Thread: Quality of tools

the quality of tools is of concern to me also and i don't believe i'm alone.
I know of one long term hardware store employee who resigned & mooved to a tool shop because he was ashamed to work in a place that sold tea towels and cookware.
there is a heap of cheap tools out there, we can now afford to have a tool our fathers would never dream of owning. when i think of what i have in my workshop and what i can buy the stuff for then consider the meagre toolkit my father a shipwright had i just have to shake my head.
for sure the tash of buying a goos hand tool seems harrder. but i would be interested to see a cost comparison between the cost of a record or stanly plane now and in 1950 in real pay packet terms.
one thind i have concluded if you shop carefully and choose wisely some of the better cheap asian machine tools will be found to be more accurate and better made than some of the us & uk made stuff of 20 to 30 years ago at a fraction of the price.
I compare the masport NZ made bench a friend baught 15 years ago for $5500 with the tiwaneese industrial machine I have recently purchased for $3500 an have to say some of the asians have realy got there act in gear.

it goes two ways, good & bad.

John, For my money, I will attempt to upgrade to the best I can afford, sometimes this means waiting a while to watch the bank balance grow.

When possable, I will search the sunday markets and gararge sales to find "pre-loved" hand tools, which are of older years and better workmanship ( also with the hope that the experience they contain will be of benefit to me!)

AS for walking into the local hardware store, well like all hardware store, it is getting more and more difficult to find "decent" quality tools, it seems that in the main, all the tool makers have migrated OS.

anyway Thats my turn on the soapbox.

Kev.

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IF at first you don't succeed, relax your normal.

lol-from the time ive started to the present i must of replaced my power tools two or three times.thats not because ive wanted to,but because at the time my budget was limited when i started----havent i paid for it though--the money i spent on cheaper tools i could have had quality gear,i guess we live and learn.....

Yeh, heard the old sayings, "buy the best and cry once" or "the enjoyment of quality remains long after the price is forgotton". That reminds me of some funny workshop signs I've seen I'll post them under jokes.
Cheers
Rod

I have a friend who laughed at me and thought it was an idot when I paid $66.00 for a hammer. He said he just brought a $10.00 special. That was about 10 years ago, I still have my hammer after many fencing jobs. He has bourght about 10 hammers.

Makes me think back to the latest Carba-tec dogalog. Man theres some nice looking gauges, squares etc in there. Exactly what I have been looking for, for years. BUT at them prices they can keep em. I really can't see that there would be too many woodworkers who would fork out several hundred dollars for a marking gauge. So I will stick with my cheapish stanly adjustable set square for a while longer. Though I will continue to search for something better. Country towns don't have much choice anyway's.
Cheers!

John Saxton and I are still having an affair with the Festool Rotex.
It's one of those tools that hurt initially but outperforms anything else on the market, which I suppose makes it good value.

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: http://community.webshots.com/user/iain49

I am at that stage where ihave just about replaced all the cheap power tools I purchased when money for tools was harder to find and tools seemed to be more expensive. I am now finding that work progresses easier and I have more tools which bring a little smile each time I use them.
that brings the question. Would i apreciate and enjoy my nice tools if I hadn't been frustrated by the cheap junk I once owned?
Also. Would I buy the cheap tools again in the same situation? I don't know.
I doo recall the words of one Peter Ross, " Lets face it a boy has to have a bomb as a first car"
Do you have a cheap tool and use it or have no tool at all?
I reccon that you should always upgrade when you can afford it.

Like Soundman say's I too am in the process of upgrading my tools ..particularly hand tools now..having reasonably got to where I am happy with,with my power tools in the shop.

Everybody lives with regrets..I in that I did'nt have an interest in wood at an age when I lost access to good tools that were sold off whilst I was elsewhere with other intersts in youth but in digressing I now realise what a cost it has been, with the cost of "quality tools" whether new or thru Sunday markets!

A good Clifton or Lie Nielsen hand plane is pretty near equivalent to a weeks salary in todays language which may well equate with the value 50 years ago in terms of income,but you probably have a tool out of the box that you can use straight away rather than having to spend some of your time "tuning" with perhaps some modicum of success and "chatter" with a hand plane of lesser note?

A lot of across the board tools available these days tho at a price are the range of Japanese saws,chisels,planes hammers/mallets etc,but a good understanding in the use of these is necessary and there have been some good reference on this BB.

