was once told that black and decker went drastically down in quality when the colour turned orange, which seems to play out from my experience
Toolguyd's listing barely scratches the surface, but does show the alarming damage asset stripping for historic names is. He doesn't tell you which Bahco chisel or Nooitgedagt plane will have a blade by Eric Anton Berg. Generally the golden age of quality tools is 1930 to the late 50s. Looking at the OP, I would think the Barrus/Wolfcraft of the pre plastic era with metal clamping and less gimmicks would be more consistent than the horrendously priced Jessem etc, and why would anyone want to keep more than a couple of dowel sizes. I did find a Wolfcraft badged version of the metal Barrus Wolfcraft Dowelling Kit model 3750 Made In Germany Dowel Jig. | eBay
It's like a game of pacman, someone goes round and swallows up a lot of small companies and becomes big enough to draw the attention of a bigger player who then swallows them up. I can recall Amp being swallowed by Tyco who are now TE connectivity, but I reckon it is the customer who loses due to reduced competition.
I think cost is just a factor of todays expensive world, it only looks expensive because there are a lot of much cheaper goods on the market which highlight the price tag. You need to think that for many of these companies there is not an economy of scale, us woodworkers do not make up a huge market for suppliers to sell to and so cost will be higher. If you look at the engineering standards being delivered by the likes of Jessem, Dowelmax, Woodpeckers, Fc tools, Benchdogs and such then we are really fortunate to have such good products available if we choose to buy, but good quality engineering does not come cheap on a small scale.
Stanley/Black & Decker and the roots of the original Black & Decker can be traced from the founding to the present moment. Today, the company is huge, owning not only woodworking but extensive lawn & garden offerings (they bought MTD products, which owns most domestic lawn care names, such as Cub Cadet, White, etc.).
Oops, sorry about that, my only excuse is it was past my bedtime
I have no excuse, even having looked at it some while back and dismissed it before buying the Rutland ones and then have looked again and dismissed it again as not having the sizes but the way the data is presented is not obvious and so one of those things you can see, look at but not comprehend. If you are selling drill stops the most important and definative parameter has to be the size of the drill it fits and not the size of the grub screw that clamps it which is secondary information.
