Victorian blacksmith's quest to boost nation's woodwork toolmaking skills, to replace poor-quality imports

Peter Trott has always been fascinated with woodwork, and with that came an appreciation for the tools involved.

"There was something a bit magic for me in a really old tool, something that had been used for years and years and was obviously someone's favourite tool," the former film set dresser said.

When the long hours working on films became unsustainable with family life, Mr Trott fell back into his passion for woodworking.

"And from that, I started to realise the need for high-quality hand tools for crafts and trades in Australia," he said.

Now a blacksmith based in Kyneton, in Central Victoria, Mr Trott has turned his passion into a successful small business making metal-edged tools for woodworkers, carvers and furniture makers.

His customers come from all over Australia, as well as from countries including Sweden, the United States and United Kingdom.

"There is a surprisingly big demand just within Australia, but Australia has never really had a hand-tool-making industry, we always just imported all the tools from either the UK or the US," Mr Trott said.

"So as that's dried up, we've noticed here in Australia that we just don't have access to good quality tools."

'There's something exciting about it'

Mr Trott is one of the only people in Australia making hook knives, which are used for things like hollowing out the bowl in wooden spoons, but also makes other tools such as drawknives, Sloyd knives for whittling and carving, and double-handled scorps.

"I do love anything made by hand, and being able to support others to make by hand has been a real win for me," he said.

Mr Trott sources the Victorian blackwood he uses for the handles from a friend who is a sawyer.

"He goes out and selects timber for furniture makers and guitar makers and things like that, so I can support his business as well," he said.

As there wasn't much in the way of training available to teach Mr Trott how to make hand tools from scratch, he is mostly self-taught.

"It was learning off other tools that already existed, a lot of them being antique tools from the US which was leading the way in that industry 70 years ago," he said.

"Back in the 1950s, the industry even in America dropped off dramatically, and so unfortunately those bigger companies that were at the top of the pile had all shut down by the '70s and we've been left with a bit of a shortage of these hand tools."

Despite having "absolutely no experience" in blacksmithing, forging and working with metal to make his tools has become Mr Trott's favourite part of the process.

"I was always brought up just on timber," he said.

"So to stumble into working with metal, it did take me quite a few years of trial and error to start to be able to make tools that I felt were working efficiently.

"There's something exciting about it, you're moving metal, it's a real hand-eye sort of skill.

"It does take a lot of muscle memory to be able to move metal in the way you want, and there's something really nice about that, and enjoyable."

In 2024, Mr Trott will travel to the US on a Churchill scholarship to study under some of the best hand toolmakers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

He plans to share his knowledge with other toolmakers when he returns to Australia.

"It would be great to try and encourage toolmaking here, as an actual trade," he said.

Traditional tools for making traditional products

The importance of quality tools can't be overstated for chair maker Glen Rundell.

Mr Rundell, also Kyneton-based, said when he first started out the tools of his trade weren't readily available in Australia.

"If you were lucky you found a drawknife at a flea market, but it was cactus," he said.

"It had had a hard life, it was never understood and for the past few decades it hadn't been cared for, left in either a pile of dirt or on the back of grandad's bench … so you looked on the internet or on eBay in Europe or America."

Aside from an electronic lathe, all of Mr Rundell's tools are hand tools, some of them highly specific to making chairs.

"I don't use them for their ye olde appeal, I use them because they're still the most effective tools for the style of furniture that I make," he said.

"The mechanised options are loud, they're obnoxious, they are fraught with risk in that if something goes wrong, you don't just make a singular cut that's incorrect, they will tear out big chunks of timber and they don't teach you to work with the timber … it doesn't pay any attention to grain direction or understanding the medium.

"There's a good reason Pete Trott has a waitlist of customers wanting to buy his tools; they are the best and they're not a nicety, they're a necessity."

Mr Rundell also teaches chair making and says most of the people in his workshops have never handled these kinds of tools, but by the end of the classes they all understand implicitly their effectiveness and what a "wonderful experience" it is to use them.

"[Often In their jobs] they don't create anything, they make people well or they educate people but there's never a tangible thing at the end they can take pride in," he said.

"I think that's the reason why people are gravitating towards those sorts of experiences these days, because it's becoming a rarity."

He said having world class hand tools made in Australia was more cost effective and convenient than paying the postage on items from America.

"There'll be another cheap, poorly made replica that's available from a big box store, or dare I say Amazon, and it'll be completely inferior," he said.