Thread: A gripe about trendy stuff sold to us

The mutton tallow is good for your boots

I thought you spread mutton tallow on your toast for breakfast? Why mutton? Was the Veritas mutton tallow better or worse than the Lie-Neilsen mutton tallow? Did you-tubers restore vintage Stanley mutton tallow previously?

A2 is still a great steel although a pain to reset primary bevels by hand.

You pays your money & you takes your choice. Buyer beware, etc etc....

I doubt there are many of us who haven't bought something on the basis of a great review or hype from someone we think "knows" & then wished we hadn't. I lashed out on water stones back in the 70s when they were the greatest thing since sliced bread & what every self-respecting woodworker had to have. The ones I bought were awful, about as hard as your average biscuit (cookie to Nth Americans), & I spent more time flattening the darn things than actually sharpening anything. They did cut fast, but wore so quickly, maintaining any semblance of a straight edge and a flat back was beyond my abilities. But at least the stones have improved out of sight since then. Yes, the Shapton pro probably costs twice what it should here too, but I'm so pleased with mine I've (almost) forgotten the pain of its cost....

While I agree that an infill in peak condition probably can't "beat" a Bailey that is in peak condition in terms of finish, I will dispute the claim that a #4 can do "better". After all, as you like to point out, it's the cap-iron doing the real work, so as long as that's doing its job properly & blades are equally sharp, the results should be indistinguishable. Equally, neither works at their best if not properly set up.

It's the old Ford vs Chevy argument in a different guise.....

Cheers,

Of the infills that I've had, the ones that are good for a couple of strokes and marveling at feel are the heavy ones. The good ones for day to day work are probably the earlier norris types that are closer in weight to a stanley.

I'd say they're equivalent except for the lack of adjuster, which is more of a finish planing thing (like trying to finish surfaces right off of the plane) than it is a smoothing thing where sanding and/or scraping will follow.

My gripe isn't about the well made boutique stuff... My gripe is the resellers with gigantic marketing campaign budgets pawning off trash under the guise of "The Same Specifications."

Pick your poison... Buffing bars full of colored wax and a pinch of low grade abrasive... Shellac where only half of it dissolves, and it takes a year to cure out, even the good alcohol. How about chisels and plane irons matching the written specifications of the boutique product, but hold up no better than cheese on wood. Planes with castings that are out of whack fitted out with lumpy handles, warped cap irons, and hitchy adjusters. And lets not even talk about the low end "water based lacquer" products...

D2 knives are the current worst of this, rivaling the 440C knife steel catastrophe of the 1980's and the A2/HSS woodworking edge tool craze of the early 2000's. The cheap ones are trash which are either unsharpenable or cast the whole edge off whenever they're used, while the boutique ones are fantastic.

I guess it's a matter of really what's being pitched and how honest. If someone buys a D2 knife for $25, they're at the very luckiest, going to get something that's actually D2 but is a bit soft.

if you buy a high end D2 knife, it had better be powder D2 or at least sprayform (I think powder is a lot more common). D2 is horrid in ingot form, but there are industrial uses for it where the terrible widely dispersed large random carbides are not a big deal. Definitely not the case for a knife - terrible edge stability and terrible toughness. Powder D2 is kind of like XHP (V11) Jr. , or since XHP came along later, it's like D2 senior, or CPM 154 Sr.

I looked up larrin's data on D2 - toughness for ingot d2 is 1/4th of powder D2. Just about everything with low toughness that's ingot is going to have large carbides and be terrible to use. the way to prevent ingot D2 from breaking quite so easily is to make it soft, which is the case for other poorly dispersed stainless steels.

there's a guy on YT who tested knives for a while - most knives were the steel they said they were. About 1/3rd to 1/2 were outside of their specified hardness range (generally below - again, people are nonplussed with a soft knife but they'll believe the spec claim. They will return a knife that breaks and demand a replacement after the warranty is gone).

