“Hi Glen, you’re among friends”

You, friend are right on the edge of the slippery slope. Turn back now if you’re
going to.

Once you get to the 18th century wooden molding planes . . . . it’s too late and
at that point you need to hit rock bottom because there’s no fighting it.

My struggle at the moment is that I fell off the slope a year ago . . . . but my
financial life changed . . . . and now I’m fighting the temptations to do
allegorical gunpoint liquor store holdups to feed my habit.

To avoid that I will probably sell my “tailed apprentices” into slavery to buy
wood and possibly a good router plane. If anyone is looking for an indentured
servant . . . . I have a yellow and black tailed apprentice chopsaw, and one
named Porter Cable who does very good router work when his tail is attached to
the orange umbilical cord . . . . either of them would give good service and I
could pick up a good plow plane instead of trying to fix the “shop made” one I
picked up for about $8 sans fence.  :)

Mark.

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:31 PM, glen  wrote:
> 
> 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.