Thread: All change at Bridge City Toolworks.....

Nah, Tony has been quite active lately.

Pretty sure Tony was visiting the same workshop as part of a gtg

Originally Posted by Colin62

.... I’ve never met someone who just wanted to look like a woodworker though, with a designer workshop that doesn’t function....

I've not met anyone like that in person either, Colin, but I reckon I've seen one or two 'shops' that would fit the bill featured in mags over the years. At least that's the impression you get, seeing the immaculate workshops with racks & racks of gorgeous, shiny tools, far exceeding anything you'd ever need to make even the most elaborate piece of furniture! But that's also a hobby, and as easy to justify as any other - you've just got to be honest about what you are doing.

However, looks can also deceive - I've been to a shed that contained cupboards full of beautifully fettled, glistening tools, not a hint of sawdust or a stray shaving anywhere. I thought to meself 'this is just a showcase, not a workshop!'. But the house was full of very attractive, unique, & extremely well-made furniture, proof positive that the tools were used and used very competently to boot! I'm still going to counselling after the trauma of it, & I'm slowly recovering - I now sweep up & put everything away before I close up for the night (well, most nights).

One giveaway in the case above is that there were no obvious redundancies, just neat storage racks or cupboards containing one each of 'real' tools, any of which I would happily own myself, & would use frequently. When you see whole cupboards full of tools that have limited & highly specialised application, you can safely bet 'collecting' has superseded 'making' as the hobby.

I've confessed before to not being a fan of most Bridge City tools, for the reasons already expressed by others. Apart from the eye-watering cost, they seem to be made primarily to look 'modern', & very slick, but few I've seen actually invite use, or certainly not prolonged use. I'm as big a sucker for a nice-looking bit of kit as anyone, but I like tools to be both functional & hand-friendly, above all...

One man's meat, & all that...

Cheers,

I have to hand it to him that he made a successful run of it in a business that has left many fine men broken...

I agree that some of his stuff had the spectacular look of "clean sheet" designs you would end up with having never used such things in real life... Aka the complete, polar opposite of the Krenov plane... Like for instance - the hammer with no hard face.... A key, critical ingredient of every useful hammer made since antiquity... And second is the reverse-taper thru-hole in the head.. Steel Hammers with hard faces and reverse taper thru-holes in their heads have been excavated dating to before 1200bc... (Yes really)... And yet somehow these bits got left out...

I must admit I have wanted a Kerf Master since the first time I ever saw one... It's super slick... And would be useful... So you probably have to take the good with the bad... Not every design is awesome (look at all of Alrxander Graham Bell's failed inventions)... And the fact that some are great makes John fantastic...

Originally Posted by Mr Brush
I think it might end up being one of those US "home workshops" we see lots of on YouTube; beautifully presented, equipped with the best and very latest shiny things.......yet strangely devoid of any actual woodwork. Not a shaving to be seen. Just another area for the home help to dust and polish once a week?

Originally Posted by Pac man

I think I’ve been to a workshop like this in Katoomba?

Paul

While I can see the direction in which you are going there, I think you are quite wrong. There is no home help dusting and polishing.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

I think it might end up being one of those US "home workshops" we see lots of on YouTube; beautifully presented, equipped with the best and very latest shiny things.......yet strangely devoid of any actual woodwork. Not a shaving to be seen. Just another area for the home help to dust and polish once a week?

"one of everything" from BCTW is a big (and expensive) ask. Reminds me of a guy I know here who has a complete (and I mean COMPLETE) matching set of Terry Gordon's planes, specially commissioned in an exotic timber, and yet doesn't do any woodwork at all.

We call those doc shops here. Usually a surgeon or someone with a half million of income a year and no time. Getting a shop put up like that for a couple of hundred thousand dollars (including tools and integral dust system, HVAC and insulation) is just a means of escapism as far as I can see.

It's available for the poorer among us with a simpler tool set and a smaller space.

There are still a lot of one-off cabinet shops of similar size around here (a few thousand square feet and a spray room attached), but they are much more low tech than doc shops....and they produce a lot of work. If you venture into areas where there are mennonites, there are tons of shops like those, and their power tools are usually of the grizzly or jet variety, and not Martin or Felder. Mennonites don't like to charge high prices (it offends them) and they don't like to have fancy things beyond what's needed. They (as a group, all of the anabaptists) are certainly well capitalized, though, and could have anything they wanted.

