People Take Warning

Your favorite toolmaker can disappear.

A pour at the Lemfco foundry, where we make our holdfasts and planing stops. It’s still possible to make things in this country.

When I started working at Popular Woodworking Magazine in 1996, Powermatic still made everything in the United States. It had a foundry in McMinnville, Tennessee, and its employees Blanchard ground¹ all the cast iron tops for the company’s machines, making them shiny and flat.

Delta Machinery was building Unisaws and band saws in its U.S. plants. Porter-Cable was making all its routers in this country. Senco made its fantastic nail guns here in Cincinnati. In fact, most of the brands of tools and machinery were made domestically.

This was, and I repeat, in 19 and 96. This was not ancient history.

Today, none of those brands manufacture their machines in the United States. Some of them do some light assembly here. But nearly all the heavy manufacturing is now in Taiwan and China.

What happened?

The correct answer is: Lots of things. But I’d like to focus on two stories I heard over and again from people in the industry. These were harbingers or metaphors or zeugmas for what was to come.

Exhibit No. 1: JET Tools, a small overseas manufacturer, introduced a band saw that was a close copy of Delta’s 14" band saw made in Tupelo, Mississippi. Delta sued JET to stop them, but Delta lost. After that, the woodworking catalogs were full of Taiwanese-made machines that looked just like Powermatics and Deltas. But the tools and machines were a fraction of the price. Grizzly, which had specialized in imported drill presses, grew to become enormous.

Exhibit No. 2: Delta began selling its machines in Home Depot. At some point, Home Depot told/suggested/demanded that Delta manufacture a 10" miter saw for $99. Delta executives knew they couldn’t do this in the United States. So they took manufacturing of that tool overseas. And soon (because of Exhibit No. 1) Delta and other makers moved more and more manufacturing across the Pacific.

Are things now better or worse? I’ll let you answer that. Tool prices are now lower, so it’s easier to get into woodworking. But the tool quality is – in my opinion – not as good. In my old job, I had to/got to use every new damn machine for 15 years. The decline in quality was obvious.

Oh, and try getting parts for your 1980s Delta band saw. Delta used to have robust customer service and an amazing parts department. Now you have to scrounge on eBay.

Foreshadowing for the Hand Tool World?
Because of people like Thomas Lie-Nielsen, Robin Lee and the current owners of Clico/Clifton, we have a solid supply of great hand tools made in North America and the U.K.² The quality of these tools exceeds Stanley tools at that company’s peak.

Because of these manufacturers, you don’t have to become a hobby metalworker or machinist to get a handplane in working order. You can order a tool, sharpen it and get to work in a few minutes. That removes a huge barrier that I faced as a new woodworker in the early 1990s. When I bought my first Stanley 60-1/2 block plane, it was a multi-day process to fettle the little f*&^er so it would work acceptably.

If you think things will be this rosy way forever, please read the beginning of this blog entry again. Delta went from a major U.S. manufacturer with thousands of employees to a small company in South Carolina that’s owned by Chang Type Industrial Co., Ltd.

Small companies can disappear in months or years (or less).³

What can you do? Simple. Stop buying copycat goods from overseas.

“Wait!” you might be saying, “Wood River and Quangsheng didn’t copy Lie-Nielsen, they copied Stanley’s Bed Rock Planes. So they were doing exactly what Lie-Nielsen was doing.”

Cough, cough, bulls&%t. The first generation of Quangsheng planes copied the casting pattern errors in Lie-Nielsen tools.

The copycat strategy is this.

Step 1: Make the copy.

Step 2: Endure the outcry until there is a new generation of people who don’t know about who came first. So new woodworkers buy the cheap one.

Step 3: Profit.

So I’m asking you, beseeching, even: Buy your tools from the people who put in the hard work. Avoid the copycats. Yes, it might cost you $50 or $100 extra to do this. But the employees of Lie-Nielsen, Veritas, Clifton and others will absolutely notice the difference. They’ll still be employed.

And future woodworkers will notice the difference. They’ll be able to order a new Lie-Nielsen or Veritas plane and get right to work.

If you can’t afford the extra $50 to $100 extra to buy a domestic tool, then buy vintage tools. You’ll have to put in about the same amount of work to fix the vintage tools as you did to get the overseas tools working. And you won’t help the copycats crush the people who built the market for quality hand tools.

And for those of you who are laissez-faire or Machiavellian in your economics, then know that flack – which is what this blog entry is – is part of the marketplace. And I’m going to continue spewing this flack for years to come.

1. https://www.xometry.com/resources/machining/blanchard-grinding/

2. Plus lots of other smaller makers like Bad Axe, Gramercy, Blue Spruce, Barr, Vesper Tools (Chris Vesper, where are you????) and others too numerous to mention who continue to make tools in North America, the EU and the U.K.

3. Lost Art Press/Crucible is even smaller than most tool companies – we’re about as big as a local plumbing or electrical company. We are seven people now, but that doesn’t lower the danger. In some ways it raises it. John and I have to make payroll every other week, which is a big expense now.

One bad mistake can wreck the bank account. Several years ago we got very low to zero cash after a sales rep for a shipping company quoted us one price (a lie) and then charged us a much higher price. We caught the problem in the nick of time. I still think about that experience every day.