Gumption (22 page)

THOMAS LIE-NIELSEN

I
f you are the type of person (excellent nerd) who is obsessed with the shaping of wood using hand tools, then you are my kind of lady or fellow. If you enjoy discussing the difference between a half-blind dovetail and one that is fully sightless, then you and I could hang out, so long as you can tolerate a beefy feculence in the immediate atmosphere and the occasional ripping report announcing the refreshing of said funk. If you are so into your wedged tenon that your coffee grows cold awaiting your attention, then you are undoubtedly the sort of initiate who is aware of the “Cadillacs” of American hand tools, that is to say, the ones that are made at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. If you are not my sort of weirdo, then chances are you remain ignorant to these sublime, finely crafted implements. Let me inform you.

(Note to youngsters: In my day, the Cadillac was an automobile made by the General Motors Corporation that was considered the “top of the line,” and so to refer to any member of a given classification as the “Cadillac” was to employ a figure of speech indicating that
it was “the best.” To this day, they continue to make a fine, quality ride, but I no longer find that metaphor to be in popular use.)

Actually, let me back it up another degree. Have you heard of Maine? If you drive east to, say, Boston, then take a left, after nipping off the corner of New Hampshire, you’ll find yourself in the magnificent state of Maine. This is the rugged locale of the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, as well as the WoodenBoat School and countless other inspiring individuals. (Check out Robert Shetterly’s painting series Americans Who Tell the Truth.)

Thomas Lie-Nielsen, born in 1954, is the son of a Norwegian boatbuilder who had immigrated to the United States in his teens, where he skippered local boats and eventually ran a handful of wooden-boat shops. Having grown up in the skilled atmosphere of these shops in the relatively remote area of Camden, Maine, Thomas then went to school at Hamilton College to study English before moving to New York City to seek his fortune. He took a job with a tool mail-order company called Garrett Wade in the late 1970s, once again exposing himself to the types of tools he’d grown up around. The company offered a variety of items, including the finest hand tools available for woodworkers at the time. Trouble was, “the finest available” didn’t always necessarily mean anything that great. It’s just that there were very few companies in the world making these specialized tools. (GarrettWade.com is still a source of tools and other swell implements, where I often shop for gifts.)

Interestingly,
WoodenBoat
magazine had begun publishing in 1974, and
Fine Woodworking
magazine had just fired up its presses a year later in 1975. These were the result of our nation’s tool purists wanting
a better education and community in support of crafts like heirloom furniture construction and wooden-boat building. Nobody in the States was making high-end woodworking tools in any substantive way, because there was not yet a noticeable demand, and companies that were making tools were cranking out tens of thousands of them per week, which didn’t leave much opportunity for quality control.

In the Garrett Wade catalogue, there was a small hand plane called an edge trimming block plane that was an adaptation of the Stanley #95, handmade by a machinist named Ken Wisner in Freeport. Mr. Wisner decided to retire from producing this plane, and Lie-Nielsen recognized an opportunity. As I mentioned, the planes and chisels available at the time were generally mass-produced, and so they lacked the level of detail and finishing that we have come to appreciate in today’s hand-tool market. Thomas understood that these catalogue tools were not remotely up to snuff; in fact, they were downright shitty, and so his gut told him to take quite a plunge.

He contacted Mr. Wisner in Freeport and acquired the tooling, plans, and components necessary for producing the #95 himself. Moving to a blueberry farm in West Rockport, Maine, he began producing these planes in a small shed, successively delivering his first product to Garrett Wade by 1981. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks was born. Thomas was twenty-five years old.

After a few years of this, he added a second tool, a skew-angle block plane, so he had to move to a bigger shed on his farm. Things were going well—two sheds well. In 1988 he moved to an actual eight-thousand-square-foot building in Warren, Maine, and then expanded into an additional thirteen thousand square feet in the mid-nineties.
The company is now producing more than twenty thousand individual tools a year and still growing. And you have probably never even heard of a skew-angle block plane, but take it from me—among block planes, Lie-Nielsen’s is the Cadillac.

On January 2, 2015, my pal Jimmy DiResta and I drove to deep Queens, New York, to a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event. If you’re not yet familiar with my friend Jimmy, throw this book out the window and go plug his name into YouTube. He has his own channel where he posts his top-drawer homemade videos on making all sorts of items with tools. They are as gripping and impressive as he is handsome (they are quite gripping). When I’m on the East Coast, if I’m doing anything fun in the realm of making stuff, I can usually be found riding shotgun with Jimmy and his equally talented lady pal Taylor Forrest, who works wonders on metal, leather, wood, denim, and Jimmy.

We walked into the enormous and butt-ugly (gorgeous), old brick warehouse where the event was being staged. It was rather frigid, and the “show” occupied two large rooms, where five or six toolmakers had their wares displayed around woodworking benches, for the trying out of the tools. The air smelled of sawdust and mold, as well as the fumes from the generator that was powering the only lights, as the building’s power had been shut off the day before. The air was filled with the sound of men and some women, mind you, chatting about tools and stuff, and, of course, the incessant, sweet noise of saws and plane blades zipping through wood, as prospective buyers tried out these luscious hand-crafted tools.

As Jimmy immediately dove into the playpen (he was in the
market for a big joiner plane), I scanned the room, and across the expanse I spotted . . . no, it couldn’t be. I wandered closer. He was performing a little card-scraper workshop for a few rapt pilgrims. Good Christ, it
was
him. Gary Rogowski. One of the greats. Shit, I had learned
all
my biscuit tricks from that soul-patched sum-bitch twenty years ago! He runs his very own kick-ass woodworking school in Portland, Oregon. What was he doing here? Slumming, it turned out, between speaking engagements, trying to unload some books and DVDs. He was very generous with us plebeians, and I learned three better ways to sharpen my scraper in about twenty seconds. Here was a master, and a jazzy one, at that.

