Don calls for specialist help...


"Well Mr Schwartz,   
You have concerns about too many tools?  And that is why you’ve called in to The
Porch for some specialist help?

Very sensible, we know all about that syndrome here, and over many years of
study we’ve been able to identify various stages of what can be a progressive
disease if not treated early enough.

Let us look at the circumstances in this particular incident.  You say you have
no memory of where these parts came from.  Be reassured that that is a very
common condition we see on The Porch.  Our clients frequently report opening
workshop drawers and finding items that they have absolutely no memory of
placing there.  A whole genre of folk stories exists on the subject, and there
are many cases of claims that ‘little people’ came into the workshop and moved
things.  At the most serious end of this particular spectrum are the cases where
actual work is done or completed overnight, and to be quite frank, these are the
claims of a lunatic.  All right thinking tool aficionados know that work is done
only through the agency of skilled hands.

You ask where they came from and where do they go?  Well, it may come as a bit
of a surprise to you, but there really is an underground, and somewhat secretive
network of tool shifters operating in this country, and with international
links.  They take sometimes intricately shaped lumps of metal and wood, and move
them by hand and even by official services, hand to hand and through postage and
courier systems to where they can do good, and feed the desires of tool
collecting cognoscenti.  We know this network exists, even though the full
extent is often hidden, because the network can be seen around the time of the
December solstice, when packages may mysteriously appear on front porches or
under trees, with the routes and pathways unknown.  Your items may have reached
you by one of these channels, so you should cease to be alarmed, as they have
almost always been shown to be harmless to people, though sometimes they cause a
thinning of wallets in the aftermath.
They may come this way - you may be able to send them into the greater tool
universe the same way.  No cause for alarm there.

Now let’s look at the specifics of your case.  Two (2) irons for planes,
travelling without their bodies like a Dickensian ghost.  Indeed they are
ghosts, ghosts of happier times past, when all plane irons had a body, and all
bodies had an owner, an owner who was frequently so attached that they would
stamp, or burn, or engrave their name to be sure of never being parted.
The answer to your problem becomes simple when viewed in this way.  All you need
do is reach out to your fellows across the globe, those with the matching
ironless bodies, who, like you, will be anxious to re-unite iron and body.  Or
mayhap the ones with an entire plane, anxious to rescue an orphaned iron to have
‘on stand by’ ready for the dreadful day when cutting edge reaches cap iron slot
or adjuster groove and an iron has to go to the great smelter in the sky.

You need only acquire more planes and more planes, and your problem will go
away.  You will look back and laugh at yourself, saying “how silly I was to
worry about where tools come from and go to.  It is not fur us to meddle in
these matters, we merely aid the process by providing stopovers for tools,
resting places where they can get together, mix with their peer groups of sets,
and re-arrange themselves into complete runs by maker or model, until the day
when they are liberated to disperse into other way stations, piling up into
groups, coming and going through their networks, bringing pleasure and
enjoyment, and leaving knowledge, artefacts and furniture as they pass through.

Mr Schwarz, you are as sane* as the rest of us.  Nothing to worry about. Your
Porch is here for you, we’ll help you through this."


Richard Wilson
yorkshireman Galoot in Northumbria




*I prefer ‘Quaint’ myself…





> On 30 Jun 2024, at 00:09, Don Schwartz  wrote:
> 
> 
> Today I came across a couple of plane irons for which I have no idea as to
their origin, and can't find plane bodies to fit them. One is a Steiner & Sohne
skewed and tapered iron 55mm wide, the other a 1-9/16 Henry Boker iron which
looks like it might have come from a wedged block plane. So the question - apart
from where did  they come from? and where do they go? - is whether this is a
sign I have too many tools in the cave? Not exactly too many tools, which makes
no sense, but too many tools for my aging brain to keep track of, even with the
help of tailed remembering and calculating and doing-all-manner-of-things
machines, of which I may well have too many. Please advise.
> 
> Don
> 



-- 
Yorkshireman Galoot
in the most northerly county, farther north even than Yorkshire
IT #300