Besides a small handful of people making ultra-luxury goods or doing historical preservation (which a sort of luxury itself), no one is making a living using tools from LIe-Nielson, Woodpeckers, etc. They're selling them to hobbyists. (Yes, there are professionals who use these tools. But that's because the hobbyests support the existence of the makers. If a trim carpenter couldn't buy a lie nielson router plane, he'd do without, use a vintage one, or use a power tool.) The entire fancy wood working tool market is for three basic things: 0) tools that are fancy because they can be; 1) tools that are supposed to save you time, but don't really 2) things to adapt an existing tool (usually a router or tablesaw) into some other tool. (Many fit into more than one category.) A commercial shop isn't going to use a router sled to flatten a cutting board, they're feeding it through a large sander.
When stanley were making all 4000 different models of plane they seem to have made, they were selling them to working professionals. No one bought a #248 because they were a hobbyist weather stripping installer, they bought it because they were joiner of some sort, and needed to install weatherstripping. Now, they use a router, or it's done in a factory with a CNC mill. The same is true for the rest of the catalog; once machines did the work, the need for hand tools greatly diminished, and for what little did get done by hand, substitutes were acceptable. if you need to install a door's worth of weatherstripping with handtools (for whatever reason), are you going to spend a day's pay on a special tool, or are you going to take a couple extra hours and do it with a handsaw, chisels and sandpaper?
Where tools are used to make money, there are lots of specialized variations. Look at a cutting tool catalog. How many different carbide insert cutters are there? Many of them exist to do one kind of cut on one kind of material, but they sell them because people make those cuts on that material, and the results (cut quality, tool life, speed, etc) are worth it to the people who buy them.
Tom Lie-Nielsen if I’m not mistaken, started out working at Garrett Wade Co in NYC, back when Garrett Wade was one of the catalog companies, (and at the time actual retail stores), still selling high quality or decent quality woodworking tools yo craftsmen who needed quality hand tools.
Lie Nielsen, decided to try to manufacture a reproduction of a Stanley beading tool, because originals had become collectors items, and were hard to come by on the used market, and this was before eBay or Etsy were a thing.
The beading tool must have sold well, because Lie Nielsen has since started manufacturing a huge number of other tool models, most based on historic designs.
The tools are obviously sold to hobbyists, but also to woodworkers doing professional reproduction work, who need quality hand tools that can be made to work well.
Professional woodworkers who do very high end work do exist, and dome earn fairly decent paychecks, but others probably just earn whatever the average somewhat skilled laborer makes.
As for Garrett Wade, they still sell woodworking tools, but have moved significantly over to other high end goods, as other woodworking supply catalogs rook over the market, which includes Lee Valley, who was acquainted enough with Garrett Wade decades ago that the catalog numbering systems share the same system.
Garrett Wade may have seemed like a “Hobbyist” woodworking supply, but I knew professional woodworkers doing high end custom work that bought their tools from Garrett Wade, and Garrett Wade tried to supply the specialty supplies needed by those woodworkers, similar to the way local “Industrial” hardware stores used to.
The Stanley planes Garrett Wade carried two to three decades ago, were the top of the line at the time Stanley planes, and those were also sold thru actual industrial tool stores, which I know, because I used to shop at a local industrial hardware store that had a case of the planes.
Woodcraft seems like a “hobby” woodworking store, and to some people it is.
I have also seen professional woodworkers buying their Festool tools from Woodcraft, and possibly other tooling.
Arguably, Festool, could be considered a “hobbyist” brand, because of who buys the tools.
Festool, especially back when they were called “Festo” definitely was not a “hobbyist” tool brand, or intended to be so. All the weird “nicknacks” that Festool manufactures seem like the kind of things “hobbyist” tool manufacturers might make.
Simply using the above as a criteria would make Snap-On a hobbyist tool manufacturer.
How many actual auto mechanics for instance are purchasing one of the Snap-On master sets?
b2b.snapon.com
too hard to fix w gloves on