(the number of sears-origin shops in the US is probably 5 times more than the regular basement type shop around here, and another 20 times more common than the doc shops - it's just the doc shop type folks who really like to share pictures of their shops. I'm sure there are some aussies with the same - you guys have space. There seem to be fewer of them in the UK, though, where space is at a premium).

Ditto here with the BCTW collectors - if you see someone who says they have one of every BCTW tools, they usually have a space issue and nowhere to work. Someone on woodnet came across an estate several years ago where the decedent had two of everything BCTW. One that he could use, and one unopened, as well as a bunch of other things. A dealer bought the whole lot, which means that his widow recovered only a small fraction of what the fellow had spent (if you're going to collect the stuff, you'd better leave an info sheet with each tool and an estimated value!). In the pictures, there were a lot of tools and very little room.

I'm not one to talk in terms of tool quantity, I have too many, but nothing in space occupied with infrequent use compared to a doc shop, and as time goes on, my work space gets more hand tool oriented and smaller. I work slower but produce more - strange how that works when the method draws you to the shop (and rarely fear for digits or concern myself about air quality).

Other thoughts on the BCTW collectors (and in general in the US since there is such a glom of used tools here):
* BCTW buyers (who have more than one or two gadgets) tend to be power tool users, often older and interested in the gadgetry of the tools. I haven't seen too many dedicated hand tool users who used them
* The doc shops mentioned above often have a full array of lie nielsen tools, stashed in a clean plain front cabinet somewhere so that they don't get dust on them (I have had my best luck buying LN tools from doctors and lawyers - they're usually unused and said folks ultimately will sell for a customary % off without fighting too much when they decide to part with the tools. The most used doc shop LN plane I ever got had about three hones on the primary bevel. The others were unused.)
* most plane collectors here in the states don't do any woodworking at all, and the ones with the larger collections bought most of their planes before ebay made it easy to sell planes and find their value. A friends' grandfather was a yardsale picker who had 1600 stanley planes when he died. It posed a problem at the estate sale, and the sale petered out with a lot of worn but not unusable planes failing to sell for a quarter.

The sears shop comment is (no clue if aus has something similar) pre-normite. Sears sold a lot of very marginal tools to DIY folks (the fixed bed jointer, half horsepower 10" bandsaws with sheet metal stands and aluminum or plastic casings, jigsaws, low cost tablesaws) and they were all proprietary in some form or fashion by the time my dad started to work wood. He still buys all of his replacement blades, etc, at sears, but he only makes things out of pine so not such a big deal. There are more sears shops in the US than anything else I can think of, but they were mothballed 30 years ago so that we only see attempts to sell the tools now and again. I recall a friend's dad (who had a "sears shop" in his basement and actually built a 2800 square foot house) commenting that the new yankee workshop was ridiculous because nobody would spend the money on something like an oscillating spindle sander. He used a sears TS for a lot, but the rest of the tools were unusable.

(just musings of mine from looking around here - doc shops are fairly rare, but when you see them, they're spectacular and usually 6 figures with a separate lumber storage area so as not to threaten the cleanliness of the shop.)

Maybe they noticed that other firms were hitting the target a little closer to the mark?
For your sake, I hope that they don't disappear.

We can buy wood shavings in cubic meter bales as livestock stall bedding.
I can't imagine tossing a lot of it around just for an effect that nobody cares to see.
Just one more damn place to lose little nuts and bolts.

Wood carving, I can generate ankle-deep chips and shavings in no time.
I do tidy up as soon as my chair can't roll though it.

I abandon hobbies. Sell off the kit and bank roll the next thing. I'm addicted to learning.
Some things persist like old friends. Flyfishing, grouse hunting and wood carving to name a few.

Originally Posted by D.W.

..........The sears shop comment is (no clue if aus has something similar) pre-normite. Sears sold a lot of very marginal tools to DIY folks (the fixed bed jointer, half horsepower 10" bandsaws with sheet metal stands and aluminum or plastic casings, jigsaws, low cost tablesaws)........

