We are Spoiled by Cheap Tools

[Gimlet]

During the winter I work as a commercial hedge layer in the UK. Don't know if hedge laying is a thing in the US, so for those who don't know, it starts off like this:


And ends up like this (with a bit of work in between..):


It is completely impossible to find decent mass-produced bladed tools in the UK. Anything off the shelf will be utter garbage, stamped out on machines usually form dreadful Chinese-made steel.
All my blades are hand-made by a blacksmith. They're not cheap, about £200 per hook, but you get what you pay for.

This is my hedging tool kit. All are hand-made except the shears (though they're UK-made), the staff-hook at the top of the picture and the dark-bladed hook which is a vintage Elwell, probably dating from the 1930's/40's. The wide-bladed hewing axe in the center is a Swedish-made Granfors Bruk, which I would class as semi-handmade. Otherwise they were made in the UK by a blacksmith from hand beaten laminate steel. He made all the handles and shafts by hand as well from locally-grown ash.
The leather pouch was also handmade by a leather worker in the Lake District..

(The mallets - biddles as they're called where I come form - were made by me with a chainsaw from a holly tree). Had them both ten years and they've slammed in thousands of stakes.

I envy tradesman in the past who could just walk into a store and buy hand-forged tools. Not all progress is good.

 

[Briar Lee]

All this talk about tools tempted me to back up my Allen wrench collection for $26 delivered.



There is no way on this earth to have any skilled hand labor whatsoever in manufacturing those little wrenches that cost less retail than cheap cigars.

There isn’t fifty cents worth of raw materials in those things.

At that price I’ll bet a machine even packages the product.

And I’m fairly safe to claim the machines that made those were made in America or Germany.

The trouble with Allen wrench sets is if you misplace or break just one out of a set you can bet that one is a popular size and the entire set is practically worthless after that.

 

[Briar Lee]

During the winter I work as a commercial hedge layer in the UK. Don't know if hedge laying is a thing in the US, so for those who don't know, it starts off like this:
View attachment 257010

And ends up like this (with a bit of work in between..):
View attachment 257011

It is completely impossible to find decent mass-produced bladed tools in the UK. Anything off the shelf will be utter garbage, stamped out on machines usually form dreadful Chinese-made steel.
All my blades are hand-made by a blacksmith. They're not cheap, about £200 per hook, but you get what you pay for.

This is my hedging tool kit. All are hand-made except the shears, the staff-hook at the top of the picture and the dark-bladed hook which is a vintage Elwell, probably made in the 193's0/40's. The wide-bladed hewing axe in the center is a Swedish-made Granfors Bruk, which I would class as semi-handmade. Otherwise they were made in the UK by a blacksmith from hand beaten laminate steel.
The leather hook pouch was also handmade.

(The mallets - biddles as they're called where I come form) were made by me with a chainsaw from a holly tree). Had them both ten years and they've slammed in thousands of stakes.

I envy tradesman in the past who could just walk into a store and buy hand-forged tools.

View attachment 257014

He quit or died before I came of age but in the hamlet of Blackjack Missouri lived a famous blacksmith who hand forged axes and knives and his most famous product were fishing gigs.

A Blackjack gig won’t break. I’ve seen them but never owned one.

As to hedge fences, in Missouri we’ve done these for over a hundred years, until recently using hedge (Osage Orange) posts.




Clearing the old fence out is done by tracked machines.

The steel T posts are driven by hand, and the corners and braces and line posts every 100 feet are driven by a post driver.

To keep them up, we spray selective herbicide today that kills brush and leaves grass.

 

[ssjones]

Here's a tale of two Allen key socket sets. My 20 year old lightly used Craftsman set, and my father-in-law's 40-50 year old Snap-On set, which as you can see, was heavily used over his career (his tools spanned 60 years, Snap-on tools can be dated).

The hex bits are replaceable on the Snap-on set, and I can see m FIL must have replaced this one at some point as the roll-in securing the bit is newer than the others.

$219 for the set from Snap-On and the Craftsman on Amazon is $25. If you need durability , you have to pay the price.

Craftsman tools served my hobbyist needs quite well in the past 45 years. It still makes me a a bit sad that I can't walk into a Sears and pick up a bit.

 

[mawnansmiff]

dreadful Chinese-made steel

i still have my old Sheffield made billhook and that must be about 80 years old and I have no doubt it will last another 80 years.

Some years ago I was in a hurry and bought a nice wooden box with 10 Forstner bits in there, all nice and new and shiny.

When I got around to using one I realised why they were so cheap.....blunt as assholes and not even made straight. Needless to say they were Chinese.

The Chinese have mastered copying, of that there is no doubt, but they are miles away from making proper tool steel.

When it came to saws it was always my preference to have Spear & Jackson or Philadelphia Disston, the Rolls Royce of saws as my boss always said. Chisels were Marples.

