A little more for the older guys, like me, and older yet. Astroturf is a great word – fake grass. Or in this case, a fake grass roots effort. Plenty of definitions online, but they generally refer back to a marketing campaign that presents a fake grass roots effort.
A simple example that we can all gather being obnoxious would be company W2 employees and 1099 contractors going out to social media like Reddit and posing as the general public. I suspect this stuff will get much better with AI, but on Reddit, it wasn’t difficult to tell if someone was a shill. Their post history would usually show one or a few things that they commented on all the time, but the comments weren’t differentiating or very deep, and they managed to show up when a company name or product was mentioned responding to a query, for example. Mechanically, that’s pretty easy. You want X, Y or Z’s two part “hard wax oil”? Shills as part of their day job monitor sites or do open searches by date to see if something is mentioned, and probably beyond that, have a bot that does it.
There’s also some buddy buddy boutique tool astroturfing. E.g., if a planemaker or sawmaker is getting critical comments for something not done well or not delivered at all, then another will show up and attest to their products being great just kind of like a drive by. And then do it several times, perhaps giving a quasi logical explanation as to why the original poster is wrong or claiming nothing else is available and the trouble is just the cost of getting the best.
But the direct astroturfing – employees posing as customers faking a grass roots effort by the public, it’s obviously disgusting if you have any ethics at all. And at this point, illegal to my understanding.
Commissioned Turf Weaving
Somehow, we all have some holes in our logic. Cognitive deficits and biases. They can be relatively more innocent, like believing that Chris Schwarz only recommends things that he thinks make sense in a trade situation or professional situation. Maybe he does, but I doubt it. However, he’s not Stumpy Numbs on my kind of scorecard of people stitching the turf for someone else. But what Chris says he uses creates a pretty big barrier because Chris isn’t selling the stuff that he recommends.
Let’s look at this through a different lens, because I experienced a financial advisor taking advantage of both my parents and a huge group of their friends. They all have more money than they’ll need in their lifetimes, though not because they’re rich, but because they have moderate incomes, pensions and social security and don’t care for stuff that costs much. Let’s frame this accurately – consider a group of people who are spending X% of their annuity income where that figure is probably about 50%. Inevitably, they have a surplus and end up at a financial advisor. The advisor is lacking honesty, but is classified as being independent, but not fee for service. I’m not apprised of anything while this is going on because of another cognitive bias as well as other types of bias – parents often do not like their kids to know what they’re doing and after a lifetime of being the one teaching the other, they certainly don’t want to learn from their kids. And my parents were good parents, but this dynamic still exists.
So, an independent investment advisor invites one of them to a learning session. This is not really a learning session, it’s a sales lead session, to give information that seems to be separated from the products being sold and tout the independence of the advisor, and also boast about their accomplishments and book of business, which implies credibility. I think it implies something else, but we’ll leave that out. One person goes to this advisor, and the next is brought to them or one of their sessions by word of mouth. They tout that they are not captive to a specific company and say they would like to see your complete financial picture so they can give good advice. That part is potentially partially true – they need to know what your means and needs are, but collection of information about your entire financial picture also affords the advisor the ability to try to get those assets under their management, too.
Suddenly, the entire group of folks who are over 65 with no savvy are buying income annuities, and they believe these annuities are earning 8% because the advisor told them verbally they are. The advisors also make pitches that they are screening the companies they broker products for and can change every time, and that makes them on the clients side. Legally, this is what’s supposed to happen. However, this is a shield and you’re left guessing first whether the advisor is actually operating on your behalf when selecting a type of product and then second when they’re selecting the company offering the product.
The advisor in this case failed the first test, but the group didn’t know it. Had they met with something like a captive insurance agent, or someone who had a shingle that said “commissioned salesperson who gets X%”, they would’ve refused to buy an annuity. My dad’s reasoning was a critical friend of his (critical in opinions) trusted the advisor. I asked him to have the advisor call me. At my dad’s age, an annuity that pays 8% of the purchase price at the time was earning about 2-2.5% interest per year. Taxable. The group of marks in this case were loaded up with the claims – the market may average 9% but they’re getting 8% guaranteed, and they have no clue what the whole profile is or that the actual price of the annuity builds an expense-adjusted return of 2-2.5%.
