W. Wells wrote:
I thought Powermatic was made in Tennessee.
"Charlie Self" wrote in message
oups.com...

W. Wells wrote:
I have been in the furniture mfg. business for 35 years and my advise to
anyone who does much woodworking is buy good old equipment rather than
the
new cheap stuff from China. Most of the new stuff is disposable and never
gives you good service compared to the old American made equipment.
Woodworking equipment is very inexpensive right now due to so many
American
companies going out of business. You can find good 220 equipment in
medium
weight sizes. A good measure to the quality is how much it weighs.

Furniture manufacturing and what most of us do are not quite the same
thing. Your advice is applicable, but not on too generalized a basis.
Taiwanese equipment has now reached a level of excellence that 10 or 15
years ago seemed unlikely. I've recently tested, among other overseas
produced tools, the new 8" Powermatic parallelogram jointer, which hits
a level of excellence that is equal to anything I've seen come out of
the U.S. at any time. It has an excellent price, too, because good
manufacturing is not as cheap as it used to be, no matter where you
are. IIRC, price is about $1600, a lot of money for a hobby shop, but
probably on a per pound basis, it's not that bad--it weighs almost 50%
more than any comparable 8" jointer. Longest tables in the group, too.

The demand for woodworking tools seems to be on an ever upward spiral,
too, and that creates problems with obtaining old woodworking
equipment, which means the price of much of that will do what the price
of rusty old (AKA as vintage or antique) cars has done in the past five
years...escalate and do it fast.


One shaper and one planer are made in LaVergne, TN. Everything else is
out of Taiwan or mainland China.