Miscellaneous wanderings (long)
Bill Houghton, sunny today yahoo in Sebastopol, CA
>I spent part of yesterday sorting through my father's garage. We're getting ready to sell the house, and I've taken on getting the last of the useful stuff out of the garage before we order the dumpster (I might well, in my own shop, save 2 foot long pieces of 1x10 knotty pine, but I can't justify loading them into my 13-miles-gallon gas-gulper Chevy 3/4-ton truck, at current gas prices). I thought we'd cleaned out the useful tools, but I stumbled over a blue Stanley No. 9-1/2 with the cam lever missing on the lever cap, and it got me thinking again about hand tools and my father.
My memories of my father's WW tool use center on his little Skilsaw (which I got in the tool distribution among my brother, brother-in-law, and me), a 6" model that weighs about half again more than a modern 7-1/4" saw. He did some amazing and, in retrospect, scary things with it while I held the board still, fingers desperately curling away from that spinning blade - cut rabbets, did plunge cuts, and that sort of thing. But I don't remember hand tools, other than a hammer, at all. I have no idea how he mortised for hinges. This was confirmed when we distributed tools: there was exactly one chisel, a Stanley yellow-handled carpenter's model, and no visible bench planes. We found a Master Mechanics block plane of too recent vintage to have been used in the 1950s and 60s when I was helping him, and the Stanley I found is too clean to have been in use then. I just think that, like a lot of modern WWers, he turned to electrical power as a preference.
That, in turn, got me generalizing: I think that's true of a lot of the people buying houses and fixing them, doing necessary furniture repairs, etc., after WWII. The technological advances during the war meant that a 1/4" electrical drill no longer needed to be the size of the Thanksgiving turkey when all the relatives are flying in from Iowa and Nebraska, and the manufacturers offered a wide array of electrically powered tools for cutting, boring, and shaping wood, at consumer-grade prices - a trend that has continued.
From what I can see of the literature, professional carpenters, cabinetmakers, etc., continued to recognize the usefulness of hand tools, but it's kind of a wonder that some of the specialized planes survived into the late 1950s and even early 1960s. The market must have been miniscule.
I brought back, among the books salvaged from the hallway bookshelves, one of those reprints of the 1897 Sears catalog, and had a great time looking through it. Observations:
1. Stanley 45s went for $4.60. My limited Internet research implies that the daily wage for a carpenter was $2.10, so this means you could buy one for two days' pay. This is not that much higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than the price for the Clifton remakes, but the Cliftons are selling to a niche market, so unit cost of production is probably much higher than for the 45. The No. 55 was $9.30. Oh, for a time travel machine.
2. They listed MORE transitional Stanley planes than iron planes. We think of these planes as oddballs, but they were apparently, based on the catalog copy, quite popular.
3. The real shocker for me was that the Langdon mitre (how it was spelt) boxes, in three sizes, ran from $8.20 to $11.75. The small one gave only 4" of cut width at 45 degrees, so jumping up to the mid-size (6-1/2" cut width at 45 degrees) cost you $10.95 - more than the Stanley 55. I don't think of miter boxes, or even mitre boxes, as being expensive tools. I paid $4 more than that (in 21st-century dollars) for my M-F Langdon box a year or two ago - would that I could find a complete Stanley 55 for $4 more than its original selling price!
4. There's about half a page worth of chisels and carpenter's gouges, in two brand lines (Buck's and an unnamed manufacturer): firmers and beveled firmers in tanged and socket styles, framing in 1/2" up to 2", corner (one), and one series of gouges, 1/8" to 2". No mortise or even mortice chisels - it would appear that the rural American usage of mortise chisels was limited, which may explain why I have only ever found one in the wild.