Hello all, nearly all of whom I don't know, and those that I do, I 
likely do not know that I know them.

Hi, I'm Glen, and I have a Millers Falls problem. (Cue "Hi Glen" from 
the gathered crowd.)

That probably covers most of it.

Here's the long version:

It all started when I signed up for a cabinetmaking program at St. Paul 
Technical College (now St. Paul College) somewhere in.. I dunno, 1992 
maybe? I didn't finish. The first quarter was dedicated to hand tools, 
print reading, and very basic joinery stuff, like rabbets, dados and the 
like. I still have every one of the tools that was required by the 
curriculum that I bought for that course. I have a lot more now, but I 
digress.

During that first quarter, I had the opportunity to use a Stanley 71 (or 
71 1/2, I don't recall now) to clean the bottom of one of my dados to 
turn in to the teacher. After I left the course, that was one of the 
more than a handful of things I remembered about it. Honestly, though I 
wasn't able to continue with it, it was one of the most enlightening and 
satisfying courses of my life. For the first quarter anyway, as they put 
the hand tools down and went Total Norm after that.

I play bass and I thought I wanted to get into building my own 
instruments. During and after that period, I frequently drooled over 
this or that doodad in the stewmac catalog or luthier's mercantile or 
whatever.

But all these years later I still remembered that router plane. One day 
at an antique sale in a local mall (the kind where they have all the 
dealers come in and put there stuff up on long folding tables and you 
get to go in and see nothing anyone wants) I happened across an old 
Millers Falls #67 router. The guy wanted $35 for it! I hemmed and hawed. 
This was the very thing that I'd held onto - a hand-powered router - as 
my personal symbol of what had tools really were. My wife and I left it 
there. My wife was originally sad that I was so despondent over such a 
small antique-thing that she'd offered to change the budget around just 
this once so that I could go get this admittedly hard to explain thing. 
Then something snapped, and I diverted our course from home to an ATM, 
where I withdrew the princely sum of $40, returned to the dealer and 
haggled my way from $35 to $33. I felt odd asking for change from my $40 
after I'd just talked him down $2, but a deal is a deal.

I didn't know anything at all about the thing. It sat in a shoebox with 
a screwdriver until we moved several months later. Then I did the Online 
Research Thing and located Randy Roeder's website and learned what I 
got. Seems I got gypped a cutter (or two, it's an early one but no idea 
just how early). Otherwise, it was complete. Honestly, $33 for it even 
missing a cutter was pretty good in hindsight.

I did more research. I looked at craigslist, ebay, etsy, and all kinds 
of places looking to find companions for my new tool. I picked up this 
and I picked up that. Snow began falling and I brought my new friends in 
from the cold, dark Shop Garage (oh yeah, I'm in Minnesota. That year we 
had windchills in excess of -48F). More friends came in the mail and by 
UPS. Soon, my shop became a home for wayward Millers Falls tools.

Just this past weekend at the Area "A" M-WTCA meet I got a No 9 1/2 
scrub plane. Someone stop me.

And saws, mostly Disston, Atkins, and Keen Kutter. Kind of in that 
order.. apparently every garage sale or estate sale near me gets their 
stuff from the National Vintage Saw Outlet Mall (tm) so they can mark 
them up to $2 each and then I buy them. I'm about halfway to a full set 
of Disston numbers now even though I swear I didn't try to (even with 5 
or 6 D-8s, none of them identical, two D23, an early(ish) D-7, No 12, 
more, etc.) I swear I'm not a collector. I just can't pass up $2 for 
brass nuts. Or steel if it's an Atkins. Except for that one time when I 
passed up a Woodrough McParlin panel saw this past summer for $2. It was 
gently bent, but still a dummy move on my part. But I digress again.

I've been buying and selling for about two years now (OK, ok - not much 
selling). Occasionally I will have a question, and occasionally that 
question will have been asked in the OldTools archives. It's not always 
answered (or I just can't find it!) but each time it would direct me 
closer and closer to paying attention to the list. I subscribed to the 
digest. Here I am. I also frequent the timetestedtools.forumchitchat.com 
forum, mostly because it was new and wasn't full of a bunch of people 
who all already knew each other so I didn't feel like such an outsider. 
The lumberjocks layout seems horribly goofy to me so I find I don't 
really go there much.

So anyway, I try to use all of these tools at least once. I'm not always 
successful. And here I am again.

--Glen Canaday