I can guarantee my parents would’ve been distrustful of a captive insurance agent who sold them something, and probably a lower expense load. What they experienced was something that elder law protects people from, but it’s too seldom enforced.
In that case, I requested my dad have the investment advisor called me. My intention was to refer him to the state attorney general’s office, because what he was doing as someone who should’ve been acting in the interest of my parents was acting in his own interest. Another relative of mine who works as a consultant to larger entities (not individuals) has had a lot of success getting similar folks prosecuted, and I guess you could say he went on a tirade at the end of his career cleaning things up voluntarily.
The Situation Isn’t as Dire
In woodworking, this situation isn’t as dire, but disclosure is also weak. My dad’s advisor never called because my dad’s poker skills in terms of withholding information involved “my son says what you sold me earns 2% and not 8% and that I shouldn’t have been sold an annuity”. Of course, the advisor told him he’d gladly call me, that I was wrong about the return (zero chance of that) and he had nothing to hide. A couple of months later, he sold his practice to a large national chain. My dad referred to this as issue solved, because the dishonest advisor retired. I guess you could look at it that way. That also gives the impression that this is a one-off thing, and other than really high fees for the follow-up advisor, things are better. My dad, as you would expect, also expressed dissatisfaction with this situation in the end because what I pointed out “made him feel stupid”. He’s an upstanding 100% honest guy, and has nothing to hide, but people feel embarrassed if they look stupid rather than wanting to settle the score. That’s too bad.
But the dynamics underlying here are the same. Influencers create a situation where they are paid like a salesperson in the companies they are referring would be paid, but can present a front as if everything they show is what they picked and whatever else happens is just circumstance. I can practically guarantee you that the larger influencers have employees who seek affiliate agreements and find products that offer affiliate agreements, buy those products so they can say they did and the arrange affiliate terms later. If someone is pitching nano-silica “ceramic” finish to you and saying they bought the finish, do you think they just ran into what they bought and it’s just happy ending they could get paid? It’s possible they’re telling you they bought the product with their own money because they did even after an affiliate agreement was in place. if someone buys $100 worth of a product and collects $10K in affiliate commissions, would you consider them to be the same as someone you know who bought a product once, liked it, and never said much? Of course not, but your eye is not on the ball as a consumer of information.
The $10k or whatever it may be of affiliate commissions and “discount if you use my link” is really only telling you the price of the product has a big enough margin as it’s claimed at retail to pay both affiliate commissions, probably an investor group who is paying to set up the product along with other similar items on different sites, and still make a margin. How much is nanosilica finish directly from China? It’s a few dollars, and maybe ten for 60ml for nanosilica and a small graphene addition. that’s not to say there’s any reason to buy it – I bought some, haven’t used it yet, but the gimmick is the silica is hydrophobic. I can tell you for sure adding nanosilica to tung oil and wax makes the water bead well, but guess what – the effect is superficial. It gets even more puzzling when an influencer announces the durability of the product and then tells you that the maker recommends you apply another finish over the “ceramic” finish so that it will hold up better and be protected.
It’s not dire – you buy stuff you don’t need or at a price you didn’t need to pay. Ultimately, my dad isn’t going broke, either – though fiduciary rules would make it difficult for his advisor to argue what he was doing was legal. As far as I know, there’s nothing at all illegal for an influencer to choose what they talk about based on the biggest affiliate commission and then tell you whatever they fell like saying as long as the video they’re saying it in wasn’t directly sponsored by the vendor of the product.
The illusion of objectivity that could exist is there. It’s even better than astroturfing – not for you, but for the influencer, because if you are in the majority of long-time viewers, you already trust them vs. just seeing someone you don’t know and adding that to a list of random comments.
The influencer further is going to make the effort to manipulate the algorithm, and almost certainly, the social media platforms are going to place a value on the audience based on their data. That means, in less polite terms, the more gullible you are, the more valuable and targeted the audience is. I think people don’t believe that youtube would actually be interested in what an influencer gets for affiliate commissions or their pattern of videos and how they’re composed outside of views, but that’s very naive. if you are creating videos like Wandel, for example, who demonstrates a bunch of interesting stuff that doesn’t involve buying, you’re more likely to be deprioritized in search. It’s been a long time since I watched Wandel’s videos, but I recall that he was fighting a rash of the system making it hard for subscribers to get updates. My last remnants of youtube as a viewer involved the same thing. I had difficulty getting notifications from a few people publishing videos. they were all “bugs”, of course, where the notifications didn’t work just by chance. That “bug” that occurred at random just always pointed me toward someone else providing lower level content, like the influencers mentioned here.
