What makes a good tool?

               

“The use of imperfect or incomplete tools draws upon the imagination in developing the skills
to repair and to improvise”  The Craftsman, Richard Sennett

This essay is a brief exploration of how we assess quality in our tools, and what are the
foundations of that assessment.

To start, we can define two opposing viewpoints, as follows :

1. There are solid and objective measures of tool quality, and every tool can be ranked
on a scale of quality, from perfect to useless
2. There is no objective measure of tool quality, and every assessment is, however
rational and structured, ultimately based on a completely subjective assessment.

The remainder of the text examines some assumptions about tool quality, and how these
measure up against the opposing viewpoints outlined above.

Quality of tools vs. quality of work

It is often stated that ‘You can’t do good work with bad tools’. Generalising this statement a
little, we arrive at an equation between tool quality and work quality – so that bad tools lead
to bad work, and good tools lead to good work. This appears reasonable, but is easily
disproved.

It is evident that bad work can be done with good tools. In the extreme case, giving a finely-
tuned plane to a toddler will not result in a smooth board. More generally, the tool will only
produce work to a quality limited by the skills of the person using it. Hence, it is possible to
do bad work with good tools.

The converse (good work with bad tools) is more difficult to prove, though there is no
general difficulty in conceiving of a situation where the skill of the user makes it work. As an
example, I would mention an occasion where I witnessed an adult deer being completely
butchered in a few minutes, using a sharp fragment of flint (Amberley Museum, 2010). This
was not a good tool by normal standards, or even a tool at all in the opinion of most people
who have never used stone implements. However, the work was done, and done well.

Given the above, it would appear that there is no necessary connection between the quality
of the tool and the quality of the work, although such an association may sometimes exist.

The standard response to this disproof would be to say that, yes, the tool was poor, but the
user was very skilled; or even that, in the skilled user’s hands, the tool was adequate. This
immediately raises an issue; how do we know whether a tool is good, when the quality of
the work depends so much on the skill of the user?

The quality of the tool doesn’t necessarily depend on the price or the amount of polished
brass included in the construction. There is a strain of tool fetishism common amongst craft
workers, in which a sort of mystic glow surrounds their implement of choice, whether it be a
Lie Nielsen plane, a ‘blue paper’ chisel, or a Grunsfors axe.
This may be related to the Excalibur myth (something which new entrants to a craft appear
to be particularly susceptible to) in which the mere possession of an expensive new tool will
guarantee good results. This is not generally the case.

The only sure way to be determine the comparative quality of a group of tools would be to
buy all of them, and use them all under similar conditions. This may be a little expensive for
most people. However, in lieu of this, it should be possible to develop some objective
measures of tool quality. I propose a few measures below which may be adapted to
different tool types.

Possible measures of tool quality

a. Stability - the tool should not change state on its own

b. Robustness - it should hold up under the strain of normal or abnormal use without
significant damage

c. Maintainability - maintenance (putting the tool into good working order) should be
easy, rapid and infrequent

d. Efficiency - the tool should produce the required result with a minimum of mental
and physical effort (or energy input for a powered tool).

e. General workmanship and precision – which will contribute to the other factors
mentioned above but may also show in the finish and appearance of the tool

Stability - we expect planes to stay flat, saws to keep their set, and squares to keep the
correct angle. In practice this means that we would expect good quality metal and lots of it -
there is far more steel in a plane body, or a set-square, than is actually required to sustain
the various stresses placed on it. This follows J.E. Gordon’s dictum regarding construction in
wood, in that what matters is not absolute strength, but stiffness under load. (Ref : The New
Science of Strong Materials, 1968)  For these tools, the excess of material ensures that the
tool will not be flexible in areas where this would be inappropriate. For wooden tools, we
expect fine-grained and well-seasoned timber, suitably reinforced where required, with no
obvious knots, cross grain or blemishes.

Robustness - this covers much of the same ground as Stability - the tool should not change
in an unexpected way, under the stress of use. Again, we expect to see a good amount, of
good quality material, used in the construction of the tool.

Maintainability - very few tools can be used without damage or degradation throughout
their entire life - one possible exception might be mallets used for working with chisels, or
jewellers’s screwdrivers. A standard hammer will spread out eventually and require a trip to
the blacksmith’s for re-forging. Pickaxes used in mining or navigation works were reforged
on a daily basis in order to keep their tips sharp enough for use. Plane blades used on the
harder timbers may need resharpening frequently.  

Given this, it is important that the tool should be set up correctly in the first place and
require as little effort as possible, as infrequently as possible, to keep it in that state. Again,
the quality of the material used will affect the rate at which it degrades; for striking or
cutting surfaces we expect high quality steel that will keep a face or edge as required.
However, this is also an issue of design quality and manufacturing quality.

Efficiency - The tool should not be designed in such a way as to require undue effort to use.
Ideally the manufacturer should have enough experience of making these to avoid major
pitfalls, which militates in favour of long-established firms or those making tools to older
patterns. As in software, new designs of tool can be buggy until the various problems have
been worked out.

