During his last deployment as an Army officer, in 2007, Mark Harrell was in command of a team tasked to train Afghan National Army forces to better fight insurgents. He valued the work, and his comrades, but throughout the tour of duty there was one thing that his mind kept coming back to: traditional backsaws, the kind with a stiff back, used to make fine cuts in detailed joinery and furniture making. One in particular, a hand-built backsaw made by a family-run outfit in Oregon, consumed his attention, and he resolved that when he got home he would add it to his collection.
It was just a tool he wanted to buy, but it would become so much more, setting him on a path to the forefront of a growing movement of woodworkers and tool builders who champion the merits of near-forgotten designs and build techniques.
Long before he set his sights on the backsaw, Harrell started collecting old hand tools as a hobby. He would visit eBay looking for vintage tools in his price range. Then he noticed that tools that needed a little work, some rust removed or a new handle, could be bought cheaply, fixed up, and then resold at a profit.
Eventually Harrell discovered handsaws. “Having a sharp saw that will sever a board the exact way you want it, with that buzz sliding up your arm, you become addicted,” he says. “Before you know it, you’re buying saws on eBay and sneaking them past your wife.”
By taking apart and reviving old saws, Harrell was also getting a design education. Inspired and informed, would go on to start, in 2009, a small manufacturing company in La Crosse, Wisconsin, called Bad Axe Tool Works, which is now one of the premier small American saw companies.
THE UNPLUGGED GOSPEL
Tom Fidgen, a writer and professional furniture maker in Toronto, exemplifies the obsession that hand-tool makers and restorers like Harrell possess and cater to. A widely recognized evangelist for handcrafted woodwork, Fidgen is the author of The Unplugged Woodshop and founder of The Unplugged Woodshop, a studio and school in Toronto that features classes on how to use hand tools and what you can make with them. He started building with hand tools only when he moved to Toronto in 2008 and didn’t have the space for a workshop with large tools. Then he realized he preferred hand tools anyway. “At some point, working with hand tools became its own thing and I started writing about it, and talking about it, and teaching classes all over the planet,” he says.
Tom Fidgen, a writer and professional furniture maker in Toronto, exemplifies the obsession that hand-tool makers and restorers like Harrell possess and cater to. A widely recognized evangelist for handcrafted woodwork, Fidgen is the author of The Unplugged Woodshop and founder of The Unplugged Woodshop, a studio and school in Toronto that features classes on how to use hand tools and what you can make with them. He started building with hand tools only when he moved to Toronto in 2008 and didn’t have the space for a workshop with large tools. Then he realized he preferred hand tools anyway. “At some point, working with hand tools became its own thing and I started writing about it, and talking about it, and teaching classes all over the planet,” he says.