Around four years ago, when it was clear this would never change, I came up with a pretty simple system – if anyone has an affiliate link in their videos, I would tell Youtube not to recommend them to me. Youtube completely ceased recommending any woodworking videos. I guess they didn’t like my choices.
Just like you will see financial advisors giving “free advice” where they don’t directly sell anything, or sponsoring something local and showing up, I’m sure you will see youtube influencers at woodworking events or presenting media about a manufacturer or a seller or a flea market or whatever else. It’s part of making sure that the important part remains – the trust level that allows you to be easier to get to for an affiliate link than you would be if the company itself sent you advertisements. You’re still playing on astroturf as a customer, but maybe you think it’s grass because of everything else around it.
That creates a completely different interesting question for another day – is it better to just be intentionally ignorant and do what feels good or makes you happy? It might be, but I can’t really offer any useful commentary.
I can offer a list of considerations, but I’ll spare you – just the first simple one, as a consumer if social media if you consume it, do you believe that the information you’re getting is there for its own sake, and if something appears in a video or is even touted or referred to that it is chosen by merit and the chips fall where they may? If the influencer you’re watching primarily gets their income from another source, it’s possible. The more their channel is the primary means, the less chance I think that’s the case, and just because an influencer has several streams of income doesn’t mean that one is where they farm marks and the others are objective.
And lastly, the nice person thing. I have known a few people who I consider to have serious ethical problems and issues with respect for other people during the day. Off hours, they are really nice, at least they are attested to be very generous and nice by other folks they have nothing to gain from. My view of influencers is dim. I think they see most people as someone to get something out of, especially if they are on the gimmick, so to speak. Which is more than just when the camera is running. They may be very nice when there is something completely outside of the area where they’re looking at people and just considering what they can get out of them. Probably, the folks who operate that way and are otherwise nice will be the most successful, even when they are also the most exclusory in terms of what they are getting out of you.
At least the mark farming is just for woodworking, though. You can get the equivalent of turf toe on woodworking stuff and it won’t change your life a whole lot.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
Interesting post David. Maybe I can offer some perspective as the ‘person with affiliate links’. I used to run a site where people could find information about a certain type of woodworking products. Initially this was purely informational, but at some point I added affiliate links.
Now I’m also not a big fan of ‘influencers’ only posting affiliate links for products they get huge margins from, so I tried to make it more useful and objective by automatically showing actual prices besides the links and link to several stores, so as not to bias to a specific store (not all were affiliate links either). These showed up on purely informational pages, so I wasn’t giving an opinion about the product myself.
Later I also started posting a few detailed product reviews, and there I also added affiliate links. This was more akin to the ‘influencer’ type affiliate link.
Looking back I can make a few observations:
In my situation back then I had strong financial reasons for doing this, but it did end up ruining the fun for me, as it pushed me from just publishing helpful content / tools that I was missing myself to going through keyword research and publishing on whatever people were searching for.
So even if you try to remain as objective as possible your behavior will be influenced somewhat by affiliate incentives it seems.
Now I didn’t make that much money at all, so it was easy to quit, but I can imagine if you start earning a serious income it’s tempting to go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to justify to yourself selling out (just think of all those influencers who claim they are ‘not sponsored’ when reviewing a product they received for free that they link to with a custom affiliate link created by the company…).
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Hi, John – thanks for the honest accounting. the era you’re talking about is almost like a different time. If you were doing that early enough, the FTC had no opinion and it was kind of regular fare for people back then to share stuff with token links on forums and then get squashed. But the tokens that I recall most back then were amazon affiliate tokens. the goal that some of the people mentioned when they got caught was to get enough token revenue to buy the tools for their shop so they could please their spouses, though I’m sure there were much more aggressive folks who figured out that you could set up a bunch of different topics and create reviews for them. Let me know if this kind of was the feel back then: there was amazon affiliate program stuff, and people all over the place were offering website reviews. there was a guy whose name escapes me now who did a lot of “reviews” but they were more like a person reading a product manual – the kind of uninformative information that really was just about getting discussion of a product in front of someone. the same guy was on the forums and would never tell anyone how he was getting paid or for what, and his answers didn’t hold water from what I could tell, usually ending in a blustery “it’s nobody’s business”.
