Shopsmith Forums

For a chance to Win a day with Tommy Mac. Enter Here.

joedw00 wrote:For a chance to Win a day with Tommy Mac. Enter Here.

Sadly, it is not open to canadian woodworker.
I like Tommy Mac but it is over already on Detroit Public System where I can see PBS. We try to subscribe as much as we can to that very nice PBS network.

I'm not too sure I could spend a whole day with Tommy Mac.

anmius wrote:I'm not too sure I could spend a whole day with Tommy Mac.

I would have to agree with you. Now if it was Norm that would be different.

joedw00 wrote:I would have to agree with you. Now if it was Norm that would be different.

Yup, I could spend a day (or more) with Norm. Love to meet him some day and he is only a couple of hours away.

I never got the feeling that Norm entertained any visitors that he did not specifically invite. I don't remember exactly when but he was openly secretive about the location of his shop. He brought a couple visitors in blind folded.

My memory may be defective but it seems like his shop was somewhere in Worchester (Wooster), MA. It seems that he and Tommy did a lot of This Old House on properties in that area too.

If you don't want to spend time with Tommy Mac, you can always spent an hour with Norm here. The featured item is changed every week and most are projects of the past. Some are reborn and others are rerun.

It is my understanding that his shop was on the property of his producer Russell Morash and was in his (not Norm's) back yard. The story I have heard more than once is that Russ hired Norm to do some work for him and was impressed with his skill and personality. He was hired to be on "This Old House" and the rest is history (as some say). Russ lives near Lexington, Massachusetts which is not too far from where another of his productions, The Victory Garden, is/was located. So, in a nut shell, Norm's shop was not actually his, but Russ' shop (and still is Russ' shop).

anmius wrote:It is my understanding that his shop was on the property of his producer Russell Morash and was in his (not Norm's) back yard. The story I have heard more than once is that Russ hired Norm to do some work for him and was impressed with his skill and personality. He was hired to be on "This Old House" and the rest is history (as some say). Russ lives near Lexington, Massachusetts which is not too far from where another of his productions, The Victory Garden, is/was located. So, in a nut shell, Norm's shop was not actually his, but Russ' shop (and still is Russ' shop).

I don't know about property ownership but I understood that in the early shows both Morash and Norm received demo model equipment from the manufacturers in exchange for using it on the shows. I would have worked for one each of all the routers that Norm introduced and one of the Mark Vs.

Norm's Mark V must have been almost like brand new. He used it very little and for only a few shows.

dusty wrote: Norm's Mark V must have been almost like brand new. He used it very little and for only a few shows.

I wonder where it went? It would be cool to have it and have it documented...

They had one sitting at one end of the woodshop at BSU (Muncie IN) in 1961. It looked like new and I never saw anybody ever touch it.


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dusty wrote:I don't know about property ownership but I understood that in the early shows both Morash and Norm received demo model equipment from the manufacturers in exchange for using it on the shows. I would have worked for one each of all the routers that Norm introduced and one of the Mark Vs.

Norm's Mark V must have been almost like brand new. He used it very little and for only a few shows.

That is very common place for shows in any industry.