I guess as a sum up to my experiences with tools in my learning curve would be what everybody else has said in "Buy what you can afford" ...buyer beware, dosen't always rear its ugly head when on tight budgets in the early years of changeing /remodelling homes to suit your needs.My first power tool a Black and Decker hand Drill bought as a gift lasted some 20years ...solid until I could no longer get brushes for it with the throw away mentality coming into vogue.

The whole point of this post and thread is in the loss of access to tools of good material manufacture at everymans level given over with the inundation of lesser mass produced by cheaper factories off shore to Australia but within close confines.
With metalurgy and it's sciences coming more into prominence it was only a matter of time whereby we "paid up or shut up" in terms of what we wanted as tools within our workshops hence what we lament that we are stuck with these day's.

A bit more than 2c worth here but cheers anyway

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Johnno

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment regarding the quality of hardware store tools these days, both of the manual and power kind. However I feel that we are presently the luckiest woodworkers ever to live with the range of quality tools available to us at present.

Some of the frustration when buying tools i feel comes from the lack of quality information readily available on tools and tool buying, although this is slowly changing too. What I'm getting at is the idea that you get from reading books magazines etc that you need every tool on the earth in order to make things in wood. Not only this, but most books (again this is changing which is heartwarming) talk about tools as just being tools. A plane is a plane and a chisel is just a chisel etc.. Having just finished reading Toshio Odate's Japanese woodworking tools (etc) I'm filled with a sense of wonder at the relationship that shokunin have with their relatively simple tools. They are able to produce beatiful objects with a relatively small number of tools, tools which are now available to us in the west.

Yes good tools are expensive, but they should be. Nice quality tools inspire us to do fine work and treat the tools with the respect that they deserve.

Having said that though, a bit of resaerch will open up a world of fine tools at affordable prices. Veritas make a large range of tools that are a pleasure to behold and use, as well as being innovative. Clifton now make very fine bench planes that cost a lot less than Lie-Nelson and from what I've heard perform exceptionally well out of the box. You can buy a 30 tpi Dozuki from carbatec for under $100. A tool which will last a very long time and give wonderful service. The point being that you do not have to buy every tool in either range. As well as these wonderful tools, we are very lucky in australia to have tool makers like Terry Gordon and Colin Clenton that are making beautiful, affordable tools that perform like a dream (I just can't use my HNT Gordon smoother enough).

Not only do we have access to fine, finished tools we also have access to excellent replacement parts and "kit" parts, along with emerging advice and education, enabling us to make tools that will outperform any bought tool. David Charlseworth in his excellent first book makes two interesting observations, firstly that there is too little innovation in woodworking today and secondly, that tools bought today should often be considered as a collection of parts which require fine tuning before use.

On the first point i cant agree more. David uses the example of a ground and sharpened hardened croncrete nail driven through a block of wood to clean up the bottom of a groove or trench. Not a fine tool i know, but a quick solution if one doesn't have a router or does not want to buy a router plane. The point again being that many tools that are around are simply not essential, thereby allowing us to spand our hard earned $$ on a few good quality tools.

The second point is interesting when you consider that you can buy a brand new Record No5 for $130 and add a good quality clifton blade and stay set chip-breaker or a laminated japanese blade and with a half a days work have a finely tuned instrument capable of taking blissfully thin shavings for under $300.

There is also starting to emerge more information and parts for the making of fine custom tools. Ron Hock and David Finck (of the US) make and market very high quality plane blade and chip breaker sets to be used in making wooden planes. For approx $80 and a chunk of well seasoned Jarrah or a bit of Ironwood you can make a fine intstrument that transcends the description of a "tool". Carbatec supply nice little Japanese marking gauge knifes that allow the making of custom sized and designed marking gauges that can adjusted to very fine tolerances evn though you have a wooden wedge and beam. A recent article in Fine Woodworking gave step by step instructions on the making and use of such a tool.

Now that I've vented and dribbled on for a bit, Ill sum up by saying that although I do lament the poor quality of tools sold by many outlets nowdays, we are also very lucky to at present have access to a miriad of choices and options regarding tools, their quality and price. A forum such as this is perfect to discuss these issues, share our frustrations but also to support others with ideas and information.

Cheers Tim

[This message has been edited by Vonrek (edited 25 April 2002).]