They’ve Pulled the Plug on Electric Woodworking Tools

Three years ago, Anatol Polillo had a close encounter with an electric router that nearly cost him a thumb. “It got ugly pretty fast,” Polillo says.

A self-taught woodworker and freelance video producer, Polillo knew there had to be a safer way to build an end table. He found the answer, and a new obsession, by tapping into Web sites and mailing lists where subscribers spoke ardently of such wonders as rabbet planes, hewing hatchets, draw knives, wooden scrapers, levels, chisels and gouges.

In forums such as the Electronic Neanderthal Woodworker and the Old Tools mailing list, the Baltimore resident found himself exploring a new universe of antique-tool buffs. There, self-proclaimed “galoots” poke fun at the power-tool crowd’s dependence on “tailed apprentices,” their plug-in gadgets. Soon, Polillo was scouring auctions and flea markets for vintage planes and saw knives to replace his power tools.

Polillo, 31, had joined the growing community of “tool fundamentalists,” those who worship antique planes, saws and chisels for their history, utility and beauty. These are implements made by master designers that reached a peak of craftsmanship in the 18th century. They come from an era before the Industrial Revolution, when woodworkers depended solely on hand tools, whether to build a simple footstool or an ornate crown molding.

Crafted before planned obsolescence, these tools were built to last and, if tuned correctly, remain more effective and easier to use than hand tools mass-produced today. They’re regarded as artifacts worthy of the attention of curators and academics. Collectors have been known to pay in the tens of thousands of dollars for a rare specimen, such as a Sandusky Center wheel plow plane made of ebony and ivory.

The old-tool market is soaring. “It’s crazy,” says Patrick Leach, a hand-tool merchant and historian in Massachusetts. “It’s absolutely nuts!”

Ten years ago, “the common planes that Stanley made, you couldn’t give those things away at tool events. Everybody wanted the rare stuff.” Now, guys go crazy over the most basic of tools, he says.

Often, hobbyists who needn’t worry about bottom lines and deadlines begin with power tools and later discover that working wood with hand tools can be “much more satisfying and gratifying,” says John Lavine, editor of Woodwork magazine. “I think eventually it becomes a very layered process, and [each woodworker] figures out a combination of hand and power tools that is the most appropriate.”

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Donald Skinner, a member of the Baltimore Woodworkers Guild, is a power-tool guy. Skinner, 74, used hand tools as a teenager and graduated to power tools to make furniture and jewelry boxes as a hobby.

Skinner likes power tools because they’re faster and more efficient. “You can get your product done a lot faster and can enjoy it sooner,” says the retired civil engineer from Towson, Md.

When guild members were asked to complete a hand-tool project recently, only Skinner participated. “In my opinion, it was a flop,” he says. Hand tools present a unique challenge, but Skinner’s not sure that the challenge is worth pursuing full-tilt. “I just don’t think that’s the way [woodworking] is going nowadays,” he says.

Among hand-tool zealots, such capitulation is unthinkable. Without their undivided attention, they fear that the old-time skills required to build furniture, homes, instruments and other implements will be lost.

Vintage tools are a tactile connection to the past. John Alexander, a Baltimore hand-tool master, has entered the 17th century through copious research and shares what he has learned in lectures around the country.

Re-creating and using early technology is a way of “trying to understand not only how the objects were made, but also the economic and social settings in which they were made,” Alexander says. His 1978 book, “Make a Chair From a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood,” became gospel for hand-tool advocates.

Even if they constitute a fraction of woodworking enthusiasts, old-tool fanatics are a diverse enough crowd to warrant numerous publications, museums and organizations with disparate missions.

There is, for example, the Early American Industries Assn., a more “intellectual” clique whose members like to “sit and talk about how you would use a fleshing knife to skin a sperm whale, or how to use a croze to cut a groove in a barrel to put in the head,” says Leach, the toolmaker and historian.

And there is the Midwest Tool Collectors Assn., whose members, Leach says, “wear overalls, drive Ford pickup trucks and have crud under their fingernails.” Those guys really use their tools, he says.