Jay.

 

[karam]

When it comes to tools you often get what you pay for. The Chinese are masters in regulating quality, they make what they're asked to make, by the market paying for it. My guess is that they could produce top quality tools, and they'd still be cheaper than Western/Japanese-made, just not by that much.
It's not like the "West" doesn't have variable quality though, compare Einhell (German cheap power tool brand) with Makita (Japanese high quality) and the difference is still stark.

My own experience with power tools in particular is around drills, angle grinders, and jigsaws. The cheaper stuff is clearly less robust and less accurate. For the angle grinder in particular I didn't even think about it, Makita straight away as this is a tool that can really hurt if it goes bad! My drill is Black and Decker (it's ok, but couldn't make holes a professional would need to do several times a day, like in cement), and my jigsaw is Einhell (it's ok for a "few times a year hobbyist").

 

[Gimlet]

i still have my old Sheffield made billhook and that must be about 80 years old and I have no doubt it will last another 80 years.

Some years ago I was in a hurry and bought a nice wooden box with 10 Forstner bits in there, all nice and new and shiny.

When I got around to using one I realised why they were so cheap.....blunt as assholes and not even made straight. Needless to say they were Chinese.

The Chinese have mastered copying, of that there is no doubt, but they are miles away from making proper tool steel.

When it came to saws it was always my preference to have Spear & Jackson or Philadelphia Disston, the Rolls Royce of saws as my boss always said. Chisels were Marples.

Jay.

The blacksmith who made my hooks (John Beavis, Chippenham) hand beats his own laminate steel when he can. But to do that he mixes modern tool steel with antique, ususally Victorian, iron. That's becoming increasingly scarce as most of it came from old buildings which are are now almost always preserved rather than pulled down. Then he started using old leaf springs from carts and old vehicles but the same supply issues apply there. Now he imports Japanese sword steel (even goes out there to source it) because he says it's the best steel in the world.
I've got hooks of his made from both materials but I think his hand beaten steel takes and holds an edge better even than the Japanese.

I'd like to think that my Beavis Hooks will outlive me and one day someone will buy them and keep using them and wonder at who made them and when.

As to carpentry tools, a friend of mine is a cabinet maker. He has always favoured Marples chisels.
I'm a bricklayer by trade (switching to hedge laying in the winter). Most building trade tools are terrible. All my trowels and pointing irons are Marshalltown. Just about everything else, if I can find them, are Irwin. Fittingly for this thread, both American brands.

 

[didimauw]

During the winter I work as a commercial hedge layer in the UK. Don't know if hedge laying is a thing in the US, so for those who don't know, it starts off like this:
View attachment 257010

And ends up like this (with a bit of work in between..):
View attachment 257011

It is completely impossible to find decent mass-produced bladed tools in the UK. Anything off the shelf will be utter garbage, stamped out on machines usually form dreadful Chinese-made steel.
All my blades are hand-made by a blacksmith. They're not cheap, about £200 per hook, but you get what you pay for.

This is my hedging tool kit. All are hand-made except the shears (though they're UK-made), the staff-hook at the top of the picture and the dark-bladed hook which is a vintage Elwell, probably dating from the 1930's/40's. The wide-bladed hewing axe in the center is a Swedish-made Granfors Bruk, which I would class as semi-handmade. Otherwise they were made in the UK by a blacksmith from hand beaten laminate steel. He made all the handles and shafts by hand as well from locally-grown ash.
The leather pouch was also handmade by a leather worker in the Lake District..

(The mallets - biddles as they're called where I come form - were made by me with a chainsaw from a holly tree). Had them both ten years and they've slammed in thousands of stakes.

I envy tradesman in the past who could just walk into a store and buy hand-forged tools. Not all progress is good.

View attachment 257014

This is probably the coolest thing I've seen in a long time!

 

[El Capitán]

But the expensive one is better, maybe not much, but always better.

You always pay for quality.

 

[Gimlet]

This is probably the coolest thing I've seen in a long time!

Thank you. Hedgelaying is a very old craft in the UK. Practiced all over the country with styles varying from region to region. The style pictured is South of England.
Essentially hedgelaying was simply a means of creating stock-proof field boundaries in the age before wire fences and where stone was not available for walling or wooden fencing too expensive. The use of hedges and hedge laying became the norm in England after the Enclosure Acts of the 18th century and it was that period which produced the familiar patchwork English landscape of hedged fields, but the craft dates back a lot further than that.
The Romans recorded it's use and there are variations of the craft to be found in other parts of Europe. And I'm sure similar methods of enclosing livestock have been and continue to be used all over the world. But nowhere are there more hedgerows per square mile than England - and we've lost around 250,000 miles of them since WW2 and mechanisation.

