I found myself at a buddy’s place over the weekend, pulled there by some vague notion of watching a man wrestle with history. He’s deep into restoring a house from the early 1900s, and for the last several weeks he’s been rebuilding solid mahogany doors by hand. That sounded like the kind of madness worth witnessing up close.
The doors were something, sure. But the real story was the saw sitting on his workbench like a small, beautiful artifact from a better civilization. Tagged as a Guildtool 4-A, though the cognoscenti know it as the Porter Cable A4 trim saw. All cast aluminum body, worm drive, takes a 4.5” blade, and produces a genuinely obscene amount of torque for something you can hold in one hand. They started building these things in 1938 and kept at it until sometime in the 1950s, when apparently someone in a boardroom decided the world didn’t need good tools anymore.
I need one. This is not a casual want. This is a biological imperative. The thing makes savage power inside a package so small and manageable it borders on some kind of cruel joke played on every other tool in the shop. It was designed for trim work and it does trim work the way a scalpel does surgery. My buddy was shaving an eighth of an inch off a one and three-quarter inch mahogany door, a job that would have had me sweating through my shirt and second-guessing every decision I’d ever made. With the A4, it registered about as dramatic as slicing through three-quarter inch plywood on a Tuesday afternoon. The fact that they stopped making these things is the kind of institutional stupidity that keeps me up at night.
So the hunt is on. Get after it yourself. These things are out there, hiding in estate sales and dusty garages, waiting for someone with enough sense to recognize what they’ve stumbled onto.
