Category: Personal Favorites

If you are semi-aware of the woodworking tool industry you know there are several classes of toolmakers.

1. People who try to make new tool designs that have never been seen before.
2. People who improve old designs that are no longer in production and are no longer patented – they are in the public domain.
3. People who copy successful tools, lower the price and put the original maker out of business.

The makers in category No. 3 will never get any good ink from me – only grief. We won’t sell our books through their catalogs. We won’t even mention their names (if we can help it). Until they stop stealing – and that is the only word for it – they are dead to us.

Want to read more? Check out this post from Kevin Drake of Glen-Drake Toolworks, who has been ripped off more than anyone I know.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

“Fast modern contemporary furniture, I want no part of it. People wanting to express themselves, it’s just simply crap. That’s what’s causing all the ills of our society, individualism with nothing to express. You tear your guts out to express yourself and it ends up in frustration and a terrible environment…. (Wood is) a gift we should treasure and use in the most logical and beautiful way, and personal expression is quite illegitimate. It’s an arrogant conceit, and we have too much conceit in our society.”

— George Nakashima interviewed by John Kelsey for the January/February 1979 issue of Fine Woodworking (Issue No. 14).