Carving tools pricing conundrum

[Rich Purdum]

After doing some very crude carving on a pirate chest for my grandson, I started looking into better tools only to have a severe case of sticker shock. Does anyone have an idea as to how a 4" piece of steel and a bit of wood can command in excess of $30? Is it low volume or difficulty of manufacture or simply that's what the market will tolerate? If I look at an equally high end chisel it is around the same price with a lot more material so I am bewildered. Maybe I'm just too "thrifty".

[Jim Koepke]

That price is why I have bought most of my gouges and such on ebay.

I bought one new one and was not impressed with it for the price.

Especially when you get to the bigger Gouges the prices for used is much better. This may have changed since I haven't bought many in a long time.

jtk

[Brian Kent]

After doing some very crude carving on a pirate chest for my grandson, I started looking into better tools only to have a severe case of sticker shock. Does anyone have an idea as to how a 4" piece of steel and a bit of wood can command in excess of $30? Is it low volume or difficulty of manufacture or simply that's what the market will tolerate? If I look at an equally high end chisel it is around the same price with a lot more material so I am bewildered. Maybe I'm just too "thrifty".

A Yamaha Professional Piccolo uses the same about of metal and a little wood and it costs $2,698.

[John Sanford]

A Yamaha Professional Piccolo uses the same about of metal and a little wood and it costs $2,698.

yes, but that's a Yamaha. If it was a Harley-Davidson piccolo, it would use twice as much metal (all chrome), and cost 4 times as much as the Yamaha, but have a wierd bass-beat.....

potato-potato

[Adam Cherubini]

Does anyone have an idea as to how a 4" piece of steel and a bit of wood can command in excess of $30?

Maybe it's made in America or Europe instead of China?

[Pam Niedermayer]

There are any number of ways to purchase cheaper carving chisels; but then what you normally receive are cheap carving chisels. I've got old western chisels (Addis mostly) that weren't all that cheap and Japanese carvers that were kind of expensive, too. Both varieties were available on the bay for very reasonable prices, say $10-20 per. Recently I was put on to some Chinese carvers by a very knowledgeable friend on another forum, sold by DICK in Germany. I bought a set (a rule violation for me) of 18 traditional style for $40 plus $40 shipping. You can see them here. They won't be here for a week or so, and I'll still have to make handles and do some tuning; but it works out to less than $4.50 per.

OTOH, there's the Mack Headley example. He made a Philadelphia style game table and did the carving, including cabriole legs complete with ball and claw feet and acanthus leaved knees, with plain old flat chisels. There may still be a video available from Colonial Williamsburg.

Pam

[David Weaver]

>>Is it low volume or difficulty of manufacture or simply that's what the market will tolerate?<<

i think it's this, combined with the fact that it does cost money to manufacture them and they're being made in europe, where our exchange rate doesn't buy us as much.

I heard some scuttle a while ago that one of the carving tool makers had big increases in employee costs due to benefits (pensions, etc) and that was about the same time that the exchange rate went into the pot, so carving tools got expensive really quickly.

in this case, I think you are either pay it, wait for sales, or forego carving. You're always going to need one for a project that you don't have, so you can't really rely on just finding them at a flea market or yard sale for cheap like you can bench chisels, etc.

[Robert Rozaieski]

The cost isn't in the material, it's in the labor. Flat chisels may have more metal in them, but they are easier to forge than sweeps. If you check out Henry Taylor's web site, they explain that each and every carving tool must be individually hand forged (using power hammers of course) and finished. Because there are so many different shapes and sizes of carving tools (hundreds, compared to what, a set of 12 flat chisels), each one must be individually forged and then the bevels are ground and honed/polished manually. It takes a skilled hand to do this. They can't just be stamped out on a machine. This is also why (I think) you don't really see mid priced carving tools like you do with flat chisels. There are cheap, drop forged, asian import sets that basically have no hand work done and aren't worth the $20 per set that you pay for them, and then there are high end quality, hand forged tools. There's really no middle ground in the manufacturing process because of the hand work required to produce a decent tool. The raw material cost is low, but the labor cost for forging the tool is significant.

Plus, as Adam said, the quality carving tools available are all made in Britain & Continental Europe. So the labor cost is pretty much what it would be if they were made in the US. If you compare these carving tools to premium chisels like those from LN, AI, Two Cherries, Hirsch, or any blacksmith made Japanese chisel, the prices are on par. You're paying for the skilled labor.

[Bob Lang]

It's not like there's an automatic carving gouge making machine that you feed steel and wood in one end that spits out finished tools from the other. If you place any value at all on skilled labor, $30 is a bargain.

Bob Lang

[glenn bradley]

I may be conditioned by the market but, $30 for a good quality carving tool is about right. I sure wouldn't make one for $30.

[John Powers]

The $30.00 carving tool I can easily see....it's the $200.00 saw and $600.00 flyrods that floor me. And I'm not old enough to remember the nickel loaf of bread my father used to talk about.

[David Weaver]

There aren't too many $30 carving tools left to begin with are there?

I looked over the rack of two cherries stuff at rockler a couple of weeks ago, and their price on the stuff must've been set for comic relief for those folks who get bored walking around the store. Even with a coupon, the price would've been poor.

The pfeil gouges woodcraft carries are nice, I think. The steel is nice in them and they are finished nicely. they are not cheap, though, either, and a second option with them is someone selling them in canada and shipping here for a little cheaper.

[john brenton]

Wow, that was a very concise and astute answer Brian.

A Yamaha Professional Piccolo uses the same about of metal and a little wood and it costs $2,698.

[Robert Rozaieski]

The $30.00 carving tool I can easily see....it's the $200.00 saw and $600.00 flyrods that floor me. And I'm not old enough to remember the nickel loaf of bread my father used to talk about.

The saw I can definitely see. I've made hand saws in various sizes, and for a hand made saw, $200 is a bargain. The time alone required to make one from scratch is worth more than $200.

Now the flyrod I too question, at least the graphite ones . The only thing I can think would be the expense of the raw materials and research going into the blank design. Graphite rods aren't hard or time consuming to build (done that too) once the blank is done. But if we're talking hand crafted (not factory) cane, different story. I'd gladly pay $600 for one of those . If I could find one for $600.

[Brian Kent]

A quick check of Pfeil and full-sized Two Cherries - looks like closer to $40.