General workmanship and precision – the best design is of no use if it cannot be

manufactured to the required degree of precision. The tool should be ready, or nearly ready,
for use. It helps to attract the user if the tool looks a little different from others of its type,
but most strongly functional items will look good without too much decoration. Note that
the various factors mentioned above do not mention cost, although this may correlate well
with quality of materials and general workmanship.

Looking at our flint knife again - it was stable enough. It was robust, if used for cutting soft
material. It was easily maintained (or thrown away and reproduced with another piece of
stone). It was efficient in the right hands. And lastly, it was well enough made, in the
circumstances, to do the job that it was designed to do. Accordingly, it is possible to say that
the piece of flint was a good tool.

From the above, it is clear that some aspects of the assessment support the ‘objective’
viewpoint – it is possible to define some quality factors and these give some understanding
of design decisions. However, it is also clear that the perceived quality of any tool must
depend on the requirements that it will be matched against, and that these requirements
are the only fixed thing against which anything can be judged. We can therefore state that
the fully ‘objective’ viewpoint is not true.

Quality of work vs. Requirements

As mentioned above, the only fixed point against which anything can be judged is the
requirement for the final state of the object being worked on. There are generally many
ways to get to any final object, and hence there are no fixed sets of intermediate
requirements which would apply to the tools and methods used.

Consider a piece of woodwork, to be conducted by someone skilled enough to complete all

aspects of the task on their own. Part of the training and experience that they have
accumulated will result in them being able to use a range of woodworking tools, and more
importantly, being able to break an overall task down into a set of sub-tasks, each of which
can be accomplished using the tools which are already familiar.

In this case it is possible to establish that a set of good tools exists because (in addition to
the various factors outlined above) they are capable of performing the functions required
for the various sub-tasks that we have identified.

Now, consider the case where some of the sub-tasks cannot be accomplished using an
existing tool. In this case, a new tool must be created, or an old tool adapted, so as to
perform the sub-task required.
How is it possible to arrive at an assessment of the quality of this new tool? It may be for
temporary use only, in which case the usual quality factors do not apply. The only way to
judge the quality of this tool is to ask – how well does it fit the requirement?

This is, of course, a much more general question, and is applicable to all tools, however
made or used. Ultimately, their value is only measured by how well they can be used to get
to the final product.

What is the requirement?

Determining the requirements for a project can often be the most difficult and expensive
part. For large engineering projects, getting an agreed set of requirements documented and
signed off can take years and the efforts of hundreds of people – and this is after the tender
has been accepted and the basic structure of the project has been agreed.

Woodwork generally doesn’t suffer from this problem to the same extent, but even for the
simpler items the requirements can take days or weeks to evolve, and may continue to
evolve during the construction process, right up to the finish. This is one of the reasons why
prototypes are built – not to find flaws in the design as such, but to clarify the project
requirements.

To revert to the earlier example of the stone knife – what were the requirements here?
In addition to the main requirement (cutting meat) there was a subsidiary requirement – to
demonstrate Stone Age technology by means of a flint knife, used in a realistic manner, to a
group of people. Knowing this, the overall requirements for the knife are much clearer and it
is obvious that no other tool would have served as well.

More generally, work on refining and reducing the requirement can lead to significant
savings in effort and other costs, and also makes it much easier to decide on what tools
should actually be used, or whether new ones need to be invented.

Considering this, it is evident that the purely ‘subjective’ viewpoint outlined above cannot be
true either, since there is at least one objective requirement that must be met and hence at
least one objective measure of value. Neither of the clashing viewpoints outlined at the
beginning of this essay are therefore true.

To resolve this, we can specify a hierarchy of requirements and values, as follows :

1. A requirement for an object is defined

2. The sub-tasks required to get to this object are defined, down to the
minimum required
3. The tools and processes required to perform the sub-tasks are defined
4. On a comparative basis, we can say that one tool performs a sub-task better
than another (we have comparative value)
5. For tools which perform equally well, we have a set of defined factors
(stability, robustness etc) which can be used to distinguish between them

So, in this hierarchy, the top-performing tool is that which meets the largest number of
requirements (such as the stone knife), once all of the requirements are considered.

For a particular requirement, we can determine which is the better tool.

And, for a requirement which is equally well fulfilled by two tools, there are reasonably
objective factors which determine which of the tools is the better.

Summary

So, to the reader that has made it this far – congratulations.

In this essay, we put forward opposing viewpoints with regard to the assessment of tool
quality, and show that neither is correct.

Some comments on the relationship between good and bad tools are added, demonstrating
that there is no necessary correlation between ‘good’ tools and ‘good’ work, or vice versa.

Some factors contributing to tool quality are identified, and it is shown that these would
tend to be in agreement with informal assessments of tool quality.

We then arrive at a value hierarchy, in which it is explained that the first and most important
factor to consider is whether the requirements for a project are met. Following this, at a
secondary level, we can compare the effectiveness of two tools, and only at a tertiary level
can we use ‘objective’ assessments of tool quality based on construction, etc.

Ultimately, the most important part of the whole tool equation appears to be the intentions
and skill of the user, because until the user has defined precisely what he is doing, there is
no way of knowing what type or quality of tool will be required.