On the subject of tool resurrection
There are a number of questions I get asked regularly about my passion for restoring machinery and handheld tools of the past. Do I use all the tools in my shop? Eventually, yeah. Do I think I’ll ever stop lugging them home? Goodness, no! What does my wife think? She’s come to terms with the irony of being a minimalist woman married to a man who owns seventy-three circular saws.
The big question, the one with no pat answer is this: what’s the point in collecting old tools?
What indeed.
There are a lot of reasons a body might rebuild an old handheld power tool or stationary machine. You might be starting a shop on the cheap, and a router or table saw that just needs a bit of TLC is less expensive than buying new. You may be attracted by the build quality, or aesthetics, or quaintness of a long-ago machine, have fond memories of the one your dad had that was just like it, or simply enjoy having a project to tinker with.
For me, a major factor has to do with my career. I have been a power tool repairman for over twenty years now, and I’ve had a front-row seat to the decline and fall of Domestically produced tools of all types and the subsequent prevalence of tools made by the lowest bidder in a factory on the other side of the world, preferably by robots. My years at the workbench spanned the end of American manufacturing and the unavoidable paradigm shift as tools went from being thought of as one-time purchases to be cared for and repaired as necessary ( tool as investment) to the current view of a tradesperson’s tools as another jobsite consumable, no less than reciprocating saw blades or a box of drywall screws ( tool as expense).
The vantage point of tools as being something you buy without research the next time you run out for warped plywood at the big box store is appalling to little ol’ me on a number of levels. My shop is filled ( crammed, even) with tools that were researched, demonstrated by a salesman, saved for over a matter of months, and purchased at great expense by the original owners, be they a home builder or a factory, serious home hobbyist or maintenance department. These machines were not replaced at the first sign of trouble because they rarely misbehaved and were far too expensive to ditch. They weren’t relegated to the backup when they got older- there was no backup for a circular saw or belt sander in the ’30s because the company very likely didn’t own another. These tools were expected to perform, and they did so well at it that they have, without exception, outlived their first owners, and often their second. That degree of build quality wasn’t cheap then. It doesn’t even exist now.
Moreover, there is the environmental impact to consider. People look askance at me when I say that because they often think of conservation as a modern concept with no application in the world of Old Stuff, but my views on the subject are more in line with the era these tools came from than one might think. We exist in a time when we have more information on our effect on the planet than ever before. We can exchange information about everything from climate change to resource depletion with anyone anywhere in the world, build a computer model to predict the number of water bottles that will be in the ocean in fifty years, and track, in real-time, the inevitable crash of an eco structure, yet there has never been a time in human history that has been more wasteful, more gluttonous for material goods, more predisposed to squander resources without compunction.
I’m not a wasteful person by nature. I’m the descendant of people who came from Scotland ( a country synonymous with parsimony) to become Hillbillies ( who didn’t have enough to their names to waste). I’m also a mechanic, both by trade and disposition- it goes deeply against the grain to throw out what could just be fixed. I think it’s absurd for a saw or drill to have a lifespan of fewer than ten years when virtually everything you or I own can be constructed in such a way that one of them will last you the rest of your life. For example, my lawnmower, a secondhand Lawn-Boy acquired when my wife and I moved in together, is now sixty-eight years old and still going strong. I’ve never owned another mower, and there’s every likelihood I never will. Our refrigerator is even older, having been made before the outbreak of WW2. It still does a fine job of keeping things cold, looks good doing it, and is the most efficient refrigerator ever tested by Consumer Reports to this day. My truck, one of the newest things I own, is old enough to run for president.
I may not always do the best job of sorting the cans from the bottles, but it’s safe to say I’ve got reducing and reusing on lock.
Additionally, there is, I think, a greater connection with life when the things you use day to day are an experience. Many of the greatest advancements in technology in the last fifty years are related more to convenience than to longevity or quality. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for the tool user who must watch his or her bottom line like the proverbial hawk. However, I have a low tolerance for the just-push-a-button, automatic, everything-is-being-done-for-you nature of things. I like shifting gears myself. I enjoy lining things up to a pencil mark instead of a laser. I enjoy sharpening lathe tooling and adjusting the lantern toolholder. It’s part of the ambiance to top off the oil before sanding down a board, I’m in no hurry. Flat belts and drum switches and HSS tooling have great feng shui properties.
Anyone with a love of history can’t help but be drawn in by the artifacts of the past. I think about my tools every time I start a job. Was my 1918 lathe purchased for war work? Why did the Army Air Corps want my T-33 made with a three-phase motor? How long did the original owner of my K-88 have to save to buy it? Did my 503 sander help put someone’s kid through college?
I often think of my crew down here in the shop as time travelers. The world is so very different from when they first saw the light of day. My Costilo milling machine remembers Utah becoming a state. My Syracuse band saw recalls the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. My workshop contains the tools of any number of trades, many of which simply don’t exist. When was the last time someone hung a regular door? Who sharpens drill bits anymore? What is a deck crawler for, anyway?
There’s also the question of performance. I draw a fair amount of heat for this, but I hold that, outside of weight savings and price, the best tools of the past can show a clean pair of heels to any modern equivalent, and can almost always hand the current brightly colored plastic excuse for a tool its hind portions in a one-on-one shootout. This deeply offends people who drink deep of the red/yellow/green Kool-Aid, but it’s true. No one has made a great circular saw in nearly thirty years. There is no honest-to-goodness heavy-duty belt sander on the market today. I have a handheld jigsaw that can cut 3/8” steel plate- show me the variable speed, keyless chucked offering that has a chance of doing that. Yes, cordless tools are a thing. I own them, they’re new. I find them very handy for jobs when I don’t want to run an extension cord. They’re boring as a beige room, and I get nothing out of using them except more time to run the cool machines.
As I mentioned earlier, my wife is a minimalist person to the core, chiefly because she doesn’t want to spend her life caring for things she doesn’t really care about. I get that, and couldn’t agree more. Thing is, there’s a lot of inanimate objects I do care about, and I’m happy spending a large part of my life caring for them.
You?