But some of the chinese knives that are too-good-to-be-true prices were something like 13c27 or some other very common inexpensive small carbide stainless instead of D2 or whatever they claimed. Not a surprise. they were XRFed - the same way a couple of people figured out what PM V11 is. that, separately, is a little weird - the LV thing of not wanting anyone to state what the steel actually is when such analysis is commonplace. It costs about $30 to get a complete analysis of a steel sample - XRF, hardness, and if you are willing to make the sample in a testing coupon size, toughness/break testing also. their claim that it's proprietary is humorous - I just bought some bar stock from carpenter last year when they were clearing it out for O1 prices. I thought maybe that was a sign of a big run to come, but it definitely has not reappeared on their tool steel drop page.

Getting far afield from my point. when someone makes an expensive boutique tool and it can't outperform a basic tool - chisels are a common issue when compared to still reasonable vintage English tools. Do A2 and V11 chisels come close to ward/I.Sorby, etc? No. will they be compared to those? No. They'll be compared to site chisels. What's the point of buying V11 chisels for super high prices when the steel is a cutting steel and has poor impact and bending toughness? I admit that I would give LV a break more than other folks and have, but that's one thing that's been going on a little too long. It's definitely a long abrasive wearing steel (double O1), but they could make a better chisel for less if they could heat treat simple steels. They can't. Silver steel rod costs very little and could be die forged into a chisel that would blow their offerings away. It's $2 a pound.

I already think the blue spruce tools are hocum, but I've said that many times. they're the boutique version of legos - source the parts, assemble, market. sand finely and polish highly. Underperform vintage tools and make dippy constraints like "short" paring chisels because there is no taper in the steel. They are a disgrace.

But somehow, I find the "graphene" rust preventive and some of the stuff that Chris Schwarz has tried to lay on people as an ethical obligation in the past, and now he comes out trying to sell literature about sharpening for the cost of a full basic sharpening setup and tell everyone he's here to save people money. the conclusion to the Spagnulo thing on graphene rust preventive that's $70 an ounce is that his table saw rusted anyway, but it was his fault. if he had put a fraction of a dollar of the lightest cut of super blonde on his saw top and wiped it off when he was ready to get back to work, there would be no rust. the fact that he comes back and uses the unexpected rust as an opportunity to pitch the same stuff again is offensive, but my opinion or guess - he has an agreement that required more than one video. he presents a false or limited selection dilemma to people because it's good for his wallet, and I guess it allows people who follow on and buy the stuff to feel that they're "in the know".

A case like this came up on the UK forum when I still posted there. "how do I prevent rust". Mineral oil. "I need something better than that that's thicker". OK, look for hydrotreated gear oil in whatever weight you want - it's $15 a quart and it won't be unstable for 75 years or more or mix mineral oil with a wax to create a barrier. the suggestion was generally disregarded because people wanted something inferior or far more expensive that would work because of its price.

Kind of like the trend honing fluid - it's slow naptha and mineral spirits and blue tint. if you wanted to mix varnish maker's naptha and mineral spirits, it would cost about $20 a gallon at retail. I pointed out what it was on one of trend's videos and asked why it's being sold for about $300+ a gallon equivalent after they claimed nothing else would work as well and they took their video down. It was a really obnoxious pitchy video, but more than one person has stated that if you come across them at a woodworking show, they do the same thing and tell you that you shouldn't use other products without being able to explain why.

i'll gladly take the label of cynic to take a whack at anyone who pushes this kind of stuff outside of the captive salespeople for the company. They don't really have a choice.

I go through sharpening anxiety once every couple of years. I don't use a grinder because I'm terrible at it (my fine motor skills aren't great which aparrently can be linked to my autism and my ADHD gives me a very low attention threshold for some things and grinding apparently is one of them. I'm sure I could work at it and get better but my chisels and plane blades don't have enough length for the amount of practice I'd need) so I stick to a Veritas mk 2 guide and an m power diamond stone setup which I use every 6 to 12 months and have a washita stone, a razor hone, and a strop on my bench for touch ups day to day. During my latest sharpening anxiety/FOMO I almost bought the Sharpen This video series since I've enjoyed all of Chris and LAP's stuff to date. Luckily I got the book before paying $75USD for the movies because honestly, there was nothing in there that you can't find on this forum explained in more detail. I ended up giving it to a friend who has just started woodworking in the hope that they might get something out of it because there wasn't really anything in there I hadn't read a million times before elsewhere (and it also left out a few things he apparently swears by according to the LAP blog and his substack [which I subscribe to, very much enjoy and consider to be worth the money]).

