Shopsmith Forums

This gives an indication for why quality hand tools cost what they do. Lots of hand work involved here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHaXAFh83VE

Yes, those babies are right fine instruments. I had hands on about 5 of them in my shop over the years, but I'm down to one multi-purpose one.

Interesting video, and company. Thanks for posting. Good to see American manufacturing happening, and I assume, profitably.

So if this company and others in America can profitably make high-end hand woodwork tools, what does this say about the population and budget of American home-based woodworkers? And the present/future market for the Shopsmith tool? (I want Shopsmith to stick around - because I own one.)

There is one market for cheap tools and another market for high-end. A single tool cannot profitably sell in both. Which market is Shopsmith in?

Shopsmith shipping cost. If Shopsmiths were sold as u-build-it kits, that may help to "spread out" and maybe reduce total ownership cost. "Build a complete Shopsmith, one kit at a time!" Don't ship the long tubes, buy them from local metal sources, save the shipping cost.

Could a Shopsmith headstock be assembled from parts by the "average" end user? And still work?

Would a kit Shopsmith shift the safety liability ($) off the company and onto the end-user?

SS is to an extent already in the fabricate/assemble yerself arena.(upgrades etc.)

Yeah, I have to agree with JPG. I already thought that Shopsmith was a bit of an Erector set for the new owner anyway...then when the PP gets Gremlins you have to be able to do electronics debug so fun if you love that sort of thing like I do.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love high quality tools, not just woodworking specific. When form and function come together it amplifies whatever passion I have for that hobby. Lie-Nielsen produces beautiful, high quality tools. I have a slightly greater affinity for Veritas over them, but really both are top-notch IMHO. Veritas is of course Canadian and so is Jessem. Two of my favorite woodworking tool companies. Hey, at least they are in North America...

Great video! But what I would like to see is the things not shown, like how they fix the dropped part, part that is out of tolerance, the oops part. I would also feel better if so many of the polishing steps were not done by humans but rather machines. Precision in handcrafted is only as good as the hand craftsman, we all know people have off days.
However after watching this video I understand why the tools cost what they do. Which makes me wonder what came first the price or need for that step?

I see the polishing as more suited to human implementation since the purpose is primarily ornamental.

Now what i observed was functional dimensioning and grinding WAS done with machines.

Close fit tweaking again best done manually.

Regardless it was interesting especially showing a current foundry existing in the USA.

The points about scrap-parts etc. remind me: My Dad many years ago had dealings with a gent in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, which in those days had a Snap-On Tools foundry. This gent's job including taking any defective wrenches to a site where they were buried in concrete!

nuhobby wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 7:55 am The points about scrap-parts etc. remind me: My Dad many years ago had dealings with a gent in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, which in those days had a Snap-On Tools foundry. This gent's job including taking any defective wrenches to a site where they were buried in concrete!

Yeah, these things are hard to understand, but presumably that was so that the company could get the tax write-off from the defective products. Definitely a few stories around of stockpiles of video tapes or rare video games that were dumped in a landfill for this reason. Then years later someone comes along and does archaeology to try to find that rare video game (one Atari example I know of) that got buried so the company could report it as a loss on their taxes.

nuhobby wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 7:55 am The points about scrap-parts etc. remind me: My Dad many years ago had dealings with a gent in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, which in those days had a Snap-On Tools foundry. This gent's job including taking any defective wrenches to a site where they were buried in concrete!

Wouldn't a foundry just melt down the defective parts? I understand a lot of stuff would get buried like those Atari games RFGuy mentioned, but it's not like they could be easily re-used. Although maybe there was a tiny bit of gold on in the components, but they really wanted those awful games to go away.