Real cost of hand tool woodworking

[James Pallas]

Because of some recent posts I started thinking about the real costs involved with hand tool work. This is just a scenario for discussion. If you buy a tool new or used you need to be able to maintain that tool. So you buy a jack plane to flatten rough lumber. Then you buy coarse medium and fine water stones (seems to be the consensus here). Then you buy a couple of diamond stones to maintain the water stones. If you buy a used plane you need to buy tools for rehab work also. If you buy a new good quality plane you should be good to go. So for five hundred to one thousand dollars you are ready to flatten the face of a board. This is sharpening by hand, no guide, and using the edge of the plane for a straight edge. If you want to do more than that you are off again to purchase more tools. So I think this is an expensive hobby. I'm not against it just my opinion. What do you think?
Jim

[Curt Putnam]

Cost accounting will tell you that the cost of the stones must be amortized over all the edges they will maintain; same for the rehab tools. I don't imagine that most folks contemplate buying a single jack and leaving the whole scenario at that.

[Jim Koepke]

My first Jack Plane was given to me by a friend. There were a few smaller oil stones in my shop from years earlier to sharpen knives. Scary sharp is an inexpensive entry level system.

As far as rehabbing or maintaining old tools if one has maintained a vehicle of any type, adjusting and taking care of a plane should be a piece of cake.

If someone doesn't already own a screwdriver, it would be thoughtless of me to advise they go buy a screwdriver so they can then buy a plane needing rehab. This is where having others as mentors can be a big help.

If one wants to get involved on the cheap with some less than perfect tools it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. At my start of woodworking I couldn't afford to buy good lumber. All of my early projects were made from wood salvaged mostly from shipping pallets. My tools were an old saw, a hammer and sandpaper. Flea markets and yard sales were a source of some of my early tools. Didn't have to have them all at once.

One has to also consider that there were a lot of tools for other work accumulated over my years of working on bicycles, automobiles, computers and other things.

jtk

[Zach Dillinger]

Jack planes can be had for next to nothing if you spend just a little time looking. No need to buy new sharpening stones. I could get eight to ten people set up to flatten boards with your proposed budget. It can be a very expensive hobby if you let it, but it can also be pretty inexpensive if you don't insist on new everything (and don't count lumber costs). Just like golf. You can spend $3,000 on a new set of clubs or you can buy everything you need at a yard sale for $75 and just get out there.

[paul cottingham]

Planes also never wear out. So that must be taken into account.

[Christian Thompson]

To just flatten a board you can grab a jack plane for $30 and a $50 combo stone. You can flatten the stone with sandpaper. This isn't the best setup, but it's good enough for a start. I bought my jack on ebay and it was in decent enough shape that I didn't have to do a thing to it. So that's $90 including the sandpaper. Of course you still need a bench...

I bought that video "the naked woodworker" from lost art press because I really need to build a new bench. But I really don't want to build a new bench :-). Supposedly the bench in the video is quick and easy to build and looks traditional enough. Anyway, I still haven't watched the video, but I guess the premise was to get from nothing to a decent setup with a minimum of investment. The summary of the video says about $700, but that's for the whole deal.

[george wilson]

I made out pretty well back in the 50's with a Sears block plane and a 50 cent hardware chisel(New price was 50 cents!)Back then the only stone we ever had was a cheap old gray one,then strop,strop,strop on a piece of paper. Eventually a pretty sharp edge could be raised.

But,I had a lot more energy back then,and my joints were not yet all worn out!

[Warren Mickley]

When I changed from part time to full time I had about $950 invested in tools. Three decades later I am at about $2500. A lot of the additions have been carving tools, which I always buy new. When I divide the amount spent on sharpening stones and grindstone by the tools sharpened, I get $0.0008 per tool sharpened. You might be buying some unnecessary things.

It is easier to justify purchases for a hobby than for a business. For a hobby you can say which would I rather do, go to a restaurant or ball game, take a trip, or buy this tool. In a business, besides the catalog price, you have to think of the cost to get the tool in shape, and the time to get familiar enough with it to make it part of your routine. Then balance that with the additional income expected. Hard to buy a Bazingo stone just to see what it is like.

[Matthew N. Masail]

As pointed out the hobby dosent have to be expensive. If you knew what you were doing you can get everything you need for quite little money. Problem is it costs money to learn without guidance. Most of us spend more because we want to, not because we have to. We enjoy the tool and equipment hobby as well as the woodworking one.

[James Pallas]

Wow! This is all good stuff. It was my reason for the post. There is a lot of great info at SMC. I have lots of good tools myself that have been accumulated over the years. Sometimes I do see here that a new person could be overwhelmed when they ask about a tool or a process and are given solid info but not the bottom line info for a beginner or even someone with little experience. Some need to be told that it is okay to start out with less and it will work okay. The mentoring thing is a big deal also. Thanks everyone for your replies. I still have my old carborundum stone and it still gets used but it is also nice to have my sigmas as well.
jim

[Brian Holcombe]

Since this is a hobby for me I take into consideration the cost of buying furniture. If I wanted a table or book shelf it's going to cost me more than what the tools to build it would cost (well….. ). I put the sweat equity in, but that is worth it for me.

[Graham Haydon]

Zac's point is very fair. You can do whatever you like however you like but if cost was an issue pick up a plane from a yard sale and grab an india stone or an old Washita. David shows how you can get a plane ready quickly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khP74IuFljY . Well worth checking out his videos.

Same with chisels, Aldi cheapies, second hand options or new more expensive one, whatever floats your boat, it matters not.

Just have fun and don't assume miracles by spending money, finding time to practice is much more difficult for most people than access to appropriate tools.

[Wakahisa Shinta]

My wife shares Brian Holcombe's line of thinking. Between her and I, we have a half-joking deal: I build a piece of whatever, I get a tool (new or old). Of course, the piece must be functional and not held together with spider web. As of right now, I am working to add two white oak QTRS adirondack chairs for our patio. After completion, I get to buy something I need/want. I am so troubled between the choices!

If I account for labor time, I'd be bankrupted long ago!

[Frederick Skelly]

Depends on what one calls "expensive", and of course that varies. I nearly vomited when I heard guys talking about buying $5,000 tablesaws recently. That's more money than I have in every machine and hand tool I own. But to each his/her own.

But you can definitely get carried away with handtools if you aren't careful. I bought a devil of a lot of sharpening stuff, as I kept trying to move from scary sharp to surgically sharp. For MY hobbyist budget, I feel I overdid it in that arena because I now only need/use a subset of the stuff. (No, the excess isn't up for grabs!) But my planes are a mix of new and old and my backsaws are the $79 LVs. None of them are from the amazing high end makers. I even avoid LN if I can.

[Nicholas Lawrence]

You don't need to buy everything at once. You could make a pretty decent shelf for example with a set of chisels, one of those Japanese combination pull saws, a block plane and a few clamps. That is how I built the first shelf I ever built, with the boards clamped to the counter in the kitchen. Not anyone's idea of fine furniture, but I learned a lot and it is still going strong ten years later.

I used sandpaper to sharpen everything for a long time. Now I have a coarse water stone, and a 1k/8K combination stone. If they need flattening, I use sandpaper on a piece of granite.