It Would be Fair

One thing that I think I owe Stan Covington and Stu Tierney after telling you to stay away from Japanese sellers who can speak English – it’s wider than that.

…what do I owe. First, I’ve never seen Stan Covington say anything he doesn’t mean and I haven’t dealt with Stan since he started selling tools as a small business or side business, but Stan did something for me few people would do.

I asked him about Kiyotada. Stan found an old stock Kiyotada mortise chisel (tataki nomi) from probably the best part of Shimamura’s (the best master under the Kiyotada mark – I think there may have been one after him) work. It was a chisel still with a tag on it, but kept in the back room at a dealer in Tokyo. This concept may be a bit foreign to us, but there are things you can’t walk in off of the street and get. Sort of a character test that you have to pass. if I were in Tokyo and I asked if there was old stock Kiyotada, I don’t know if I could talk about heat treatment and talk my way into it. Stan had rapport with a dealer who did the “what’s the sticker say thing” and had some hard to get stuff like that. In this case, a Kiyotada chisel. What’s the sticker say means that the sticker that was on the chisel remained on it. the dealer wasn’t interested in hammering someone for $600 for a chisel, but rather about a third of that. it didn’t take long for me to find later on that an unused Kiyotada chisel can be bonkers expensive. if the chisels are used, you can get a better deal, but to get something like Stan got me is not like ordering something off of amazon.

At another time, I mentioned in frustration with the “All Japanese Tools are Better” club that nobody could show me a japanese saw that was legitimately good for ripping hardwoods. I don’t mean 20 inches, I mean like if you might have to rip 100 feet of length in a given day. From all of the disposable stuff, that’s true. My hands ache thinking about using lightweight kataba style saws and having them rattle my hands, and practically my teeth, trying to rip white oak.

Stan saw this challenge and said “I think I know a guy” who can make a saw that will work for hardwoods. Like heat treatment, when you run into a saw guy, suddenly there isn’t any “all Japanese saws are”. The challenge was to make a saw that would rip as well or better than a typical Disston 5 point D8. Of course, I didn’t think we’d see any such thing. Stan had two custom saws made by a guy who makes about 2 or 3 saws a month. He gave the guy a disston #12, and in honesty you won’t see any of the more woo type folks say, the sawsmith kind of bent the #12 around and inspected it and said “It’s a very good saw”. No nose wrinkling, no mythical “those american scam artists”.

What Stan returned was a mule tough rip saw that you me and nobody else was ever going to damage. The teeth were more stout and the back of the saw plate was forge welded to a heavy tang and the saw ripped saw like a japanese version of the best of rip saws. The maker knew exactly what he was doing not just to make the saw hard to damage, but to make it so that the proportions and orientation would just make the saw work. Of course, it was pulling and the assumption would generally be you’re standing on the work and it made me sore. Big time. It was also $1500 for the pair. I couldn’t justify buying one of the two – Stan was keeping the other. There was a level of connection to the maker in that saw – not a woo thing, but the fact that someone hand made this saw and it wasn’t a pretty piece of delicate art and nobody gave me any crap about how this saw was only for skilled users. It was a very attractive saw, but it was all business and would’ve done a lifetime of ripping hardwoods comfortably.

Before I try to guess why there’s no much cheaper production version of that saw, someone can tell me of the production rip saw that matches a disston D-8. There isn’t one.

And Tools from Japan

Stu Tierney is a high character guy. I’m fairly sure he was appalled by what he saw being sold to people in the US and when he started carrying Tsunesaburo planes even during a period of bad exchange rates, and they were half of Japan Woodworker’s price. And you could specify whatever you wanted.

Stu also helped me get a stranded Tokai guitar out of japan. The proxy service decided the guitar could be shipped in japan, and that’s it, because it was a customs risk. Technically it was, practically it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t and couldn’t convince the proxy service that had allowed me to make the purchase “unrestricted” and then changed their mind.

They offered me that i could store it to figure it out, and pay storage rent after at temporary period, or I could “have it destroyed for free”. The cost of the guitar and fees was $1550. As a matter of last resort, I got a hold of Stu (who I knew since before Tools from Japan ever existed) and Stu shipped it to me. At the cost, the guitar was opened and inspected in customs (anything over about $900 was by mandate). Not only did customs not care at all about madagascar rosewood on the fingerboard, they also made no attempt to collect the 9% tax that’s supposed to be assessed on Japanese guitar imports.

Thanks, Stu.

Lee Valley eventually screwed Stu by starting to sell the Sigma Power stones. I don’t know that it ever meant anything to Lee Valley, but it meant something to a one man business putting food on the table in Japan. There haven’t been many things that Lee Valley did that I think are a real turd move, but that’s one of them. Stu did a lot of leg work to educate people on some of the stones in Japan, was the only source, and Lee Valley just didn’t seem to care about that at all.

For everyone else, what’s “further”

There aren’t Japanese tool sellers in the US I’d bother with. The residual value of tools is poor and the typical white collar buyer can’t do much more than google to see if they can find a comparable price. If that price is what’s being sold now, maybe you get stuck for $950 for a plane that sells for $450 new in japan, but you can find someone else here who thinks 25% off of the $950 is a good deal. It’s a false dilemma.

But you could sometimes in the past find English translated links to Japanese sellers. Maybe they’ve gone out of business by now, but these were legitimate in country tool sellers. if you entered the front of the site saying you were in Japan, the prices were 2/3rds of what the prices were if you wanted to read the site in English. A stupidity charge, I guess. Never liked that kind of thing.