Popular Woodworking 2007-08 № 163, страница 48

A nice gift for yourself. An ivory plow plane made by Jim Leamy (jimleamyplanes.com) to commemorate Sindelar's 25th year in business.

Mostly plow planes. The rear-most room of Sindelar's collection. This room contains an impressive array of plow planes and a wooden lathe that Sindelar brought back from a trip to Italy.

And notjust a few tools. Hundreds and hundreds of vintage tools lined up on tables, shelves and a display case made from a harness for an elephant. Few of the tools are under glass. In addition to the tools, there are two comfortable chairs against one wall and under a panel of stained glass. And that is a good thing because I have to sit down.

This is j ust one of the five rooms filled with tools. Sindelar has so many tools ("Probably, tens of thousands," he guesses) that he keeps a significant number in storage. In one adj oining room there is a wheelbarrow filled with a stack of plow planes. In another room there's a wall of rare infill miter planes. In the front room - the biggest room - the walls are lined with vintage workbenches. Tools cover the benches, axes cover the walls, the floor is covered in boxes (that are filled with tools).

That this collection exists is remarkable. Getting to see it is something else. And what Sindelar has planned for it just might change your vacation plans someday. Sindelar is actively making plans to build a30,000-square-foot public museum and woodworking school that will show off his collection and teach woodworking skills.

He has three locations in mind - near Williamsburg, Va., Harrisburg, Pa., or perhaps in North Carolina. He sketched up plans for the building, which would look like a French castle, and turned them over to an architect to develop. He wants the museum open for business by 2010.

Opening a tool museum on this scale

sounds like an unlikely feat for anyone. But once you meet Sindelar and hear his story, you are unlikely to doubt that it could happen.

A Trained Farmer and A Block Plane Into the Drink

Sindelar, who is from that corner of Michigan near Chicago and Indiana, had a father who was a carpenter and contractor. Sindelar him-selfwas helping him set nails by age 5 and built his first apartment building as a teenager.

But it was farming that spoke to him. As a young man Sindelar leased a 350-acre produce farm and then went to college to study agricultural management. He graduated and immediately got approved for a loan for $400,000 to launch his own farm.

Cat scratch fever. One of the most sought-after saws is the Woodrow & McParlin panther saw. Most collectors are lucky to have one example. On the day we visited Sindelar, he had three.

The scraping snake. An unusual European ivory-handled plane. The plane shows signs of use (lots of hammer taps on the wedge), and its construction suggests it is a scraping plane.

That night, he thought, "That was too easy." He says he started running the numbers and concluded that if he had one bad year on the farm, he could lose everything. He eventually decided to follow in his dad's footsteps as a builder, though he still yearns to farm and will occasionally volunteer to plow the fields owned by local farmers just to get his hands dirty.

So Sindelar entered the building trade, and as a young man of about 21, he found himself in Florida building high-end residential homes and working under a French-Canadian carpenter who had a taste for good working tools.

One day the French-Canadian carpenter told Sindelar that it was time for him to start buying his own tools. So Sindelar purchased a new standard-angle Stanley block plane, the kind you'll find in tool buckets all over the country. He presented the plane to his boss for inspection one day on a job site.

"He studied it for five minutes," Sindelar says. "He never used it. He threw it into the Intercoastal Waterway and said, 'You have to start buying good tools and learn to take care of them.'"

Sindelar obeyed. From that point on, he tried to buy a good tool every week, a practice that continues to this day, though now his tastes run more to mint Holtzapffel miter planes than hardware-store tools. And he also takes great

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