This is an update to my bio from 2004.  The history doesn't change much but
some of my interests have.  For those who do not like long emails, my
interests are listed first.

 

I've been interested in Addis and Herring carving tools since 1997 and have
been quietly amassing them and studying the imprints for over 15 years.  I'm
more of a researcher and woodworker than tool hoarder and in order of
conscious effort, I would list researching the Addis history and the
imprints first, followed by carving followed by collecting.

 

You might know me from my "Addis History and Carving Tool Imprint Overview"
published on the OldTools board on March 2, 2006.  A lot has been done since
then by both others and me but most of that work was accurate and is still
current.  Working with a number of other interested people in England,
Northern Ireland, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, South Africa,
China and the United States, the Addis and Herring stories are now fairly
complete and I am categorizing the imprints on the Addis tools, of which
there are over 50 different.  Maybe an update will follow in 2016.

 

I probably have over 400 carving tools including the Addis, Herring, a
fairly complete set of Buck Brothers and a lot of Pfeil.  Of these, a half
dozen will be used this weekend as I teach myself how to do letter carving
in wood.

 

I also have a lot of wooden handplanes and try to make American Period
furniture.  I went from true hacker to well-educated amateur woodworker by
taking a number of woodworking courses at Gary Rogowski's Northwest
Woodworking Studio and got my Masters Certificate at the Marc Adams School
of Woodworking.

 

I am also the president of the local chapter of the American Marquetry
Society and use both handmade manual fret saws and a powered Hegner
scrollsaw.

 

This year I improved my dovetailing skills immensely but that was all with
modern hand tools and my preferred Japanese chisels.

 

I am trying to assemble a set of pre-1850 tools, now focusing on chisels, so
as to do hand tool woodworking with period tools.  Old planes are easier to
find than old chisels.  I have no old saws and do not even know if these
would work.

 

With some updating, here is what I last wrote in my profile in 2004:

 

My name is Gary and I live in Tualatin, Oregon, which is in the southwest
Portland metro area.  Growing up in suburban New York didn't give me much of
an opportunity to get into tools or woodworking, but woodworking interested
me and when we moved into a house with my grandparents, Grandpa had a small
shop, although with few tools by our standards, as he was mostly a painter.
Being artistic by nature, having a father and grandfather with painting and
paint-store backgrounds and having a chemistry background, I'm good with
finishing and solvents.

 

Years later after education as a chemist and during a career in hi-tech, I
bought a house and declared the garage was my shop.  Now, two houses later,
I have a three-car garage and allow the car to share one of the bays at
night.

 

Woodworking started small and simple.  The first major project was a cabinet
under a cheap workbench bought from a home hardware store.  This led to
toys, a series of mostly machine-made rocking horses and in 1991 an overly
ambitious grandfather clock.  Somewhere around this time I bought a Swiss
workbench and built a 15-drawer tool cabinet under it.  Now that was a
useful project!

 

Sometime around 1991 it became apparent that handwork with traditional tools
gave woodwork a personality and class that dangerous and noisy machinery
cannot.  This slowly led to my current interest in trying to make 18th
century furniture with hand tools.  I think electricity is very useful for
lighting the shop and running shop vacs, dust collectors and classical music
at high volumes.

 

What got me to turn the corner towards old tools was a book I saw just after
a visit to the American Furniture wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
where I had decided that it would be nearly impossible for me to ever make
18th Century style furniture.  The book is "Making a Piecrust Tea Table" by
Tom Heller and Ron Clarkson, which implies you too can make nearly perfect
18 th Century Philadelphia Chippendale style furniture with only a shop full
of hand tools and by following around 10 million carefully photographed
steps.  It isn't completed yet, but it's only been 10 years.  (Update in
2015: it's been 20 years!)

 

Now there are more than three unfinished projects

 

Tool-wise, I started slowly.  Now I try to find creative ways to fit more
into a defined and limited space.  We never have enough tools.  I built a
shed to get the gardening equipment and ladders out of the shop but it
became largely wood storage.  

 

The epiphany came in 2002 as a result of a handtool tune-up course with
Mario Rodriguez.  Now I can tune and use a plane.  And chisels.  Really.  I
think the L-N 164 and 102-special are near-perfect, but I now use my LN-4
and Stanley Bedrock 605-1/5 and 606 all the time.  I have some antique metal
planes and use old wooden planes and the Clark & Williams modern variants.
And why did the world need routers when there are clearly enough Stanley 45s
to go around that don't block out the string quartet playing in the
background?  That's certainly a slippery slope.

 

I like planes, but I think I like chisels and carving tools even more.  

 

I really like carving tools.  Sharpening them was a challenge and I can now
sharpen them well enough, and continue to improve.  In 1997 I read Ian
Agrell's article touting Addis and Herring carving tools and took a carving
course from him where I used some of his tools.  Many of my perhaps 200
carving tools are antique Addis and I continue to track down the history of
this family and their tools.  There is nothing like the feel of an
exquisitely sharp carving tool slicing through Mahogany or Basswood.  It's a
feeling up there with making fluffy shavings with a properly tuned Stanley
#45.

 

I've also taken up marquetry, but it doesn't feed the tool buying fervor as
much as a new furniture or carving project.  Then again, one can cut veneer
with a chisel, build a wooden saw to do marquetry and get veneer edges
straight with a hand plane.

 

So that's where I sit today (2004) with my Galoot story: incomplete
furniture projects waiting for me to learn joinery and other techniques,
carving projects and carving tools, some waiting for a good sharpening and
most waiting for more shallow drawers, and marquetry that slowly takes care
of itself.