Then I wandered into the next room and was double gobsmacked. There was Matt Kenney from
Fine Woodworking
! One of the finest! I had known Matt for a few years, having run into him at another gathering of chisel freaks, but here in this crappy brick room in Queens, it was as though I had just pegged Strider sitting in the Prancing Pony, although Matt is inescapably sweeter in countenance than Aragorn could ever hope to come across.

We spoke about what a neat get-together this was, and he had this to say about Lie-Nielsen: “During the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an explosion of high-quality, American-made woodworking hand tools. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to say that we’re living in a golden age of hand tools. And I believe that Thomas Lie-Nielsen is largely responsible for this.”

I replied that I was really enjoying being around a bunch of other folks in Carhartt jackets, none of them clean, except maybe mine, their hands dirty with tool oil and calloused with work. My actor
hands were easily the softest paws in the room. Matt had been studiously hogging out an edge dado with a Veritas plow plane when I approached. As he minutely adjusted the implement’s depth, he said that he “had been brought up with the understanding that a man or woman should be able to maintain and operate any object that he or she might own.” That’s something that woodworking with tools like these allows us to hang on to, in a world where I open up the hood of my Audi wagon and it might as well be an X-wing starfighter.

The presence of luminaries like Kenney and Rogowski was a testament to the strength of the woodworking community. It is truly a band of brothers and sisters sharing knowledge and, when necessary, muscle, and sometimes after that, a delicious brown beverage, or at least a sandwich of savory meatstuffs.

Finally, I got to the man who was clearly in charge of this hoedown, a rugged, muscled chap in a Lie-Nielsen shirt. He agreed to answer a few questions, so we stepped into the back room. He told me his name was Deneb, after the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan; last name Puchalski, a name I believe to be of merely human derivation, although I failed to ask him.

Deneb turned out to be the son-in-law of Mr. Lie-Nielsen, and also his greatest salesman. These hand-tool events were his baby, Deneb explained, conceived when he realized that the larger-scale tool shows had rather too much of a carnival atmosphere to accommodate their small niche of hand tools for woodworking. They came up with these much friendlier “local get-togethers,” at which there were no power tools in sight. Which was good, because there was not so much power, either.

Interestingly, Lie-Nielsen footed the bill for the event but then
invited the other local tool-making artisans to set up their displays all together. “That seems counterintuitive,” I stated, to which Deneb replied, “No, there is not enough of a market for us to really be competitive with each other. If we can continue to inform the community about the quality of our goods, well, a rising tide raises all boats. Our
competition
is Apple and Sony, anybody who is going after people’s disposable income.”

Well, this was something new to me. A business that invites its fellow retailers to participate in a small, well, festival, I guess, knowing that any of their sales will help the common cause. This sounded swell, but could the business model hold up?

I later put this question to Robin Lee, from Canadian toolmaker Lee Valley/Veritas Tools, another top-notch North American firm. He said, “This is going to sound trite—but there is an honesty/integrity that seems to be common to people who work with their hands for enjoyment. We both recognize that woodworking is something that people will do for decades, if not for their entire life. We both assume our customers are coming back at some point . . . and do everything to ensure that happens.”

These two refined companies, Lie-Nielsen and Veritas, are like if a town had two excellent restaurants on either side of it, and the chefs loved each other’s cooking in a way that it inspired them to make new, better dishes themselves. Lee said, “At the same time as we compete—the two firms are really quite complementary. I often describe Lie-Nielsen as ‘classical,’ where we’re ‘jazz.’ Tom’s line is based on executing the time-tested designs of Stanley tools to a quality level that Stanley never achieved. Our designs are based on a
reboot for each plane—taking into account changes in methods of work, available materials, and the capabilities of modern manufacturing.” I was very charmed by this generosity of spirit that is reflected in the tools fashioned by these folks.

When Deneb started working for Lie-Nielsen fourteen years ago, there were thirty to forty employees. Today there are 100, and they make more than 350 individual tools. This circumstance is peculiar given the fact that they are completely committed to quality over profit. Normal business sense would lead such an outfit to look for places where corners could be cut, or lesser materials substituted, in the way that so many plastics have been introduced into your average automobile, for example. Thomas Lie-Nielsen launched his business with a burning desire to fabricate hand tools the way they ought to be made, and he’s not about to forget it.

Before I left the tool show, I asked Matt Kenney for an official quote for my book, and he did not have much trouble coming up with a firm opinion, almost as though he reads books: “We should count ourselves fortunate that in the late 1970s [Thomas] recognized a need for better hand tools, and that he was audacious enough to start making hand planes to meet it. And we should admire the determination, focus, and force of personality it must have taken to develop those early efforts into the company that Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is today.”

On top of such a commitment to quality, Lie-Nielsen tools also carry a 100 percent lifetime guarantee. That an American company could grow in this way while maintaining an inarguable level of quality and customer satisfaction thrills me to no end. By the way, I should point out that when they say “Made in America,” that is completely
what they mean. I was not aware until Deneb informed me that a retail item requires only 60 percent of its labor to be performed on US soil in order to receive that coveted label, which feels like bullshit to me. So much mediocrity has seeped into the regulation of our American integrity that even “Made in America” is only 60 percent true? So some CEO can make a buck, or millions of them? How many of our “American” products are being mostly fabricated in Asia, or Mauritius, or the Philippines, only to have the shoelaces installed in Alabama, so we can pay premium prices?