Originally Posted by
Bob Lang
I think we're seeing some revisionist history here. At the time I learned woodworking, in the early 1970s, there were plenty of guys who knew how to use hand tools, and used them everyday on the job. Yes, in the world of hobbyists people bought into the post-WWII marketing of power tools as always better, but in the real world there wasn't any "broken chain" or need to research the old ways, guys were doing what they had been shown when they were young. Someone who apprenticed in the 1930s isn't that far removed from how things were done in the 19th century. That's the stuff that the current generation of gurus uses to give themselves credibility. Good new tools were hard to find, but there were people around who knew what they were doing. There are good reasons things have been done certain ways for centuries, and there are also usually good reasons when things are abandoned after being used for centuries. If your goal is to make nice stuff out of wood in a timely manner it isn't hard to figure out when new is better than old, or old is better than new.
Bob Lang