Palladino

There is either more going on here than meets the eye or Lie-Nielsen is an incompetent business.

(1) I never have heard of a company that dropped a retailer because the partnership with the retailer created "too much demand" for the product. Who does Lie-Nielsen think it is kidding? Any competent businessman would either expand production by hiring skilled craftsmen to make more planes or, if he thought that doing that would reduce quality, would raise his prices. Lie-Nielsen's alternative of under-producing and then rationing by waiting reduces woodworker welfare. The company fails to meet demand and then allocates the restricted supply in a way that prevents the tools from going to those who value them most. Concurrently, the strategy minimizes Lie-Nielsen's profit. I find it very hard to believe that all this is really what is going on.

(2) Just how does Lie-Nielsen improve customer service by dramatically reducing the retail outlets for its products? I live in Raleigh, NC. There is a Woodcraft store a little less than 3 miles from my house. I shop there a lot and even bought a Lie-Nielsen plane there once. Great store, good service. One time I was visiting my son in Massachusetts, and he and I went to the Woburn Woodcraft store, where a salesman took a Lie-Nielsen plane out of the glass case and showed it to me. He took it apart to show me how it was made and explained what about it was superior to the most other planes. Great store, great service. Now, under Lie-Nielsen's new policy, the nearest outlet for Lie-Nielsen planes will be Highland Hardware in Atlanta, GA, a little more than 300 miles from my house. I have bought by mail from Highland for many years. Great store, great service - but there's no way in the world that I am going to drop in at Highland to look at a Lie-Nielsen plane. Just where is the improvement in service here? Is Lie-Nielsen really so dense as to think that essentially eliminating customer contact for the vast majority of customers somehow increases customer service? Again, I don't believe for a minute that that is what is really going on here.

Of course the first machine you get depends on what you want to do. However, for general wood working, I vote for the table saw. There are two big reasons. First, most of what you must do to convert lumber to components of a project is rip it to width and cut it to length. The table saw is tops at ripping and very good at cross cutting (beaten by the chop saw or miter saw). Second, the table saw is extremely versatile. It can cut boards to thickness provided their width is less than twice the maximum depth of cut of the saw. Fitted with a good miter guage, the table saw does a fine job of cutting miters. With its blade tilted, it will miter a board's thickness. It can cut tapers with a taper jig. With a molding head and set of molding cutters it will cut moldings. It is slower at that than a router table because it turns slower than a router, but it does the job. With a dado cutter it will cut dadoes. With a tenon jig it will cut tenons. Obviously it will cut grooves for a tongue and groove joint. If you make a sliding table, the saw can cut heavy boards or very long boards with ease. It can cut large pieces of plywood, with the maximum size depending on the size of the saw's table and the availability of infeed and outfeed rollers. You can make dedicated special sliding tables to cut odd angles repeatedly, such as when making pieces for a segmented bowl. You can make a simple jig to allow you to produce circular disks. The number of jigs one can make for the table saw are almost endless and allow you to do a great many things with one tool.

If Prof. Loeser doesn't like FineWoodworking, he doesn't have to read it. If he doesn't like the kind of projects that the readers of FineWoodworking produce, he is free to do something different. FineWoodworking in no way constrains Prof. Loeser or limits his audience. As a business, FineWoodworking is doing its job if it is maximizing its profit while doing nothing illegal. The fact that FineWoodworking has been economically successful tells us that it is doing its job correctly. I suspect that Prof. Loeser's real complaint is that a lot more people like the kind of stuff that appears in FineWoodworking than like his work. I suspect that's what he means by the field being too "narrow." That's just the usual combination of artists' unwillingness to face the verdict of the marketplace and the intellectual snobbery of many modern artists who display no creative ability but who loftily assure us ignoramuses that our failure to appreciate the greatness of their work merely illustrates our lack of taste and intellect. I don't buy it.