Humorous Comment on Neander Tool $$$

[glenn bradley]

The misconceptions we have of things we don't know about are often amusing. I recently had some hardwood flooring installed in a hallway. I made the ignorant assumption (although thank goodness I didn't state it out loud) that "its just a hallway". I commented to the installer about how many of his reasonably specialized tools came into play for the install. In his response I learned that, and I quote, "hallways are the bane of a flooring man's existence". In a ballroom the challenge is the amount of flooring. In a hallway he had 5 doorways, 4 with carpet transitions, a short "L" to the garage, an angled section as it passed the guest bath and linen built-ins . . . whew! Once I saw it through his eyes I was doubly glad that I decided to let someone else install "just the hallway".

As to woodworking costs; I have yet to spend near what I spent golfing (mostly at the nineteenth hole I think) and am I sure I am a far, far cry from my fishing enthusiast buddies. For the cost of a decent reel, you could buy a jointer plane!!!

[Jim Koepke]

As to woodworking costs; I have yet to spend near what I spent golfing

For me it has only been the last year that my woodworking income is above my golf income.

I never played golf, but I earned some good money as a caddy.

jtk

[Jeffrey Martel]

My wife thought that my LV Low angle smoother cost was what I paid after I put a gift card on it. It wasn't until later when she found out that the real cost was $100 higher...

Luckily she is an engineer as well and understands that good tools help out quite a bit. That being said, all of my other planes are all old Pre-war Stanleys. I figured a smoother is something that would benefit from the higher tolerances associated with new and that any refurbing I would do to a smoother would likely make it worse.

[Winton Applegate]

After all, how much could a few saws and planes cost

Good thing I wasn't there.
I can't help whipping out the : How much could a few tiny hunks of compressed carbon tied to your finger with a skinny piece of metal foil cost ?

HOW MUCH !

I don't believe you.

[Brian Holcombe]

Woodworking thus far has been less expensive and far more satisfying than car racing.

[Maurice Ungaro]

image.jpg
Of course, that's not REALLY true...

[Brian Holcombe]

Thats pretty accurate.

[Jeffrey Martel]

Woodworking thus far has been less expensive and far more satisfying than car racing.

I don't know about car racing, but at least doing trackdays on the motorcycle is a lot more fun than Woodworking for me. But due to the costs, I can only do 5 or so a year.

[Fidel Fernandez]

I heard on a business newscast yesterday that Eastman Kodak's film sales have dropped 94% since the year 2000. They are a ghost of what they were when I was a kid growing up in the Rochester NY area. Amazing how the holder of most of the original patents for digital photography managed to ignore their own technology while trying to fruitlessly protect their lucrative film business only to watch it go down the tubes anyway.

I always said that "profit" is the enemy of innovation. The problem is when profit is first and innovation is second or third. You need both to be equal important.
I know you have a patent and it is bringing a lot of money to the company, that is good. Many companies new days they don't invest or kill others just to keep the money flowing.
Kodak is a great sample, they tried to hold into that money cow, but they were left behind.

I know not many people will agree with me, but IT technology/computers/phones could be years ahead if innovation shared the spotlight with the profits.
If you see the computer from the 80/90s with 640kb of memory and floppy disks, what a new computer can do better? The new ones have just more capacity and speed, but in essence it is the same computer just with steroids. The best a phone can do is take a picture? and we cannot have a decent phone conversation without dropping calls, bad reception, can you hear me? type of thing, etc. Those are gimmicks.

Woodworking is not exception and it has a different story at the end. Manual tools did their best they could and they were replaced by power tools. Lack of innovation in the power tools makes many people (I am one of them) go back to manual tools which are being improved a lot. I can see 2 lines of thought in the manual tools (planes).
Provide the same tool as it was in the 1800s or early 1900s (Lie Neilsen) but with an excellent quality none to par or provide innovation of those tools with 21s technology quality and imagination (Lee Valley).

Profit should never be first alone. They stop moving ahead when this happen and eventually they will be left behind.

[Chris Parks]

Woodworking thus far has been less expensive and far more satisfying than car racing.

Real racing costs real money, far more than woodworking. The missus comes in and says, dear I would like a new embroidery machine...$11000 dollars later we have a new embroidery machine.

[Dan Hintz]

I know not many people will agree with me, but IT technology/computers/phones could be years ahead if innovation shared the spotlight with the profits. If you see the computer from the 80/90s with 640kb of memory and floppy disks, what a new computer can do better? The new ones have just more capacity and speed, but in essence it is the same computer just with steroids. The best a phone can do is take a picture? and we cannot have a decent phone conversation without dropping calls, bad reception, can you hear me? type of thing, etc. Those are gimmicks.

Oh, I don't know... we have recordable CD/DVD drives, solid-state drives with no moving parts and orders of magnitude increases in access speed and orders of magnitude decreases in power consumption, parallel processing capabilities, etc. It's a computer designed for, well, computing things... if you desire it to do other things, it's no longer a computer. The best a phone can do is make a phonecall... being able to take a picture with it and surf the internet is an extra brought on by the innovations of tiny CCD cameras, high-resolution OLED screens, etc. The phones do quite well when you're near a cell tower... but should we really expect great performance when we're 500 miles from a tower that's serving 1 million people at once? Probably not.

Oh, and those advances all came with a nice profit margin, so I'd say it's working about the way it should...

[Fidel Fernandez]

Well, like I said not everyone will be ok with me, but in a way you confirm what I am saying.

Everything is speed and speed, but doing the same thing.
When I started my career in IT in the early 80s till today, nothing has changed. Promises were made and they still in the air.
I remember in the 90s something called "genie" or something like that and it was ready to launch to automate homes (smart home). Well, I think it was bought and kill by another company or something like that. Well, mid 2010s and here we go again the smart home is in the news. This could have happen long time ago, but it didn't because profit killed innovation.
Why they have to prevent innovation so they can keep milking the cow

My opinion is that It is not right.

Just like the TV commercial against Directv or Dish Network. You can have GPS signal into your gps navigation even when it is a big storm, but a single cloud breaks your TV reception.
I know they are 2 different things, but we are used to accept the limitations and live with them. Why cannot ask for better? That is the question for me. Why cannot ask for better.