It's an elegantly simply idea, completely sustainable and highly effective. And it creates fantastic wildlife habitat. It's undergoing something of a resurgence here now which I hope will continue. But much of it is funded by environmental grant payments with farmers getting it done because they can claim payment for it rather than because it actually works and is more cost effective and ecologically beneficial than expensive and short-lived fencing. But undoing two generations of mechanised mindset among farmers and persuading them to trust laid hedges to perform their function, teach them how to maintain them correctly and accept hedging as a viable part of land-management rather than just something that looks pretty that they're getting paid to do to keep the eco movement happy is an uphill struggle.

It took about four years to educate the owner of the hedge in the picture. I'd laid miles of hedging for that client before he came to accept that they worked and he didn't need to fence his hedges in any more.

I'm getting more and more garden hedge work as well as homeowners are cottoning on to how much better and more private a laid hedge is as a garden boundary than a fence or a line of trees that has gaps and holes in all the wrong places.

This is a black cherry plumb hedge garden hedge which I laid about three years ago:

 

[Gimlet]

Apologies if I'm derailing the thread by the way.

 

[carlomarx]

Sometime in the middle seventies I bought a Black and Decker corded electric drill and a corded Black and Decker electric circular saw. They are still good as new and in my father’s Grade A milk barn. I was so proud to own those the original boxes may be up in the attic of the barn with the original papers.

View attachment 256944View attachment 256945

Those were modern, light duty consumer products that in the seventies might have cost $15 for the drill and $25 for the saw. They’ll last centuries if kept out of the weather.

Those are the only two tools like that I’ve ever really needed, for a half century.

Today if I was a teenager on a fence crew they’d have to pay me $12 an hour and look what kids today can buy for a day’s pay.

View attachment 256946

Nobody knows yet how long the standard 20 volt lithium shop took battery will last because they’ve not been cheap except the last ten years.

But once you get the Porter Cable or Black and Decker 20 volt charger and tools to take the battery the best lithium heavy duty 7 amp hour battery is cheaper than feeding two at Burger King. All the smaller batteries are cheaper.

View attachment 256947

Why America is the land of the free and the home of dirt cheap high quality tools is a little complexicated, as the little boy said.

For all the whining, moaning, groaning and complaining you hear in the barber shop otherwise America is very capitalistic. Even with a tariff those cheap tools are cheaper for Black and Decker to have made in China than Baltimore and every fast food joint in Baltimore is crying for teenagers to flip burgers at $15 an hour.

My mother hemmed up the legs on my father’s last pair of bib overalls and I managed to actually wear them ragged over the summer of 1973.

That fall we were at the local Palmer’s clothing store in Humansville and brand new bib overalls were almost $20 and Nick Palmer apologized and blamed the gubbermint.

Still today on sale Walmart sells $20 bib overalls, but Mexican made.

When the grass has grown over me in Plum Grove for a hundred years my hand tools will still be as good then as today.

And kids will still have to build the barbed wire fences, and they will, if they pay enough.

I have and use the same Black % Decker drill shown in this post. It was was passed on to me by my father and I can't test it but I'd say it has more torque than my newer drills.

 

[Briar Lee]

Apologies if I'm derailing the thread by the way.

Oh my goodness go on!

I never thought about British hedgerows, instead we Yanks get told about how the Germans were so tough to displace from the hedgerows of Normandy.

 

[karam]

The blacksmith who made my hooks (John Beavis, Chippenham) hand beats his own laminate steel when he can. But to do that he mixes modern tool steel with antique, ususally Victorian, iron. That's becoming increasingly scarce as most of it came from old buildings which are are now almost always preserved rather than pulled down.

Do you mean wrought iron? Wrought iron is great to work with, forge welds extremely easily to itself, can be beaten to very elegant shapes rather easily, but is not a great tool metal as it's iron, not steel. That's probably something like the Japanese katana forging process, a mix of low carbon with high carbon steel. I have some doubts about using wrought iron in a tool as it's quite soft. The blacksmith may be using it for visual effect?

I'd imagine any old steel to be inferior to modern tool steels. Modern steel is very consistent and calibrated.
I've made some nice knives and cleavers from leaf spring steel (5160) but I took the easy route, I just ground them and heat-treated them, no forging involved.

Damn blacksmithing is addictive!!!

 

[Briar Lee]

I have and use the same Black % Decker drill shown in this post. It was was passed on to me by my father and I can't test it but I'd say it has more torque than my newer drills.

The electric drill replaced the bit and brace and the electric circular saw replaced the hand saw.

Like all other modern consumer products quality has three components.

The first is design. A hundred years on there are few if any patents to worry about. Anyone can make a proven design of a drill or saw.