I also remember there were a lot of professional woodworkers (not hand tool only) who would make a couple of things as a side hustle and also hang out a shingle that said “available to do tool reviews”. Except they (more honestly in my opinion) put that right on their personal sites. That’s pretty clear – “I’ll get your product demonstrated in front of people, and competently”. That was a boon for sort of transition advertising back then because the magazines and other older-style mediums probably still cost a mint and you could get more reach. More formulaic web aggregator stuff followed and youtube at the time was filled with cheap product placement videos. “I just bought this ____ today and really like it”. That got the FTC involved. But that was also around the same time that April Wilkerson and Jay Bates showed up on youtube – there was some time gap, but it was clear that YT channels were suddenly being set up by incompetent woodworkers who were just starting, but those individuals for one reason or another could get 60-70k subscribers within a few months. It was a sign of a dumb market. Jay Bates may be a nice guy, but the start of the channel was sort of a study in “if this grows quickly, I know that the era of people wanting to see a professional demonstrate something are over”. Of course they are now, and were already then.
There is something much more powerful about how youtube will put someone who is at best partially competent in front of a group of people, make them feel comfortable, and then make them want to stay in that group and not have their bubble burst. It just seems far more dishonest and stupid to me than whether or not someone who is a professional really nailed it on a detailed discussion about table saw blades or a new hybrid saw offering.
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This was up until 5 years ago or so. In my situation I did usually have a clear marker that they were affiliate links, there was no ‘tricking’ people into clicking them. Also if you’re using the Amazon Affiliate Program the terms say you should make clear that you may receive a commission if people buy through your links. Usually people put that sentence somewhere at the bottom of the page where most people don’t read it though.
Personally I don’t have a problem with affiliate links per se, as long as it’s made clear to the reader/viewer that it is one. Also, I feel like there’s a big distinction between ‘generic’ affiliate links and links where the influencer has a direct link with the company. If I write a review of some Veritas hand plane, and I put a few links (some of them affiliate) to various stores where you might buy this plane, then I don’t think I have a huge incentive to bias my review in some way.
However, many influencers these days have a personal connection and unique affiliate links / discount codes with companies. They will often say ‘XYZ’ provided this free of charge, but I have no obligation to say nice things about this product. Which may theoretically be true, but if they do say bad things about it, they’re unlikely to get any early review units next time, plus they will lose their unique affiliate link that probably earns them a lot more than some generic Amazon affiliate link. They’re basically sponsored, except they get paid at a later date and based on how many people buy the product – that sounds an awful lot like how sales people are compensated.
Now I do have to say that on Youtube I’ve seen some changes recently, at least for youtubers from countries like the UK and Germany who seem to have much stricter regulations around disclosure. They will have [Gifted/ad] in the video title, and some German youtubers even have the word ‘Ad’ in the top left of their video all the time as long as they are using an affiliate link (even a very minor one).
Then again, not all of them do that, and I don’t know how much enforcement there really is of the new disclosure rules. I know of two extremely popular tool resellers in Germany who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers making ‘entertaining’ content on Youtube which is so obviously biased – they somehow always recommend whatever they are selling themselves as the best when doing product comparisons. Which is maybe understandable, but they are genuinely pretending to be doing objective product reviews and people are still eating it up.
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It may not have been the case for you, but even with products you’re not associated with, there’s an incentive to always bias toward being positive. if you say you like something and someone else doesn’t like it but can’t immediately think your review was fraud, you’re definitely better off being positive. Both for getting more things to review and getting more people to read and click through links to block out time on whatever the link through site is and get credit for anything someone might find.