I guess what I'm saying is even though I'm a hardened skeptic 99% of the time I, and probably most other people get swept up in a bit of (woodworking) performance anxiety and FOMO when it comes to the next thing. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you've wasted some cash, stop yourself from throwing good money after bad trying to find a way to make something work as promised, and let other people know your thoughts if they ask.

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Originally Posted by Bennykenobi

I go through sharpening anxiety once every couple of years. I don't use a grinder because I'm terrible at it (my fine motor skills aren't great which aparrently can be linked to my autism and my ADHD gives me a very low attention threshold for some things and grinding apparently is one of them. I'm sure I could work at it and get better but my chisels and plane blades don't have enough length for the amount of practice I'd need) so I stick to a Veritas mk 2 guide and an m power diamond stone setup which I use every 6 to 12 months and have a washita stone, a razor hone, and a strop on my bench for touch ups day to day. During my latest sharpening anxiety/FOMO I almost bought the Sharpen This video series since I've enjoyed all of Chris and LAP's stuff to date. Luckily I got the book before paying $75USD for the movies because honestly, there was nothing in there that you can't find on this forum explained in more detail. I ended up giving it to a friend who has just started woodworking in the hope that they might get something out of it because there wasn't really anything in there I hadn't read a million times before elsewhere (and it also left out a few things he apparently swears by according to the LAP blog and his substack [which I subscribe to, very much enjoy and consider to be worth the money]).

I guess what I'm saying is even though I'm a hardened skeptic 99% of the time I, and probably most other people get swept up in a bit of (woodworking) performance anxiety and FOMO when it comes to the next thing. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you've wasted some cash, stop yourself from throwing good money after bad trying to find a way to make something work as promised, and let other people know your thoughts if they ask.

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I was thinking this morning (also ADD, no H), the ADD part is probably comorbid with impulsiveness (and also being on the spectrum - I haven't been diagnosed for the latter, but the hyperfocus on certain things and obsession with people speaking honestly rather than using an arbitrary cloak of manners to grease themselves from one situation to the next feigning offense when someone calls them out - probably characteristics).

But this applies beyond the ADD/spectrum crowd for people who want to pay to solve problems due to a lack of creativity and ability to follow things other people teach without question or much depth of understanding ...

....anyway, it ran through my head that sharpening materials are kind of like unintended pregnancy.

you can make good decisions most days, but you get into a situation where you let your guard down, and suddenly you've got sharpening materials coming in the mail.

a lot of people like Chris and the level that his books are published at (like the mouldings book, for example), so he has a captive audience - many in the audience would just rather hear what Chris says to do vs. checking around and seeing first if it's anything special. that's not really a shot at everyone - it's not my place to determine what other people prefer. Lots of people a generation older than me didn't really care what the national and world news was as long as it came from their preferred source. If someone loved Dan Rather or one of the other anchors and they made a statement that hinted at them feeling like the news was more important through them than it was more objective through someone else, they'd brush that off.

When it actually comes down to things like sharpening and mouldings, the older texts are generally better and far deeper or more credible in that they're a well of information that came out of deep practice. whatever they don't describe is probably something better discerned.

Nicholson and Holtzappfel both say the same thing, for example. Grind relatively shallow carefully (holtzappfel actually specifies 25 explicitly, and Nicholson just says that a good grind should be hollow and uniform). Holtzappfel precisely describes a secondary bevel from a very fine stone for softwood work at 30 degrees, and the same at 35 degrees if the wood is to be hardwood. when the bevel is difficult to refresh or threatens getting steeper, regrind. Nicholson's description is similar by saying that the grind should be an angle that would not hold up as a honing angle and the iron should be held "more vertical" or something when applying the second or second and third steps honing.

If one finishes an edge and holds to their rules, there's not much more to do other than address how it can be done on things like gouges or skew irons, etc. Everything flows back to the same point and really doesn't depend on stones or this or that guide or whatever else - that kind of rigid fidelity ties up mind molecules that should be spent on developing feel and experience instead.