The second is material quality. The best use a little better perhaps, but the material suppliers likewise have spent a century making products for the tool makers. I own some cheap new Rough Ryder Carbon steel knives that have amazing edges fabricated from T10 tool steel, used by the Japanese to make modern Samurai swords. The grade of materials is specified by the designer and it must be at least adequate.


The third is quality control. Every drill and every saw has to be built exactly as designed, without fail. Sad to say, the more sets of human hands and eyes that can be replaced by robots and lasers until there is one 20 year old Chinese kid watching a machine package completed drills and saws the better quality will be.

Quality is uniformity.

 

[mawnansmiff]

I'm a bricklayer by trade

I have a vintage Sheffield double ended pointing tool that was hammered out of octagonal bar spring steel. It is a most beautiful thing (if a tool can be beautiful).

Jay.

 

[Gimlet]

Do you mean wrought iron? Wrought iron is great to work with, forge welds extremely easily to itself, can be beaten to very elegant shapes rather easily, but is not a great tool metal as it's iron, not steel. That's probably something like the Japanese katana forging process, a mix of low carbon with high carbon steel. I have some doubts about using wrought iron in a tool as it's quite soft. The blacksmith may be using it for visual effect?

I'd imagine any old steel to be inferior to modern tool steels. Modern steel is very consistent and calibrated.
I've made some nice knives and cleavers from leaf spring steel (5160) but I took the easy route, I just ground them and heat-treated them, no forging involved.

Damn blacksmithing is addictive!!!

That I can't tell you, not being a blacksmith myself, so I may have misremembered. I can only repeat what I recall him telling me. I know he used to have a variety of old metal, steel and iron I assumed, outside his forge which he used to fashion his tool steel.

i do remember he told me he couldn't get hold of old iron/steel (whichever it was) and was now using imported Japanese steel for his bladed tools. I know the first two hooks I bought from him were forged from steel he'd laminated (is that the right term?) himself, whereas the last one was Japanese. They're all exceptionally fine tools but I can tell the difference when I use and sharpen them. Though whether that's down to the steel or small variations in the tempering between them I couldn't say.

 

[Gimlet]

I have a vintage Sheffield double ended pointing tool that was hammered out of octagonal bar spring steel. It is a most beautiful thing (if a tool can be beautiful).

Jay.

Definitely they can!

 

[karam]

I know the first two hooks I bought from him were forged from steel he'd laminated (is that the right term?) himself, whereas the last one was Japanese. They're all exceptionally fine tools but I can tell the difference when I use and sharpen them. Though whether that's down to the steel or small variations in the tempering between them I couldn't say.

You're referring to the practice of layering steel (different alloys/carbon contents) and forge-welding it together, then folding and forge-welding again, repeating this process a few times. The common name for this is Damascus steel but the process has been invented independently in various places in the world. Damascus (Syria), Wootz (India), Tamahagane (Japan), Toledo (Spain) are the most well-known types of historical steel using this technique. The European Ulfberht swords were also pattern-welded.
Regarding these steel's utility, though I am a romantic and greatly admire the skill and work of these ancient craftsmen, the reality is that absolutely nothing made before the 20th century, with 20th century machinery is even close in strength and consistency to modern steel.

 

[Briar Lee]

The key to modern tool quality is above all else selling enough of the product to amortize the factory and machines that make the tool.

Our local MFA (Missouri Farmer’s Coop) keeps these branded MFA Made in USA in a bucket by the check out for $5.



The machine that makes the standard pair of heavy slip joint pliers doesn’t care where it sits.

It’s probably made in Wisconsin.

——

Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory

toolguyd.com

——

I have lost any count of the screwdrivers and six inch slip joint pliers I’ve owned over the last fifty years that have walked away.

Making tools is sort of like making corn.

The last full time row crop farmer in our county was a friend of mine and he died earlier this year of Covid.

But a few years ago he was in my office and was going over how much it cost to plant, raise, and harvest a bushel of corn

The first necessity he claimed was to have already bought and paid for the millions of dollars of land and machinery and just forget how much interest that much investment would make. The return was the joy of farming, which is priceless.

Abe went over how much fertilizer cost, how much herbicide cost, fuel, and how much seed cost but the most crucial cost he claimed was crop insurance.

I asked why, and he said it costs about four hundred some thousand dollars to plant and harvest a thousand acres of corn on your own land and add a hundred and fifty for rented land, and no bank and nobody that had a half a million would risk it unless they were guaranteed their money back in the fall. And without a generous government subsidy no crop insurance company would risk it either. Abe had out nearly four thousand acres that year, or about two million bucks invested.

I said Abe, what about your labor costs?

He laughed and said I work for the fun of it, and the total labor per acre is total less than an hour. It’s the tiniest fraction of the cost.

He said I don’t care if I pay the kid $15 or $20 an hour but I care he will show up and do it and not tear up a half million dollar piece of machinery during the harvest.

It’s no different making wrenches or pliers than making corn.