Let’s take a couple of minutes and ponder the tool. We started with a wheel and a lever and a stone axe. Now, if you have the equipment and the inclination, you can sit at your computer to design a carving, hit enter and let the CNC router take care of the rest, without ever touching the wood.
There is a middle ground between using that old stone axe and that computerized router. In that middle ground live the tools that most of us use – the hand tools and the small power tools.
A group of woodworking tools that holds a special place are the antique tools that our forbears passed down to us or that we find in the dusty corner of the antique store.
While most of us could never plane a board smooth as quickly with a jack plane as with a big powerful thickness planer, there is something so satisfying about the sound and the feel of using that nice old solid tool. That piece of birch, fashioned years ago into this beautiful tool, held at just the right angle, gives you that perfect chamfer you sought.
For putting down deck boards, nothing is going to beat your 24v cordless screwdriver, but for tightening the screws on the hinges of your old barn, a nice hefty old screwdriver might be the tool of choice.
Please don’t hear us knocking modern power tools and hand tools. These tools bring woodworking to us, the masses. Just don’t forget the high-quality, long-lasting tools of yore.
