One of the charms of vintage tool world on the Internet is that many of the diehard sites you come across feel rather, ahem, vintage themselves, as if they were created in the earliest days of dial-up, Netscape and AOL. Rather than detract from the experience, though, this vibe seems to complement it. One such site is Ashby, Massachussetts-based Superior Works, the handiwork of a collector named Patrick Leach which, as far as we can tell, first appeared in cyberspace in 1998. Leach not only makes a small number of his own specialty tools (a layout knife and a smoothing plane among them) but also sells a range of vintage items that he sends out in a monthly email. The October edition went out yesterday and included dozens of interesting pieces, ranging in price from $30 for a 2 3/8″ Gensco plane iron from Sweden to $2,750 for the featured sale of the month, a Jim Leamy center wheel plough plane. According to the email, all kinds of buyers are welcome except, Leach says, “the kind of person who puts a straightedge to the sole of a #40 to check it for flatness or who tosses a plane on a scale to weight it against what it states in the Stanley catalogs.” Consider yourself warned!
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