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foot-operated shaving horse, based on an original model. He calls it "the potter's wheel of the woodworker.
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Jim Linthicum of New Market, Md., felt so stressed out at work 10 years ago that his wife, Kara, suggested he take up a hobby. He chose woodworking and soon found himself collecting old wood working tools and tool literature, too.
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As a child, Jim said, he spent many hours on his grandparents' dairy farms, learning how to make hay, plant tobacco and feed the animals. Doing those things, he gained an understanding of how the older generation used hand tools.
Later, he trained to be an industrial arts teacher and then switched to real estate, which was what he was doing when he took up woodworking.
'I started working with green wood and old tools,' he said. 'I like this type of woodworking. It's the way this country was settled in the 1700s and 1800s. I like to work wood the way they did back then.'
He's not particularly interested in the exact chronology of when a tool was invented. Rather, he is fascinated with how a tool first was used and how he might replicate that use.
When Jim started looking for the old tools, though, he couldn't find them. 'They were only available at antique shops, farm auctions or specialized auctions of antique tools,' he recalled. 'One of my resources was Eric Sloane's book, Museum of Early American Tools. He has the best drawings and insight into these tools and how they were used.
'I also watched Roy Underbill's TV program, 'The Woodwright's Shop,' and started to figure out the market to buy the tools.'
Now, he goes to 10 to 15 auctions a year, preferring to buy in per son rather than, for example, on the Internet in order to correctly judge quality.
'Collecting has become a big part of this even though it's not my goal,' Jim said. 'The collecting takes more time than the work, which is a struggle as I'm not retired.'
Jim's collection includes chisels, gouges, long and short planes, molding planes, scrapers, saws, augers and reamers. The tools come in a variety of sizes and are mostly made for specialized functions.
He also has a post ax, used for splitting rail fence posts, and a heavy auger, used for making the holes in the posts to hold the rails. Both tools are about 150 years old and are of a style that traces back at least 300 years in U.S. history.
One of Jim's favorite tools is the froe, a wood-splitting tool that comes in many sizes. He said it was one of the only tools that hadn't been replaced by something more modern.
Large froes were used to make shingles, medium-sized froes were used to make barrels and buckets, and small ones, wooden baskets.