Links to Galoot-like Web sites
by George Langford
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Links & Abstracts
To see the old links as written way back when, click on this link.
The following URL's were gleaned on December 7, 2003, by scanning my entire Bookmark file and then, in January 2016, scouring the WayBack Machine for links to the lost sites. Those are the ones where the destinations don't match the text you see here. If the abstracts seem incomplete, that's because I decided to publish them sooner rather than later. These sites are too interesting to be simply rendered like common soap.
KomPozer can't handle very large tables, so this is Page 2.  Go back to Page 1. Page 3; Page 4; Page 5; Page 6; Page 7.
Jim Barker's Slippery Slope webpage, including a not-soon-to-be-repeated story about bargaining for way more tools at one time than most of us have never tried or even come close to succeeding, a nice bit about the Rogers Mitre Planer, and a useful Cross Reference of Planes Between Manufacturers.
While not as huge as the auto flea market that I attended about twenty years ago that covered several square miles, the Brimfield multi-field antique flea market is a big affair indeed. The 2016 dates are May 10-15,  July 12-17, and September 6-11. The best eyelevel descriptions of the looting have been written by Sandy Moss; they are must reading for the serious oldtool collector, as each of the twenty-one different fields is operated independently and by its own rules.
The USDA's Forest Products Laboratory, where this 2005 webpage listing the FPL publications is handy.
The University of Sheffield, UK, maintains the Hawley Collection of cutlery. The Hawley Project also put on exhibitions every now & then.
Before he became famous on geocities after 1999, Tom price set  up a short webpage showing his well made workbench and revealed an addiction to old tools ...
An archive of less frequent questions asked in rec.crafts.metalworking (since gone entirely to seed, unfortunately), preserved for all time by Jim Kirkpatrick in 2011. Included are a selection of questions on heat treating of metals, metalworking & machinery museums, Internet resources on metalworking, a list of then-current vendors, stuff to think about when buying "modern" machinery, metalworking organizations, actually getting round holes when drilling, dealing with mail-order suppliers, Fortran programs to get arbitrary thread pitches on a lathe, BASIC programs (with handy asides) to facilitate the winding of springs, among other wide-ranging topics.
Starting from a section devoted to the famous Emmert vise, this site boasts the interesting prerunner of a forum, dubbed by its author as the guestbook.
Dave Ficken's marvelous selection of staid advice, from a humorous In Praise of Klunkers, to a couple of how-to-buy-a-used-machine's for a lathe and for a milling machine. Dave closes the webpage with a plug for the annual Model Engineering Show. BTW, I bought my own klunker, a thoroughly used South Bend lathe from my alma mater in 1960 for forty bucks. Generations of students had used it for various metallurgy projects, and they were extremely careful not to injure their fingers when unscrewing the lathe's two very heavy chucks. The resulting dings in the ways next to the headstock and the saddle-shaped depression in the ways from nearly 100% chucking work have never deterred me from getting accurate results. I did have to realign the tailstock, though, after forty five years of drilling.
John Swensen's 1996 treatise on the classical  method of making a triplicate set of identically and geometrically perfectly straight straightedge gages.
John goes on to a series of pages on informative techniques and a section of Amazon.com links to useful printed resources.
http://www.trindersfinetools.co.uk/nguide.htm
A Guide to Norris Planes.
http://www.lathe.com/
The Lathe Section of the Logan Acuator Company. You may experience sticker shock here, but it's a lot of work to make or find parts for an old lathe.
Specializing in Disston saws ... with a museum of the very best, a library of all sorts of saws and sawing, the latest site news, and saws for sale (note: read carefully before exiting as "new" in this webpage's context means newly available antique saws made long, long ago by Disston & Sons). Disston has been reincarnated as Disston Precision, making a variety of superbly high quality plate steel products for thoroughly modern uses. I have watched a PCN Tour of the Disston Precision works aired on the Pennsylvania Cable Network.
A.K.A. Akbar 'n' Jeff's Tool Hut, Tom Bruce presents an exceptionally wide range of old tools, all in one giant list, thankfully navigable
with internal links, nicely described, but without any pictures, not even on the original 2005 webpage.
Bob Kaune's Internet old tools store. Mostly Stanley Planes, especially the Bedrock Types, other Stanley Stuff, and then Chisels and Saws.
The St. James Bay Tool Company makes spiffy infill wood planes in Mesa, Arizona, USA., shown on one great big page with navigating links.
Tony Seo's Olde River Hard Goods store ca. 2004, selling candles & their accoutrements, black powder paraphernalia,
tools for working leather, various woodworking tools, and even some small specialty planes made by AMT.
