Popular Woodworking 2007-08 № 163, страница 49

Fresh from the forest. A French marking hatchet with a well-patinated leather sheath. Sindelar says this example is unusual in that the owners initials were still on the poll - those were usually ground off when the owner died.

pride in tending to his collection. Every evening after finishing work at his business, Sindelar Fine Woodworking Co., he'll gently clean a tool or two in his collection.

His dayj ob involves woodworking, though not the kind practiced by the tools he collects. Sindelar Fine Woodworking is a modern commercial cabinetshop filled with power equipment and a half-dozen employees. The company tacklesjobs that range from outfitting high-end horse trailers, to remodeling the interiors of two state capitol buildings in Michigan and Ohio, to supplying wooden fittings to Georgie Boy RVs in neighboring Elkhart, Ind.

When you walk in the front door of the shop

Just hold on to the neck and go. An early adze with an unusual hand-carved handle showing a horse and rider.

you're between the company's spray booth and the sanding area. The machining area spreads out before you; a warehouse beyond that is stacked to the ceiling with bunks of lumber. Sindelar's office doesn't even offer many clues as to his tool-collecting passion - there are piles of paperwork, shelves of trade catalogs and modern office furniture. But once you pass through the back door of the office, everything changes. The hum of the machinery disappears and it's just rooms and rooms of tools.

This tool cache hidden in the back rooms of an industrial park is an apt metaphor for Sindelar's life as a collector. Though he has been a collector of tools for many years, few people knew of him until about eight years ago. Sindelar tried to keep a low profile in the collector

And in this tool chest... Tool chests line the walls of the rooms housing Sindelar's collection, and all of them brim with tools.

world as he quietly fed the back rooms of his business with vintage tools.

That introverted approach - common among collectors - all changed when Sinde-lar met Roger Phillips, a long-time collector in La Jolla, Calif. Phillips also came up in the trades - his woodworking enterprise had a reputation for outfitting the interiors of banks, corporate offices and casinos. Phillips had been collecting since 1945, and when Sindelar saw his collection, he says he could think only one thing: "Wow. I want this."

With Phillips's guidance, Sindelar kicked his collection into high gear. He went from buying $100 tools to $10,000 tools. He sold his collection of Stanley tools and began buying one-of-a-kind tools in Europe.

"It's an obsession," he says. "I need to get into an AA program."

When other tool collectors go to Europe, they have secret spots to hunt for old tools that they share with no one. But when Sindelar told Phillips he was going to Europe, Phillips handed him a list of all his favorite haunts.

"Roger is just so open about everything," Sindelar says. "It really changed my life."

He also took a cue from Phillips when he decided to get involved with other tool collectors and open his collection for inspection. In the process, Sindelar has also developed a reputation as a collector who likes unusual tools with an artistic flair. Fellow collectors pull him aside during auctions and say, "Hey, I've got something you have to see."

And as a result, Sindelar's collection has evolved into something that is filled with some of the most recognizable vintage tools that have appeared in recent books on tool collecting, plus newly made tools, such as a fleet of plow planes made by Jim Leamy, and infill planes made by Bill Carter and Wayne Anderson.

A lot of vintage tools have tall tales behind them - antique collecting is like that - but Sin-

58 ■ Popular Woodworking August 2007