Since the introduction of the Shopsmith to the woodworking market in 1948 and its subsequent popularity, there has been a seemingly endless debate over which is better, multipurpose tools or stand-alone, single-purpose tools. Those who advocate multipurpose tools point to their versatility, compact size, and the step-saving advantage of having everything you need to work within an arm’s reach. Those who would rather work with single-purpose tools argue that they require less setup time and a tool designed to do one thing well is preferable to one that does some things better than others.
There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both types of tools. And ultimately, the only part of this discussion that means a damn to people who are trying to decide which type of tool to buy is, “Which kind of tool produces the best work?” And the answer to that question is, “Neither.”
Currently, the cultural bias among woodworkers is in favor of stand-alone tools. But it’s only a bias, not a fact. If you know your woodworking history, the cultural scales once tipped in the other direction.
When I first began woodworking, I bought my lumber at an ancient lumberyard the proudly boasted it had been supplying building materials since just after the Civil War. In one area of this yard, there was a defunct millwork shop that had once built the windows and doors for most of the new construction in town. Instead of carpenters buying these commodities in standard sizes from a distant manufacturer as they do now, windows and doors were once made to order locally. The millwork shop employed eight craftsmen, and each craftsman had his own “millworking machine,” consisting of a jointer, planer, table saw, shaper, and mortiser arranged around a central arbor. A craftsman with a door or window to make could do so simply by walking around the machine – he needed nothing else.
These sorts of multipurpose machines were designed around our concept of manufacturing before the turn of the twentieth century. Manufactures had employed assembly lines and standardized parts since the 1820s, but craftsmen were still responsible for the construction of individual items. Often they would walk along the assembly line, progressing from station to station. Machines like the millworking machine that I described were designed to save steps and make this sort of manufacturing process more efficient.
In 1903, Henry Ford added a new wrinkle. Instead of craftsmen moving along a line, the line moved past the craftsmen. Each worker in the Ford automobile plant performed the same manufacturing step over and over. The tools used were single-purpose machines since each craftsman did only one job. There was a great deal of resistance to this kind of manufacturing at first. Nine out of every ten workers that Ford hired quit before they made it through their first year – it wasn’t the kind of craftsmanship they had been trained to perform. Ford, and other manufacturers who adopted his system, continually had to retrain their workforce.
This problem reached a head during World War I, when it became apparent that there would have to be some sort of new education process to train workers for mechanized farms and factories. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 set up the first “vocational” education programs. Naturally, these programs focused on the types of tools that the students would likely find in modern manufacturing environments – single-purpose tools. Professional-grade multipurpose and combination tools continued to be made for and used by an older generation of craftsmen well into the 1930s, but they became scarcer and scarcer in factories as younger workers trained in the new vocational system joined the workforce.
Today, almost everyone who has been trained to work with his or her hands professionally has learned on single-purpose tools and consequently there is a cultural bias that embraces them. We prefer the familiar; find rationalizations to convince ourselves that the unfamiliar can’t be as good. This is why “brand loyalty” is so important to marketers of cars, phones, and laundry detergents.
However, tools are unlike all other commodities in one important respect. Tools – and I use that term to also include things like video cameras, paint brushes, and potter’s wheels -- are extensions of our imagination. We use them to create things of our own design that add beauty and utility to our lives and the lives of others. This is craftsmanship – or what craftsmanship ought to be. Your choice of tools is important, but not essential. To prove my point there are thousands of examples of good craftsmanship that have been built with both stand-alone tools and multipurpose tools. And some of the best-crafted pieces of woodworking ever made were created with a few dozen hand tools that the makers could pack into a single trunk. See
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/c ... tOd=1&vT=2 or
http://www.winterthur.org/pdfs/American ... ns-web.pdf or
http://www.artcomplex.org/shaker.html
Woodworkers and would-be woodworkers spend an enormous amount of energy arguing the merits of stand-alone versus multipurpose tools, and it boils down to much ado about nothing. In the end, your choice depends on your personal preferences and circumstances. And which way you swing is not an issue as long as you choose good, capable tools. I like working with this company because Shopsmith makes an entire system of good tools. Good tools make good craftsmanship easier. But they do not make good craftsmen.
With all good wishes,
Pat,