![\"small](\"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/IMG_4624_edited-2.jpg\")
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Here’s a question just for fun. In the past 30-40 years, which advance in tooling has made the biggest practical change<\/strong> in small shop furniture making? An individual tool, a type of tool, or a major upgrade in a tool category, hand or power, all qualify.<\/p>\n The answer will depend on the definition of “small shop.” What I have in mind is what I most relate to, which is the one-person shop<\/strong> making high-end furniture and accessories. Such a shop produces one-of-a-kind pieces or very few repeats, and may be an amateur at home, or a professional, whose furniture making is only part of his income.<\/p>\n OK, with that in mind, drum roll . . .<\/strong> my vote is for the Ryobi AP-10 portable thickness planer<\/a>, which was first made in about 1985 or 1986, as best I recall. This humble machine, which I owned back then, was the first lightweight, portable, low-cost way to easily and quickly<\/em> thickness large quantities of wood. The Ryobi begot improved competing models, such as the much later DeWalt DW735<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the small production shop, I am guessing CNC<\/strong>, along with CAD<\/strong>, has made the biggest difference. For shops of any size, the overall improvement and proliferation of carbide-tipped tooling<\/strong> \u2013 router and shaper bits, table saw blades, bandsaw blades, jointer\/planer cutters, etc. \u2013 may be the biggest advance.<\/p>\n To impart the touch of quality that is only possible with hand tools<\/strong>, we must, of course, acknowledge the roles of first, Lie-Nielsen, and then, Lee Valley\/Veritas. More than with vintage tools, new Mercedes-quality handplanes became readily available and indeed, the standard, which elevated everyone’s work. As a tool category, this may be the most significant advance. The same evolution occurred in Western hand saws, culminating, in my opinion, in the Bad Axe line.<\/p>\n Other<\/strong> tool categories that came to mind in thinking about this include: greatly improved tool batteries for cordless tools, the wider availability of high quality steel-frame bandsaws sized for the small shop, the wider availability of wide over-under jointer-planers, and the availability of excellent Japanese hand tools. For individual tools, the biscuit joiner, Saw Stop table saws, and Japanese waterstones deserve some notice but I would not consider these pivotal.<\/p>\n Oh, and there is one more “tool”<\/strong> that, come to think of it, probably has made the biggest difference of all: information!<\/strong>\u00a0Books, magazine, video\/Internet, classes, and so forth have tremendously advanced the joy of good woodworking.<\/p>\n It’s all good. We are fortunate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s a question just for fun. In the past 30-40 years, which advance in tooling has made the biggest practical change in small shop furniture making? An individual tool, a type of tool, or a major upgrade in a tool category, hand or power, all qualify. The answer will depend on the definition of “small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools-and-shop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4919"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4928,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4919\/revisions\/4928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rpwoodwork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}