No, D.W., we never had anything quite like the Sears tool phenomenon here, unfortunately. I'm not sure if you meant to sound disparaging of Sears stuff? It's certainly not Hammer or Felder quality, but it was useable, as your father clearly demonstrated. For someone like myself, arriving in North America in the 70s, it was a new Eden - power tools were cheap enough that even someone on a grad student stipend (& with a family, in my case!) could afford machinery that was simply out of my league here in Aus. At the time, there was very limited choice, and even those meant for home use cost an arm & a leg.

My Sears 12" bandsaw sailed through Rock Maple up to its full depth of cut (6") with its 1/2 HP - grunted a bit at times, but got there. A good friend had some property outside town & I had access to a few nice windfalls from his woodlot, which helped me turn downed trees into a few items like these: Walnut side chair.jpg Cherry 4_poster.jpg

Given the limited shop time available, a bit of machinery made it possible to (almost) keep up with family needs for simple furniture & occasionally tackle some more ambitious stuff like that above. Even in my prime I don't think I could've finished a quarter of it using hand tools alone.

So although Sears may not have sold the very best quality tools, they were a level or two above much of the cheap stuff sold at the 'big boxes' these days, and I'm grateful for the chance it gave me to enjoy this (wonderfully varied) world of woodworkng....

Cheers,

In Canberra there are quite a few doc-shops.

Some public servants retire on lottery windfall pensions and spend up big... But soon realise that 30 years of sitting at a desk has been unkind to knees, hips and constitution.

A local salespoint, Gumtree, often has estate sales or workshops with some impressive gear in them.

It's a good thing that such gear is made well, it allows the next generation to get into the sport at a reasonable cost.

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

I think it might end up being one of those US "home workshops" we see lots of on YouTube; beautifully presented, equipped with the best and very latest shiny things.......yet strangely devoid of any actual woodwork. Not a shaving to be seen. Just another area for the home help to dust and polish once a week?

"Reminds me of a guy I know here who has a complete (and I mean COMPLETE) matching set of Terry Gordon's planes, specially commissioned in an exotic timber, and yet doesn't do any woodwork at all.

I hope you are not talking about me. Mine do get used... not as much as I’d like but I do have some output. Lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

No...he's in NSW fairly close to me. You're in the clear, kevjed

Originally Posted by IanW

No, D.W., we never had anything quite like the Sears tool phenomenon here, unfortunately. I'm not sure if you meant to sound disparaging of Sears stuff? It's certainly not Hammer or Felder quality, but it was useable, as your father clearly demonstrated. For someone like myself, arriving in North America in the 70s, it was a new Eden - power tools were cheap enough that even someone on a grad student stipend (& with a family, in my case!) could afford machinery that was simply out of my league here in Aus. At the time, there was very limited choice, and even those meant for home use cost an arm & a leg.

My Sears 12" bandsaw sailed through Rock Maple up to its full depth of cut (6") with its 1/2 HP - grunted a bit at times, but got there. A good friend had some property outside town & I had access to a few nice windfalls from his woodlot, which helped me turn downed trees into a few items like these: Walnut side chair.jpg Cherry 4_poster.jpg

Given the limited shop time available, a bit of machinery made it possible to (almost) keep up with family needs for simple furniture & occasionally tackle some more ambitious stuff like that above. Even in my prime I don't think I could've finished a quarter of it using hand tools alone.

So although Sears may not have sold the very best quality tools, they were a level or two above much of the cheap stuff sold at the 'big boxes' these days, and I'm grateful for the chance it gave me to enjoy this (wonderfully varied) world of woodworkng....

Cheers,

I suppose I'm viewing it through a current lens. My mother paints stuff. Kind of hokey, but she makes a fair bit of money doing it, perhaps $25/USD an hour equivalent - and it keeps her off the street, or more accurately, it keeps her busy and in a good mood. In the US, the style is referred to as tole. It hurts my eyes!!

For her to paint probably 1000+ hours a year (as she has done for the past 35 or so), my father has to prepare stock. Early on, it was just lumber yard stock cut to pattern, then they started sourcing barn siding and other more interesting stuff - same deal, though, my father was stock prep man. small tooth fine blade, fast pattern cutting. He's worn out a lot of sears tools - a couple of bandsaws, belt sanders, etc. - one of the few people I've seen use a tool enough to actually wear it out. I think he'd have been better off with a better saw, but he doesn't operate that way. Those were available here used for about the same price as his was new, but one has to have some curiosity - he buys a tool from sears, wears it out, curses it, then buys another one.