But the brand associated type, definitely. I used to watch demonstrations of guitar gear on YT before. They do at least allow you to hear something, but I recall watching someone who was outing youtube influencers who said they were independent and flouting the sponsorship disclosures by taking money behind the scenes and not letting anyone know. They did have affiliate links, but I guess people like to say they are touting something with an affiliate link and that’s “not sponsorship”. A sound guy who did music and sound stuff across the board got trapped by this guy – or trapped himself. The demand for a pair of videos was something like 10 grand plus override incentives (extra % on referrals if the volume went over a certain amount).
Another from a guitar store in the UK doing “reviews” of Victory amps when the owner of the store had some equity or capital stake in the amplifier company – same guy outed them and the UK regulatory body did practically nothing other than recognize that it should’ve been disclosed. the owner of the guitar store who always seemed like a meek friendly kind of guy turned out to be a real piece of work -using the “apology” to claim that industry people and employees of his stores already knew about the association so it wasn’t a secret (customers and potential customers didn’t!) and then claiming the need not to disclose it and keep the ownership in a front business that didn’t expose names was important so that competitors would be wiling to buy something he had invested in. He failed to grasp that was worse, not better (oh, it’s innocent because if my partner and I had our name on the company in an LLC and had it disclosed, some retailers may not have been willing to carry the amps).
I would imagine there’s quite a bit of lobbying in commerce groups to make sure that enforcement of any of this stuff isn’t prioritized.
it’s just part of reality – I can imagine contributors and lobbyists saying that if the laws actually are enforced, it will put honest retailers at a disadvantage or some nonsense.
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This is “affiliate links done right”. I personally don’t see them as an issue until a person starts to optimize towards conversions on these links. Doing anything online is quite an effort, some motivation wouldn’t hurt.
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As ever, cogent and distinct.
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hey…how’d you find this place!! I hope you’re well and doing well. If not, the commercials between the astroturfing on youtube are filled with guaranteed health fixes that you can just mix in coffee. they say they’re easy five word secrets but somehow, the 2 minute commercials aren’t long enough to say those five words.
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Somebody on the FB Handtool group dropped the dimensions when invoked the Unicorn Method for a confused newbie.
This format suits your mature writing.
You’re spot on about the whole thing being a glorified advertising platform.
I do (on rare occasion) see a demonstration that challenges prevailing approaches, for example Pete Millard on YouTube.
He did a test to destruction of Medite (MDF?) displays built with only butt joints and Titebond.
That was an eye-opener.
https://www.facebook.com/jim.matthews.1291?mibextid=ZbWKwL
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I’m going to guess that glued together MDF isn’t that easy to break at the glue joint if the joint is wetted (enough glue for the glue to find itself to stick to without finding a dry joint I guess is a better way to put it).
I can’t see anything on facebook – it’s a platform I am averse to, which at this point maybe that’s all of them. No twits, no winklevoss thieves, no reddit…I can look up pete millard, though – presumably most of his stuff is on YT. Years ago someone mentioned his name – not that many years ago and I confused him for a short time for Rob Millard. different guy! I’m glad you made it here. It’s not that I’m an efficient or even interesting writer – it’s just voluminous and difficult for me to do any other way, even though it seems like saying less and in order would be less work. For me, it’s not. I think you may have at some point bailed me out with the quote “i would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time”. In the world of dudes, I’m more el duderino, duder, his dudeness than just “dude”, I guess.
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Don’t sell yourself short.
You’re plenty interesting.
Jim
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> because Chris isn’t selling the stuff that he recommends.
He totally does though, esp. now with his new substack. He just have enough shame not to do it explicitly and obviously, but there’s always some Crucible tool in a frame. Though he doesn’t have enough shame to not to sell re-packaged cheap stuff with 80% margin. And the publishing model is yet to be studied by scholars, I guess. All in all Chris is an its own kind of “not good” – this is the difference. I wouldn’t mind if he could find a way to keep his marks from lashing out on anyone even remotely critical of Chris or the peddled products, ‘cos giving any sort of a feedback on his resources is just pissing against the wind. Well, I would probably mind the books still.
> getting critical comments for something not done well or not delivered at all
see also: Blackburn tools, St. James Bay (although people say the guy made it good later), and the Lie Nielsen shooting plane mini-drama. The last one was good. In every case there were a bunch of drive by attorneys attesting it with all their hearts of how good were the tools that eventually were delivered. Pretty sure kickstarter is full of these dramas, so not exactly new.
