He's NOT a hoarder.

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No, he's not a hoarder. He's a highly skilled professional user and historian with a very well looked after and informative working reference collection.

A hoarder would have piles of boxes of stuff filling up the space with no idea what was in them.
 
Oh only 800 planes? So a smaller collection then <walks away innocently>
 
A hoarder is someone who takes a thin, useless offcut of wood, sands it carefully and then brings it into the house as a gift of yet another bookmark.

Imagine not being able to throw away any scraps of wood, because they are too pretty.
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I could give it up any time I wanted to...
 

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Keep this going - I might feel slightly better about my chisels and vices/vises (far fewer, but still)
 
Oh, and Patrick Edwards is absolutely an expert, craftsman of the highest order and historian of furniture making (it's not mainly about the tools, but the work done with them)
 
No question about his expertise and the work he produces. I am somewhat sceptical however, of his claimed working time - 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 50 years?
 
Chris Knight":2iffry7n said:
No question about his expertise and the work he produces. I am somewhat sceptical however, of his claimed working time - 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 50 years?
I was similarly sceptical of virtually the same working hours claimed by/for some high-end painters until I got some personal insights into the work, along with some first-hand accounts that said it was no exaggeration and an average (ponder that for a bit). So, old-school work ethic + complete immersion; I'd buy it.

If it's similar some 'just being there in the workshop' time – pondering, problem solving and pre-planning in the head – should be assumed.

So it's not 12 hours a day constantly on the go planing wood, cutting joints, scraping, sanding and applying shellac etc. In fact from everything I've seen and heard in recent years the pace of work of this type of hand-tool woodworker could actually be described as sedate, even leisurely. This makes the longer hours seem more reasonable when a large, involved piece might take 500 hours or more; with paintings it could be ~2,000 hours and more, the work of 7-36 months depending on how many pieces are being worked on simultaneously.
 
But he does say on his blog he raced bicycles for 35 years - that makes me a little suspicious about the 84 hours a week work - racing bikes takes time to maintain the bike, train, race, recover etc etc
 
That would work":2ewpkh6j said:
800 planes kind of ok but 450 spokeshaves???
"This followed me home, isn't it lovely?"
"I just couldn't let this one go."
"This is a rare one and let's face it, nobody else is going to love it like I can."
"They fell into me hands love!"
"It was a job lot, I only wanted the cigar shave. So the rest were basically free!"
"Um, okay I might have a bit of a problem."


gasman":2ewpkh6j said:
But he does say on his blog he raced bicycles for 35 years - that makes me a little suspicious about the 84 hours a week work - racing bikes takes time to maintain the bike, train, race, recover etc etc
Ah fair enough! One does put the lie to the other.
 
I wonder if 450 spokeshaves is a mistake. Does he say that in the video?

There's a great little booklet by Ken Hawley about wooden spokeshaves. It reproduces the relevant section from the Ward and Payne catalogue of 1880. It lists shaves in five categories -
- Spokeshaves,
- Chairmakers' coach and Wheelers' spokeshaves
- boxwood spokeshaves
- Iron spokeshaves
and then the irons on their own.

Totting up I make it 128 different sizes and types on offer, ranging from a shilling to 5s 10d each, wholesale. That's a lot more choice than we get at Screwfix, or even at Workshop Heaven. :)

The Hawley collection has about 150 spokeshaves from various makers to illustrate the range.

Now I know everything is bigger and better in America, but if he's interested in the tools for what they can be used for, I do wonder if 450 can really be true.

Then again, the standard work over there, the snappily titled'Manufactured and Patented Spokeshaves & Similar Tools' by Thomas Lamond is a 450 page book, so maybe if it has an average of one picture per page...
 
It was good to watch & clearly he’s a talent man but for me some of the commentary didn’t add up, as you say Andy everything’s bigger & better in America :-k
 
Can't fault the man. My vice collection has exploded this year!
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Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
 
dannyr":2m77rdg6 said:
who could toss out that lovely slice of ???hawthorn

It's olive. Insane as it may sound, all my scrap wood for practice, and training is being done on olive wood. It's my firewood pile. :oops:

I know what people pay for this stuff, and every single piece of wood is a insane suprise of majestic wonder. Here is the box I have just made out of scrap to put my sharpening stone in - have to have a battered wooden box for a stone, it's obligatory. MikeG may be pleased to learn that this time the stone fits in the box! Progress is being made.
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TFrench":g18m3f8t said:
My vice collection has exploded this year!
Awww look at the cutie on the right there, when it grows up it wants to be a vice!

Are you intending a couple to be users or are these mostly me wantee purchases? :)
 
ED65":3fnkrsc4 said:
TFrench":3fnkrsc4 said:
My vice collection has exploded this year!
Awww look at the cutie on the right there, when it grows up it wants to be a vice!

Are you intending a couple to be users or are these mostly me wantee purchases? :)
The grey Leinen is my normal day to day vice, the grey one on top of it is handy for holding bits I've painted off the bench. The monster on the right is a shaper vice for a metal shaper (and a large clue as to my next machine rebuild project :lol: ) The green ones in the middle were a recent restoration project and I'll probably sell one or both, the brockhaus needs a lick of paint before I sell it and the Jones and Shipman on the left is for my surface grinder. The DOHM is most definitely a me wantee purchase - even happier now I know what it is! It might well become my main user, it deserves better than sitting on a shelf.
It just tickled my sense of humour to have that many vices in the workshop at one time.
 
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