I'm really sorry I missed the beginning of this thread. I may as well offer this. I hope it doesn't anger anyone. In America, there are a lot of people returning to hand tools, after having used power tools, almost exclusively, for years. I am in that category. In middle school, in my home town, at age fourteen, all the boys took "shop class", while the girls took "home economics". We all learned to use hand tools. Shop Class was optional beyond that first year. If you took the class then, you learned to use power tools. A few years later, This Old House came along, followed by New Yankee Workshop. Thousands flocked to buy all the latest power tools. Meanwhile, Roy Underhill was quietly plodding along, doing his thing. Like me, as a lot of amateur woodworkers have gotten older, and all those power tools are sitting around unused, thoughts return to those early years, when hand tools were all that was available, or at least affordable. Now I find myself ignoring anything Norm Abrahms has on the internet, and instead, I read and watch everything with Roy Underhill and Paul Sellers. It's like returning to something fundamental, not only in my own childhood, but woodworking itself. As we "old newcomers" to working with hand tools, struggle to make up for the thirty years or so that we wasted chasing after power tools, it's easy to get caught up in trying to use all the right terminology. The first time I heard "tote" used to describe the rear handle on a plane, I thought it odd, but assumed it must be the old accepted term for it. Since a lot of American woodworking traditions are derived from British (English?) I always assumed that "tote" was from over there. Please be patient. I feel there are a lot more people like me out there. We're trying to learn. Thanks for all the discussion!
