi-Osaka, a district of small engineering works east of Osaka. The hip-roofed toolbox was already a familiar shape. What the company claims for the Y-350 is that in 1984 it became the first such box to be drawn from a single sheet, and that its rounded corners and a hinge needing no separate pin were then thought new.

Drawing allowed thinner steel and fewer parts, and so a lower price. The maker gives the width as 350 millimetres, a size chosen because it takes the greater part of ordinary hand tools. The box was sold through tool merchants, hardware shops and home centres, and through the wholesaler Trusco Nakayama, which shared its Long Life Design Award in 2009. The jury observed that it had held its market without major change.

Toyo Steel says it now makes about seven in ten of the steel toolboxes sold in Japan. The Y-350 is still pressed there, in more than a dozen colours besides blue, and a box once bought by mechanics for their call-out kits is sold by design shops abroad to hold pens, paints and cameras. It is the same object: a seamless steel tray, a roofed lid, a handle and a clasp.