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39268 StrobeWest <StrobeWest@a...> 1998‑03‑13 Bio: Roger Harrer
(Auto)Biography of Roger Harrer of Pocatello, Idaho, from a woodworking tools
perspective, to 3/12/98.  Be forewarned, this document is long (but
efficient), and contains gloats.

I started collecting old tools about 1951 when I bought a little red handled
Yankee drill from Clark Hamilton’s strange store in Weiser, Idaho.  The drill
was new then, and the handle was made of plastic and aluminum, but even at 9
years old I could tell it was a good tool and a bargain at $3.00.  It traveled
for many years in my carpenter’s toolbox, and it’s still there, only a little
worse for the wear--but now an old tool.

When I was in high school, I bought a cast-iron Craftsman scroll saw, powered
(sorry, I’m gonna use those sortsa words) by a vibrator motor, for $20 from
Everett Eller, a retired carpenter from Kamiah who ran the Weiser Hot Springs
swimming pool.  I liked the cast iron.  About 8 years later I discovered a
broken spring in the vibrator, and replacing it quieted the thing down by
about 40 decibels, and it stopped breaking blades.  I still have that tool
too.

Everett gave me a couple of planes for free.  (Maybe he thought I was an all
right kid when I dove in his pool at Thanksgiving when it was about 13 degrees
and streaked past his dining room on the way to the hot baths.)  One was a
Stanley #6C fore plane, circa just before they started plating the lever
clamp.  I cleaned off some rust with a wire brush in an electric
drill--lightly, after noting how this rig could erode cast iron--made my best
guess at how to tune it, and made my first long shavings.  Years later I
decided it must have been designed to shorten doors.  The other plane was a
WW1vintage #60 that was pretty beat up, chipped badly around the throat and
with the cam missing from the cutter cap.  I sharpened it, jammed a piece of
leather shoelace under the back of the cap, and it planed end grain very
nicely.  Still does.

My dad went to Montana State to become a mechanical engineer.  He had a great
respect for his mechanics tools, and kept them out of the rain.  Farm
machinery though, he said, was best protected with a good coat of rust.  And
carpenter’s tools ... the handsaw he bought about 1954 hardly ever felt a
file.  When I inherited it in 1986 it wasn’t even a good back scratcher.  I
think if it didn’t smoke like his table saw, he figured it wasn’t dull yet.

I worked for my uncle Loyal Talbott, a builder, in the summers during college
and for a couple of years later on.  He built custom houses and did remodeling
and poured concrete and did roofing.  His brother John was a wood technologist
at Washinton State, involved in designing new building methods, and the two
collaborated on some very interesting houses.  We built prototype plywood I-
beam joists and trusses and glued stressed-skin floor systems with integrated
heating plenums and whole houses without an inch of moulding or a single door
or window frame that wasn’t an integral part of the framing of the house.  But
that’s a whole ‘nuther story.

After a couple of years as a naval officer, I earned a Master of Arts in
Teaching. That didn’t pan out, and a friend and I rebuilt an 1894-vintage
house in Bellingham, Washington.  We gutted it, leveled it, roofed it, got new
windows and built porches.  The old framing was all rough clear yellow pine.
He did the wiring and I plumbed it and built the cabinets and learned how to
sand wallboard with a sponge.  After 8 months we sold it, paid for the use of
his money, and split the rest which came to about $2.89 an hour.  But, I
learned a lot, as they say.  Like, during our epic argument over how to trim
the exterior for the greatest esthetic impact ...

I was doing some odd jobs around Moscow, Idaho, when I met my future wife, and
I decided to stay for the winter.  Digging ditches one cold windy cold October
day under a cold house on top of a cold Palouse hill, I decided I would rather
be a cabinet maker.  I went to the legendary First Bank of Troy, and told the
president I wanted to borrow money to start a cabinet shop.  Noting that I was
broke, he asked how much money I was thinking about and I said, “I will
probably need $1200.”  His jaw dropped momentarily, then said, “Anyone who can
start a cabinet shop for $1200 can get my backing,” and I was off and running.

I bought an old Unisaw for $350, put in new bearings and replaced the working
parts of the fence and glued the motor pulley back together with epoxy, and
with the Beaver jointer I picked up in Bellingham, and some used pipe clamps,
I proceeded to build cabinets.  I bought a new 2 horse Craftsman compressor
and a used Paslode stapler (hey, I never put a staple in a cabinet where it
would show, even in the interior) and a couple of Speedbloc sanders and set
out to build carefully designed kitchens with cabinets of high volumetric
efficiency.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about business.  I did manage to build a
28 by 48 shop that looked like a house on the outside while inside was a
clear-span roof and a stressed skin wood floor that you could set a unit of
plywood on with confidence.  But after 4 or 5 years I was doing more
remodeling than cabinet making.  Aside from being too much self-taught and
radicalized by research projects, my biggest problem was the need to overcome
an ethic that loosely expressed, amounted to “If you are making any money you
must be cheating someone.”  I also realized the custom nitch I tried to occupy
was already populated by retired carpenters who had paid for their garage 15
years before and thought they were successful if they had enough gas to go
fishing on Sunday.

