iron or, shown here,
a hard-wearing manga-
nese bronze alloy that
has a nice warmth
in the hand. Its cutting
iron is cryogenically
treated steel.
Below:
Lie-Nielsen’s N0.4
smoothing plane is
a reincarnation, greatly
improved, of the classic
Stanley Bedrock bench
plane. It comes in ductile
a decline. Some of them ceased manufac-
turing entirely. If you aspired to serious
woodworking you sometimes couldn’t find
the tools to do it with.
The onrush of technology, however,
hasn’t made good hand tools obsolete any
more than it has rendered wood a thing
of the past—at least not yet. About 30 years
ago, things started to pick up again, thanks
to a second flowering of invention in the
realm of traditional hand tools, particularly
hand planes. The tool has yet to come along
to trump the practicality of a hand plane:
there are many operations in the making
of a cabinet, a violin, a boat, or a bamboo
fly rod where the right tool to use—the only
tool that makes any sense, in fact—is a plane.
The new wave of toolmakers has not
merely been reproducing classic old tools
but refining them to improve their perfor-
mance. Studying what a tool actually does,
small companies of entrepreneurial wood-
workers, machinists, blacksmiths and brico-
leurs have been reengineering the action,
the mechanics, the metallurgy and some-
times the ergonomics—the very shape of the
tool in the hand—of the familiar old forms
of the whole panoply of woodworking
tools, not only of hand planes, but of chisels,
handsaws, even hammers. Three of the
leading manufacturers of this new genera-
tion are Lee Valley & Veritas Tools in
Ottawa, Canada, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks
in Warren,
M E,
and Bridge City Tool
Works, in Portland,
OR.
Veritas has made
a specialty of radically reimagining the form
and mechanics of hand planes and a host of
other tools. Lie-Nielsen’s planes, produced
both in cast iron and in manganese bronze,
are largely derived from the classic Stanley
archetypes but have greatly improved
adjustment mechanisms. Bridge City Tool
Works makes, among other items, special-
purpose molding and shoulder planes and
multi-planes almost baroque in their com-
plexity and in the extravagant attention
given to a tool’s detail and finish.
The resurgence of interest in the ele-
mental implements of woodworking carries
more than a hint of nostalgia for the good
old days. Even while these tools are manu-
factured with sophisticated
c n c
equip-
ment, they feed a longing for respite from
the nonstop onslaught of tech. Exquisitely
finished, far more so than the tools most
blokes and proletarians toiled with to make
a living, they recall the fancy brass and rose-
wood “gentlemen’s tools” that used to be
advertised in British catalogs, catering to
chaps who liked to dabble in woodworking
in the same way Marie Antoinette some-
times liked to dress up and play at being
a shepherdess.
The intent of these contemporary tool-
makers from the beginning has been to
make tools that not simply work better
(which theirs do in spades) but that are fine
works of craft in their own right. Beauti-
fully made, seductive both purely as sculp-
ture and as objects that exist to be used,
these tools ask your hands to make things
with them as fine as they are themselves.
Glenn Gordon, a writer, furniture maker and
photographer in St. Paul, m n , contributes
to such publications as
Woodwork, Public
Art Review, Color
and
Black & White.
♦
lecvalley.com
lie-nielsen.com
bridgecitytools.com
apr/may 10 american craft 029