Prepared by the late William Harris, emeritus professor at Middlebury College, prepared this instructive page for folks just getting started in working wood with hand tools. Incidentally there is a list of tools for sale with interesting annotations and descriptions. There is still a memorial page at the college website, with the same hand-tool essays preserved, including a fascinating verbal, non-pictorial description of how to make bookshelves that only a Humanities professor would create, and a wonderful history of his personal experience with the Internet, starting in 1987, about the same time that I started ...
Tony Griffiths, known around the world as Tony Lathes, has so many catalogs, descriptions, and images of metalworking machine tools here that you might be forgiven for failing to notice that he is also a tool dealer and is still making a living while gathering and indexing this voluminous data. At one time he had to open only part of this database at a time, alternating back & forth, but nowadays digital storage is so cheap that the authorities can gobble up everything from the Internet w/o anyone hardly noticing. Tony even includes some hand-made, one-off machines, such as this lathe, and even a lathe made with concrete as the stiffening element ... that was used during WWII in great numbers.
Stan Faullin's webpage, including reproduction knobs for the Stanley No.45 combination plane, and lots of photographs of other combination planes
made by Stanley, Sargent, and Siegley; ugly planes, and a nice section on the construction of his large beech workbench.
Comprehensive guide to USA flea markets as of 2005, i.e. before the Great Recession ...
Ken & Mary Greenberg's website ca. 2002 with stuff for sale and wanted, a nice section on the Bay Area Galoots,
another section on a wide variety of hand tools for woodworking, all nicely arranged far too orderly, and a number of furniture-making projects.
Tom Price's AOL page on eggbeater drills, ca. 1998, about the time we first met for Saturday Morning at the Forge,
where Todd Hughes made a hewing hatchet right before our very eyes.
For reasons unknown to me, the US Patent & Trademark Office once presented the digital images of patents obtained on their patent search page in a .TIFF format which most S/W didn't understand, except for AlternaTiff, which you can obtain gratis from this site. Today (2016) the images are in .PDF format, which is readily accessible on all computer platforms.
Richard Van Vleck's already-sold New Rogers treadle-operated scroll saw, part of his extensive online catalog.
A lot of the stuff in his barn has been sold, but the excellent pictures remain.
Martin J. Donnelley's Cumulative Listing of All Tool Lists prior to February 23, 2012. Alas, his robots file prevents viewing of the associated tool images.
Scroll down to see the For Sale page ca. 2004 for heavy duty blacksmith items, a blacksmiths' forum called The Junkyard, an indexed page for source material called the Black Pages, a long list of links to blacksmith sites called The Boneyard, and a nice section on Blacksmithing Techniques.
Known to some as the Potomac Antique Tools and Industries Association, and known to most Galoots for its annual Spring Auction, held in Damascus, Maryland, a region seemingly devoid of tool collectors. I know this because for two years running about ten years ago, I stumbled into the dealer show and picked up a mint Stanley No.810 brace for five bucks each time, at an hour (ca.1 PM) by which such a tool would have been long gone. The real draw at this auction is not the auction itself but the outdoor tailgating and the indoor dealer sale, both of which dwarf the auction itself.
Website of the Early American Industries Association, which publishes the extraordinarily comprehensive Directory of American Toolmakers on CD, which the late Bob Nelson typed into an IBM O27 car reader all by himself. There is also a Subject Index to articles published in their quarterly Chronicle of the association and an extensive list of links to resources.
Martin's Gen'L Store Museum as it looked in 2003, especially the page, Historical information about Millburn.
http://cmcardle.net/galoots/
Extended discussion from the odTools List regarding books on hand tools,
starting with the Directory of American Toolmakers, edited by the late bob Nelson.
http://www.rosewoodandbrass.com/
July 2007 version of Larry Poffenberger's former rustytools website,
filled with antique tools for sale, personal projects, pictures of completed projects, links to other Old Tool sites, and wisdom.
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/FPLGTR/fplgtr113/fplgtr113.htm
Former description of the USDA's Wood Handbook,
now, on the WayBack Machine, a series of PDF files of the various chapters, each of which is downloadable.
http://www.antiquetools.co.uk/
Tony Murland's Museum of Antique Tools, also the English equivalent of a Brown's Auction or MJDTools.com,
with a timely listing of the upcoming auction, also with tools for sale, tool articles, and links to other old tools resources.

Jeff Youngsstrom's woodworking page, with details (in 2002-2005) about his shop, his  finished workbench project,
tool inventory in situ, some other completed projects, and a list of links to other woodworking websites.
Barry Young's Amateur Machining webpage, with a short bio, then interesting pages on the construction of cameras
and plans for eventually doing some woodworking.

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