My bride was fed up with her work situation, and on an interview trip to
Pocatello she found out the guy really wanted to sell his business more than
he wanted to hire.  Soooooo......   being too naive to know we couldn’t buy a
veterinary hospital (did I mention my wife is a veterinarian?), we did it
anyway--and suddenly I was a business manager.  (I managed not to make all the
same mistakes in this new business.)  The tools left from my shop got crammed
into a corner of the garage.  We raised kids and a mess of dogs and cats and
pocket pets and Meeko ate the tarantula and we had tropical fish and even a
few horses and floated rivers and landscaped about an acre and 15 years later
my wife wondered where all the nice wood things were that she had thought I
would build her when we pledged our troth back on Moscow Mountain.

Through my building career days and the years since, I have been a sucker for
a good deal on a good tool.  Someone gave me an old #48 tongue and groove
plane.  I traded my sister a near-new Handyman for an old #4 with a heavy
layer of green paint, and that one has also traveled in my toolbox for 35
years.  Old Mr. Hawkins gave me his funny #62 plane in exchange for a nicely
tuned 50’s era Stanley #4 that I’d paid $8.00 for at Bill’s Second Hand.  (I
was a little richer yet for hearing Mr. Hawkins’ stories about squaring up
ties with a broadaxe for the C.M.St.P.&P. at 30 cents each.  Hawkins came over
one day and asked if he could incinerate a star thistle that appeared in my
pasture, and ended up hiring me to do his kitchen.  But he lost the battle on
star thistles, which now cover hundreds of thousands of acres in that part of
Idaho.)

The old Ward Hardware in Moscow was bought by young Cope Gale in the early
70’s.  He put on a leather visor and shirt sleeve garters and cleaned out the
basement.  I picked up a few Stanley items new in the box, some from as early
as Sweetheart times, that Cope just left the original prices on ($2.25 each
for #31 pocket levels--I got three in the box.)  I spent over $40 dollars on
my first #45, but the #55 was another matter.  My wife called home during a
yard sale foray to tell me a lady was using a wooden box with some “plane-like
parts” for a door stop.  When I arrived I found a beat-up original chestnut
box with a couple of small plane parts, and in the bottom were all four boxes
of cutters.  She took me to the basement where I found the rest of the Stanley
55, and showed me a whole chest of ... well, that’s another story yet, but you
ever see a carpenter keep soap for screw threads in a sterling silver clam
shell soapdish?  Sadly, all I came away with was the 55.  For $20.  Ok, maybe
I’m trying to impress you.  It might have been $25.

Looking for reasons not to go home to the empty house after the kids left, we
returned to the yard sale habit that furnished our first home.  My wife
graduated to “antiquing” and as a survival tactic, I took up the hobby of
collecting glass insulators (“I think maybe I’ll get one of each kind.”)  And
when I ran into a nice tool for a good price I would buy it.  When I got sick
of looking at insulators, I was left with looking just for tools.  Anybody
need 700 pounds of lumpy glass?  (By the way, you can’t collect one of each.)

So last year (pretty much all year) I cleaned out the garage and discovered
some of what I had.  From a shipbuilder’s adze to a Starrett angle head to a
dozen handsaws to a peavey.  Planes in every state of repair or lack thereof,
including a nearly new-in-the-box Fulton multi-plane (#45) that was in my
dad’s stuff (he kept that out of the rain too).  I read some Mike Dunbar and
unknowingly joined the Flat Sole Society when my wife gave me a 6 x 36 inch
piece of half-inch-thick tempered glass for Christmas (“Well, I think you said
tempered, not plate, and you had better like it because it sure was
expensive.”  I like it.)  I found the can of 3M adhesive I bought in 1973 to
mount disks on an old Delta disk/belt sander, and it managed to spit enourgh
goo onto some 600 grit carborundum paper to mount it on the glass.

I’ve been building frames for my wife’s glass paintings on a newish router
table (you expected me to plane all that oak moulding with a #45?).  But oak
dust is not near as fun to breathe as birch, fir and yellow pine used to be.
I just finished some bookcases of oak and walnut, and tried out a bunch of
planes and a #282 scraper.  Nothing to burnish with but the back of a
chisel--I may have to buy a new old tool.

I’ve been doing a lot of lurking these past few weeks.  For a while I was
learning so much I couldn’t do anything.  Now I’m looking for a container to
do electrolysis that will hold a hand saw; plastic window boxes show promise.
I’ve taken to calling my wife “SWMBO” on our way to flea markets.  We’ll see
how it goes from here.  We’re off on the Next Great Adventure (NGA), as my
buddy Roger Applegate said when his wife got pregnant.

--Roger Harrer
  StrobeWest@a...



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