> employees posing as customers faking a grass roots effort by the public
Absolutely correct, it’s illegal. A company tries to break a networking effect by incentivizing own employees to review any product of their liking. That should be okay, what is not okay is that most companies can be honest even in this little aspect. Legally they are obliged to put “an obvious indication” that the feedback is solicited. They put a gray label somewhere next to a review, but in a place that is rarely read by people, like in that graphical mess of icons or somewhere under a username.
> April Wilkerson and Jay Bates
What a blast from the past! Not sure whether to feel nostalgic or sad because I know who these people are, lol. They’re rather a trope at this point rather than actual people, I guess, if they’re still active.
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Goes to show how much I know. The last I looked with those two (jaypril, let’s say), they were both going. Looks like Bates has promoted videos on other topics courtesy of what you can see is a decline in his views – something a lot of other folks weathered if they were willing to keep thumping the floor trying to make their channels all about clickbait and sales links. Looks like Wilkerson is still at it.
I really don’t know Chris much, but little that he’s done but publishing other peoples’ info has been useful. However, it would’ve been more useful even in those cases for me to be in the shop more, or read older sources instead. For example, of all of the moulding layout stuff and kind of basic instruction that I’ve ever gotten, just having the drawings in nicholson and holtzappfel of profiles to really get coked up on how good they look would’ve been more useful, and basic instruction like -use straight wood, put the profile on the ends, remove wood with something other than the detail planes as much as possible and then use the profile planes to finish things.
Whatever the case, once in a while someone will mention that “you should pay for his substack, he’s writing on substack now”. No thanks. There was something just not quite there for me – it’s certainly not at all like talking to George about anything, just worlds apart. You are right about the fanboys, though – they registered or logged back in to SMC to complain about George who had criticized Chris’s saw jamming demonstration as well as clinching nails sloppily in a how to. That’s all it took, and the site owner of SMC and some of the moderators – not my kind of people. Guilt by response from other people, enough – it’s a “noncompetitive advertising” environment as the site says in the terms. At least back then, any conflict got quick moderation, admonishing and guilt by association if you were the target of others’ ire. I got a time out on woodnet so long ago now that I can’t remember when it was – 2008? For calling out someone who deserved it. There had been some conflict and one of the moderators said the publisher complained or something, or advertisers complained to the publisher and the publisher told the moderators about it. Whatever – maybe it’s not all about advertising all the time in the real world (except in most of the places where there’s a platform, it actually is, and advertisers know that a fake plastic face style friendly environment offers the most verisimilitude and outright selling).
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I don’t know him personally either, just judging by what he does. Here’s an example, it went like this: (1) a post on LAP about some presumably magical decor patterns he has collected traveling Transylvania, (2) another blog where he reproduces these decors on his cabinets, (3) an announcement of a special cutter” for these decors developed by his friend and a partner at Crucible tools — there’s quite a surgical precision in their words juggling to never say “we made it” but still to imply it’s a custom made tool. (4) another blog post hinting at logistic issues because of a spike in orders and limited quantities. Here’s the kicker: for 34$ + tax and shipping you receive an incomplete set of stamped vinyl floor cutters, from which a few cutters and a big plastic handle has been removed. Comes as a loose items in an envelope, a little blister for cutters, but that’s it. Given that these special Crucible tools are drop shipped I really doubt they even took these kits apart themselves. The kicker is that a complete set was 9-13$ on Amazon at that time. Not a single example too (it is nice to be acquainted with a mark sometimes).
His re-prints are totally butchered. Looking at the original publication quality one might think it’s impossible, but here we are. Outstanding examples are Hayward books, full of typos, OCR issues, bad page layout and absolutely randomly arranged content – that’s one of his flagship products, no less, he spend several years priming the audience for it. And I bet 20$ that ChatGPT would do a way better job at translating Roubo than whatever machine translation service Chis has used. Oh by the way, contrary to the statements, illustrations from Roubo were not enhanced. They’re still the images you can get from archive.org and they’re as illegible as their originals. The books he wrote or those by people he “invited” (or whatever it’s called) are complete BS, a good editor would have shut it down at a draft review (naturally, a good woodworker isn’t necessary a good author and Chris has but a few good woodworker friends) – most of them are terrible authors, just masking this fact behind clunky, unnecessary verbiage and tons of repetitions and anecdotes. And as you rightly noted, if anyone finds anything new in these books – it’s bad news tbh. All in all Chris probably is the epitome of an influencer. He’s so good at it he made you think he’s not like the others (probably because he doesn’t operate in the parts of the internet you frequent and because at least a half of his operation is offline). I’m going on a limb here, but I think that Chris and a couple of other folks were in fact role models and paved the road. I mean, imagine being a secondary journalist in some secondary magazine, barely having any skills or talents, but making it just because you happen to meet right people at a right time – sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
> “you should pay for his substack, he’s writing on substack now”.