He helped me put my kitchen in last week and remarked about how many tools I have (he's not made anything of note, but he's made a lot of that). And then he said "we're losing our sears, I'm going to have to go somewhere else to get blades and belts now". He'll be better off for it. My mother has gone more the way of making prints, and that'll make the current saw last longer - we'll see how long it lasts, but I'll help him find another one if he and the business live long enough to wear the current saw out. My parents are in their 70s, and they have money anxiety......and a lot of money and a lot of other income. I hope they stop at some point so that the sears thing doesn't matter.

At any rate, I recognize that the environment in the '60s on made for success for sears. When I bought my first portable table saw from them (long time ago now), I found that the slots were about a hundredth too narrow for any standard TS fixtures. They failed to mention that when I bought the saw. They didn't stock many parts in the store, so you could go to the parts and repair desk and special order items, but they're expensive, and soon NLA if you don't get them right away. The attitude at the desk was one of "don't waste my time", as the salespeople were commissioned and not happy to begin with.

I see where it provided opportunity early on (to be fair, or local hardware store did, too, but the offerings were fractious and the stock a lot less, of course), but the business model they use was outdated by the mid 1980s (around the same time we started seeing grizzly catalogs at my grandfather's house).

George Wilson often reminds me how bad the opportunity was to have power tools in the 50s and 60s, and just how much a decent old style dovetailed ways jointer cost back then. Probably equivalent to $1500+ now.

So, I do see your point. I think there may have been a time that the quality of the sears tools (The low end ones, like a $300 bandsaw, for example) may have been better than it was in the late 1980s, and they probably didn't have ridiculous things on them like "2 7/8th horsepower" like my dad's current 8 amp bandsaw has written on the front.

I don't know that this ties in to the current thread, but I'll give my dad credit - he's used his tools to cut more lumber than the bridge city tools sold to a cohort of 1000 buyers. I don't think the BCTW model will sell that well once the current generation of white collar retirees is gone, though. There are lots of bubbles like that in the US (and probably everywhere - there's a really strange one for vintage farm equipment here that will burst in a couple of decades).

I think sears had a good run. I think it turned into them taking advantage of mark buyers, though, and unfortunately, my dad is one. The free flow of internet information sealed their fate 15 years ago or so, and now their tools are available here at one of their competitors' stores (lowes), which is really strange to see.

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

I always wondered how they survived with their business model, but reading his blog it sounds as though Bridge City was almost constantly living on the edge financially.

I always take complaints about tightness of business with a grain of salt. If John E managed to run the same business for 36 years without going broke, it must've been fairly decent. I'm sure he's worked hard, but I've got an extremely wealthy uncle who did sort of the same thing (made an individual unique business, worked really hard and ran it for 35 years) who also tells the same story of struggle and hardship. For 20 of those years, he made the equivalent of $750K US in today's dollars, but he can always strawman someone "who had it easier and made more".

Karl Holtey (not badmouthing these folks, just see the same sentiment) also wrote something along the lines of "i merely survive, in this business, nothing better" in terms of the financial results. I'm sure a surgeon makes more, but I'll bet he's done better than a retail clerk by a wide margin, and has had a life of purpose and meaning.

I was going to make a comment about how people like John E always write a book about themselves, and that he probably will, but I see he has already written at least one. The guy who runs fast cap is really high on himself, too. Another forum user here in the states is an editor, and he said that he has a constant flow of small business owners who feel that their story is so interesting that everyone must hear about it. Digital publishing has made it accessible for them to write a book, pay a few thousand dollars to have it edited and then published. As said user has told me, the books often aren't as interesting as the authors think they are. John's looks to be a little higher cost.

(My uncle also ended up writing a book about himself....he hands it out to people because sales aren't as high as he thought they'd be!! The common theme in all of these books is that the authors are extremely confident about what they're doing, often to the point of being delusional about their accomplishments. Reading the summary of the book that John E wrote makes it sound a lot like my uncle's book - he was more clever in making a title that would lead a reader to think the book might be about quality or process, but it appears to be a self-written pat on the back. Some folks like that - my relative does. I'll bet not a lot of these guys read each others' books, though!)