Just as with making mouldings, it's not so much difficult to understand making end templates and then removing wood - that's brief, but it's important to get a look at a lot of work and a lot of moulding profiles to get more of a feel. The former will be the focus of a modern book making a lot of pages out of how to use end templates, etc, and the older texts will spend a page or two on the how and a whole lot more on the what as well as some taste points. We're all better off reading the older ones instead, but they don't go down as easy as the kind of in-between level that Schwarz has mastered postings.

Of course, there are cosmanites and sellersites who also have dogma that they won't move past. One member on woodcentral when I was still reading there said something to another member like "are you really going to change that method and move away from what cosman says? It feels like cheating on him" or something like that. Way out there!

I probably don't traffic in the same circles... But I'm just not seeing this massive crowd of people who pound dogma of one fellow as the only way.

What I see is fellows who can get beginners going fairly quickly. Sellers seems to fall into the "Don't bother buying anything special, just use the tools you have laying around and get on with it." Crosman seems to have something you can buy for every problem.

I will say that I found Crosman's hit piece "comparison" between Narex Richter and Woodcraft Sockwt chisels a bit disingenuous. He jig sharpened both to 25 degrees, pounded them through hard maple, and showed the chipped edges. He then followed with "See, they both take equivalent damage," as if this test showed they were more or less the same, and a heavily chipped edge was what you should expect after a short chopping session.

I feel like this was a sharpening failure, and should have been used as a chance to educate folks on the necessity prepping edges for the intended use, and how you do this, but that wasn't where it went.

Cosman favors whatever he's selling. not necessarily what brand, but if he's selling it. I have him and sellers and all of those guys on "do not recommend" on YT, which is a wonderful function as I sometimes have YT running in the background and find most woodworking presenters on YT to be a reflection of what they're selling.

Cosman started off giving classes and realized, at least based on his account, that he could offer tools. I would guess he did a lot of those kind of on-site classes that they may still have at woodcraft.

Sellers pretends he's not selling anything, but his objective was to get you to spend money going to one of his classes chasing some nebulous thing, and he pretended to have sort of the "Uncle Roop who is a real craftsman and has been there and done that" hand tooler. he's a power tool user who has from what I can tell, learned to use hand tools based on whatever he can teach and draw people on. He doesn't have the mark of a cabinetmaker. But he has really convinced a lot of people that he's somewhat altruistic compared to other guys, and he's gradually distilled what he does from on site classes (since 1984 or something according to him?) to selling media and now at least last time I tried to find out any honest chronology of his history (they are a bit conflicting or full of holes), he's quit doing in person teaching. If you're in his position with a giant captive audience paying an annuity stream of revenue, it's far more valuable and far less hassle than dealing with people who want refunds for some odd circumstance that they can't make at the last second.

I understand just from seeing people say they subscribe to cosman's something or other (site, channel? who knows) that he does the same.

both manage to get folks latched on for a very long time for what should be things you'd learn in a year if you expected it out of yourself.

but I guess that's my gripe about woodworking and the first four years or so I was in it, I was starving for better information in a sea of people who had opinions about things they never did well or professionally, and gobs of tool reviews that were just veiled marketing. In 2011 or so, I started sampling good older tools, figured out how to use them and was then off to the races. Thankfully, the best tools of the 19th century were a bit underappreciated at the time in England. they may still be, but there's less finding a double iron try plane with little use for 25 pounds now than there used to be.

if someone ends up going that route working with hand tools, there's not a whole lot to have marketed at you compared to doubling the price of japanese waterstones or selling $20-$30 chinese sets of chisels for a multiple of the per-unit cost, or in the case of IBC stuff, nosebleed prices for kind of pedestrian and ugly tools. Or in Seller's case, trying to keep people on the annuity payment setup - the aggravation of breaking away from basic ugly work is a bit of a burden and would burst the bubble of folks happy to spend 22 years mastering sharpening.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Cosman started off giving classes and realized, at least based on his account, that he could offer tools. I would guess he did a lot of those kind of on-site classes that they may still have at woodcraft.

This will date me. I remember the woodworking guild I was part of hosting him, about 31 years ago. Can't say I liked him LOL. He was putting on the hard sell, disguised as a technique demonstration. Can't fault him for his hard work though. He's done well where the vast majority fade away.