Idk, he has nothing to say really, never had. Nothing he says is original or correct, often both.
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So, most of what you said is foreign to me because I stopped reading a lot of sources around 2011. Here was my bias with Chris and it’s maybe not a very nice one to say this way. I wanted to learn to use planes and then I wanted to learn to work with them only and no power planer at least most of the time. Chris made things in woodworking look pretty hard. I can’t think of anyone actually who demonstrated working by hand well aside from maybe bits and pieces from Williamsburg, but I know from experience that using single iron planes only working rough wood is a dead end. I did it for a little bit – it’s terrible and impractical no matter how good the single iron planes are unless you can find absolutely perfectly sawn lumber. that’s difficult if you aren’t selling the work, or making something like guitars.
So past the release of the wearing book (which is a dud for me – I get its usefulness for others, but for me, the kind of paint by number stuff is out – it’s limiting in the end), I kind of fell off other than at one point seeing the lump hammer and then jazzing up a flea market hammer with the belt grinder and posting it and referring to it as my $10 “dump hammer”.
I *hear* that there might be a superb book on varnish coming at some point. it could be a while, but I have seen some of the background and legitimacy going into it and it too may not be “complete”, but it will be a jumping off point to more information and experimentation for people – I hope. Of course, it’s not me writing it. I don’t know of anyone other than Chris who would help get something like that published, though. But compare what Chris typically publishes to something like the Seaton book – it’s not a close contest. The seaton book is unreal. But it involves the efforts of a lot of people and is not so much a commercial effort.
I think I responded to the wrong post here, but you know which one this applies to. I think it may be Raney who is working with Chris on some of the tools. I’m fond of Raney – but not going to buy any of the tools. I’m fond of Raney because he chewed me out on a forum a couple of times about the discussion just repeating and not progressing, and then he gave me some advice. One of the pieces of advice he gave me was that you can’t match the heat treatment in something like a hock iron, but he was giving that advice in a helpful way and that’s one of the things I remembered (I have to see if that’s true). I don’t think hock’s contractors can heat treat anything better than I can, but in deference to Raney’s advice, it has taken some time and a lot of experimentation to both hammer out how to get good results and know it well enough to be able to give rare advice. I can’t say much about any of their tools because I’m just not the market for it. Pairing the tools with the writing does have a little Cosman flavor, but they’re different in dynamic. I still see Cosman and Chris as being influencers, but not of the youtube algorithm type. Are they Peter Nicholson, no way. But I guess a casual reader will breeze through the couple of dozen pages peter nicholson writes about planing and joinery and such and completely miss how much is there and how golden it is. Part of the early bias also with Chris was the reality that the efforts were in the shadow of being an editor. It took me longer than it should have, but I subscribed to two magazines until counting the number of times I used their information (near zero) and how long it took me to read a new issue (usually 15 minutes, skipping the ads and Q/A as well as most of the power tool stuff). it just didn’t make sense to buy them, but that kind of relationship between blogging about tools and having some of the makers at woodworking events and as advertisers in magazines….censored discussion (censoring in a data way, not like Tipper Gore or the TV censors who told Lucy not to show that she was pregnant on TV in the 50s), not really my bag. As in, talking only about the stuff you want to promote – or in the case of both blackburn and garibaldi, being slow or nonexistent in advising readers “by the way, i’m touting these guys but lots aren’t getting what they ordered” – not a fan. that part – I’m a frownface on, of course. There’s a weird current in the world of boutique toolmakers that stiffing a buyer is different than someone else – horseshit to that.
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