How to find handtool information

People who know my contributions to various discussion groups will know that I'm considered quite a competent web-searcher. Here are the methods I use most often, and you can use them too.

Searching the web - using google.
The most basic way to find stuff on the web is to use a search engine, and the best search engine is google. Many of the following search ideas can be used with other search engines , although the exact syntax will vary
- Use phrases
  When searching you may get better results using phrases.
```
"router plane"
```
  is a more specific search than
```
router plane
```
  And similarly, "stanley plane" may well avoid getting pages and pages about Spitfires and Mustangs. It's worth trying the simpler form first though; it gives a wider range of results, and google's ranking may be good enough to put the stuff you want near the top. Use the phrase form if you're getting swamped with chaff.
- You can spell - but can they?
  You need to be careful of people's (and nation's) variable spelling; is it "gauge" or "gage"? It doesn't help if you know the right answer, the person placing the information to the web may not. In these circumstances google's "OR" (upper case is compulsory) command is your friend.
- Compounding the problem
  Similar to the spelling issue is the question of how a compound noun should be written. These are very common in tool names; things like rip saws, or paring chisels, or rounding planes, or gutter adzes, or even the humble bow saw. Or is that "bow-saw"; or perhaps "bowsaw"? Again, google's OR command can be used to treat all 3 options as synonyms, at least for the purposes of searching.
```
"bow saw" OR bow-saw OR bowsaw
```
- An iterative approach
  Often, one of the hardest things to find out is the right question to ask. So don't be afraid to type in a vague query, and manually scan a few pages (a fast link is helpful, obviously; disabling graphics in your browser can be helpful here). Even if you don't immediately find the information you're looking for, you may pick up some relevent (and hopefully specific) jargon; conversely you may find that many of the "miss" pages all share a keyword. In either case the information you glean as a result of your initial search can be used to make a second, more precise search.
  A while ago I was reading a Fine WoodWorking article about making measured drawings of classic furniture from photographs. This sounded interesting, and an ideal application for computer software. So I did a pretty vague search:
```
measurement photograph accurate
```
  The results weren't too bad, but browsing the first few sites told me something veryimportant. The technical name for this whole activity is "photogrammetry". Using my other favourite keyword when looking for basic information I searched for:
```
photogrammetry tutorial
```
  Lovely.
Archived discussions
In these archives of these are stored megabytes and megabytes of conversation between woodworking enthusiasts. By merely using these forums (as opposed to the internet as an undifferentiated whole) you know that the pages (posts) you find are at least woodworking related (most of the time!). IMHO there are 2 prime resources
- The Porch (the OLDTOOLS mailing list)
  If you don't know about this, you should, so go and read the FAQ
  Oh, you're back. Now, there's a partial, dreadful archive of of this at egroups, but the search engine sucks, and the listmoms turned off the feed recently. Due to some splendid work by various members of the Porch (which has the disproportionate representation of geeks common to most internet groups) there's a fully searchable archive programmed and hosted by Christopher Swingley. The search engine is MySql, which (sadly) doesn't support many of the techniques described earlier. You just get to feed it multiple keywords. Better things are promised (natch) for the next release (4.0).
- The Wreck (the rec.woodworking newsgroup)
  Not exactly handtool friendly all the time, but for sheer scale it takes some beating. Always worth a look, and easily searchable via google group search This uses the same conventions as "web" google, with a few extra, newsgroup specific options. The obvious one is to add the term "group:rec.woodworking" to your search. There is also (in common with web google) an advanced search page which makes the options more explicit.
Ebay
This is a great resource; I have yet to buy a tool from Ebay, but I browse it all the time. In this era of affordable digital cameras, most people put up pretty decent photographs of the items they're selling. It's in their own commercial best interests. The descriptions can be a bit dubious sometimes. You cannot trust words like "rare", or sometimes even the names. But measurements (this weighs 10 Lbs, is 14" long) are OK. The Ebay search engine is a bit unusual and cranky, but works. The Help page is OK, and has useful examples. A major limitation is that the completed auctions aren't held for long, and the search engine only works on the titles of completed auctions.
To use my synonym and phrase techniques, you need to be careful. Synonyms have to go in parentheses, and must notbe separated by spaces. On the other hand it does support wildcards, which is useful for zapping plurals. "plane*" is easier than "(plane,planes)" Sadly, wildcards don't appear to work in synonym phrase sets, so you can't do
```
("plow plane*","plough plane*")
```
you have to expand it all out as
```
("plow plane","plough plane","plow planes","plough planes")
```
Here's a fairly careful search I was running regularly a while back
```
(43,043,44,044,plow,plough,combination,dado,beading,grooving) (plane,planes) (record,marples)
```
Ebay is also a good way to find specialist dealers. If you find somebody selling an item of the type you're interested in, they may have a website, which may have links or a helpful FAQ. Chase the trail, use the web!
Martin J Donnelly
This guy has, over the last few years, bought and sold some of the nicest, mintest, rarest and generally drool worthy tools available. Mostly way beyond my pocket. He's also famous for his yearly catalogues, wherein everything is nicely photographed and described.
More usefully, his website is also full of nicely photographed and described tools, and he doesn't appear to delete stuff. This mean that his website is a remarkable tool reference. His website has it's own search engine, which is dreadful. A much better way to find stuff is to use another of google's features, the ability to restrict a search to domain's which satisfy a particular test. Just add the term "site:www.mjdtools.com" to the rest of your google search and voila! For example:
```
site:www.mjdtools.com "scrub plane"
```
(A little low end for MJD, I fear)
Archived Journals
There has been much interest in getting "dead tree" data scanned and libraries in general digitally accessible . I know of 3 major projects, and would welcome information on more (related to hand tools, of course).
(19 aug 2008)we now have google books which makes the other archives look ... less important