Originally Posted by The Spin Doctor

This will date me. I remember the woodworking guild I was part of hosting him, about 31 years ago. Can't say I liked him LOL. He was putting on the hard sell, disguised as a technique demonstration. Can't fault him for his hard work though. He's done well where the vast majority fade away.

hard sell disguised as a technique demonstration. That kind of describes all of them, but I remember cosman almost 20 years ago now since I started woodworking - he was putting on a demo of something at a woodshow and wearing one of those madonna mic things and really going at it TV infomercial style.

He made a comment about irons or something early on and I said something contrary about his claims, as I normally do (not ever going to claim being mr happy go lucky), and another one of the boutique crowd who was selling knife kits sent me a PM asserting that Rob has 10 kids and nobody should say anything negative about what he does because of that (the whole kind of "you're getting in the way of him feeding his kids".

I have some respect for the guy because he has never lost his cool when I've confronted him with analysis of whatever he's saying, but I've felt with all of the "teachers", there are no mack headley's in the group, so the conundrum with people who probably some small % really would enjoy moving on, is getting them to the point that they're sharpening stuff and doing work, and then pointing them toward older stuff and things established before 1900 and then that have declined since then.

In one of Cosman's videos, where he's selling his planes, he's asserting that the larger 4 1/2 smoothers are the appropriate plane to get because the no. 4s were designed for boys to learn planing at school.

Originally Posted by raffo

In one of Cosman's videos, where he's selling his planes, he's asserting that the larger 4 1/2 smoothers are the appropriate plane to get because the no. 4s were designed for boys to learn planing at school.

if he put a couple of three or four hour days in of sawing and planing, he might grasp why the 4 1/2 didn't sell better in the US.

Probably when he started "coaching" people on hand tools 30+ years ago, you could say just about anything you wanted and most people wouldn't have had access to information to know otherwise. Some reflection on reality in terms of claims doesn't happen by default, i guess - testing things we say against what actually happened. Todd Hughes used to propose little things to think about, though he didn't often follow up with much - but the whole double iron thing sunk in when he proposed "so, you're telling me that blacksmiths went to great additional cost to slot an iron, make a cap iron and then a screw and thread the cap iron and screw to be put in a more expensive plane that was less good and people bought it".

OK, that wouldn't make sense. It had some economic value, which we have a pretty good grasp of now.

the whole "the bigger planes were for men, and the smaller for boys" smacks of the 1980s/1990s pre internet thing that you'd get from parents and older folks who explained everything by "it's just common sense".

Too, I knew what a plane was when I was a kid. I had no idea how they worked, and the reason I knew what they were was because there was a person or two in every area who had hundreds of them or more than a thousand because they were hoarders, operating more like stamp collectors. None of them were woodworkers. One of my coworkers asked if I wanted any planes around 2006 because her grandfather had died. He had 1600 planes. He was a jovial nice guy, but he wasn't a woodworker and he didn't use the planes. What Wiley has described to me in terms of keeping in mind the progression of things from the 1960s or so until now, where the first kind of break from the shift to modernity was interrupted, was how much of a vacuum existed by then and the idea that krenov or someone would write a book and actually use planes in fine furniture (even though only for light operations, the rest done by machines) was like a life changing concept for some.

I'm sure there were a few collectors who also were immersed in correct information about planes and chisels and such, but the audience for their knowledge would've been just about zero. Even in 2006, all kinds of poo was being spouted about this or that chisel and characteristics of japanese chisels made them sound "tricky and unpredictable". I think Charlesworth referred to annular ring japanese chisels as "tricky thoroughbreds" and then touted the LN chisels in an LN produced videos and he was a little offended when I called out a claim that he made about longevity - it was a little out of character for him which is why it stood out.

I guess all of these things fit in "stuff that was sold to us", but it was really "at us". To side with Todd on trying to figure out why things weren't done the same way 150 years ago as they were in 2006 was sort of a buzz kill for many, and it wasn't well explained by the "well, they were just poor and of no means back then, otherwise they'd use what we use". They definitely wouldn't have. Sometimes there's not enough reality in romance and not enough romance in reality.