It is normal for these archives to have their own search interface, since their web pages are generated dynamically from the database, and are not (consequently) indexable by web engines.
The latter has no search engine, so I've manually made a directory to the index for each volumne
Link rot
One of the vices and virtues of the web is the rate of change. New material is added all the time, people update their own sites, and people change ISPs. The upside of this is that the searchable data get ever more wide ranging. The downside of is the dreaded out of date link. If you run into one of these, what can you do? The most obvious thing is to give up, and find another page. But if the link sounds sufficiently promising, there's a number of things you can try.
- Google
  If you found the page with google, your first approach is quite ludicrously easy; click on the Cached link that google presents on its search results page.
- URL bashing
  It may be useful to truncate the URL. Most people use some kind of hierachical file structure for their web pages. The consequence of this is URL's of the form:
```
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/harry/hobbies/tools/planes/stanley/smoother.html
```
  If this comes up empty, it may well be worth trying to knock off the components of the path, one at a time.
```
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/harry/hobbies/tools/planes/stanley/
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/harry/hobbies/tools/planes/
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/harry/hobbies/tools/
```
  And so on. In this case, it would appear that
```
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/harry
```
  is as short as you'd like to go; one would guess this is harry's home directory. If any of these attempts succeed, you may then be able to navigate back down to your desired information using the links on the higher level pages.
  If you're a Netscape user, and the URL that fails looks like this:
```
http://www.redbrick.ac.uk/students/idiot/pictures/my tool.jpg
```
  you've most likely got a page created with Microsoft's Front Page. This application generates URL's with spaces in them, which is outside the HTML spec. You may find it unsurprising that Microsofts's Internet Explorer has a compensating feature that accepts these invalid URL's. You may further find it interesting that Microsoft have been told about this problem in FrontPage for a long time, but have never "got round" to fixing it.
  Regardless of any conspiracy theories that may be hatching in your mind as you read this, all you have to do is edit the URL, replacing each space with %20, and you should be OK (unless, of course, the link is both invalid and outdated).
- Search again
  If your search engine gives an on screen summary of the page you cannot get to, you might try feeding a suitably distinctive phrase (phrases are good, remember) from the summary back to the search engine (or a different search engine). The text of the page may have been duplicated elsewhere on the web, or the creator of the page may have moved ISP's. In either case, a search may locate the new version or copy. The phrase should be at least three or four words long, in order to be suitably selective.
- Where's that file gone?
  By using google's "field" ability, you can search for the filename instead of the content; so if someone has moved a page within their site, or moved to a new ISP, this might be a helpful search:
```
allinurl:bailey.html
```
- Time Travel
  This is amazing. These people have been archiving the web. All of it. For a long time. They announced a publicly accessible gateway on Oct 24, 2001. You just type in your long defunct URL, and they try to find an archived version.
  This was recently used to resurrect the (long believed extinct) Jay Sutherland Stanley Plane Dating pages
  Wondrous.
But you don't have to listen to me
In a stunning piece of recursion, I did a web search for web search tutorials (told you it was my favourite keyword). If you don't like my techniques, try these ones:
- Teaching Library at the University of California at Berkeley
- recursion gone wild! A page of links to tutorials on searching.

back to home page

How to find handtool information

Searching the web - using google.

Archived discussions

Ebay

Martin J Donnelly

Archived Journals

Link rot

But you don't have to listen to me