Don Altman, 50, of South Bend Township has a passion for tools that reach back centuries.

It's not quite as obvious in his workshop of electric table saws, cuttings, sanders, joiners and drills, which Altman uses as owner of a kitchen and bath cabintry, millwork and furniture production business. It is more evident in a side room in his basement, which is home to a literal laundry list of rare and antique tools. Altman has tools from as far back as 1730 up to about the early 1900s in his antique collection.

"I take good care of them. I've disassembled them all, cleaned them, waxed and restored them as needed. They are in a very good state of repair," Altman said.

From broadaxes to bark spuds, to adzes and mast shavers for shipbuilding, to chisels, to cocking mallets, to flagging irons for giant felling saws, to his plentiful array of wooden-bodied planes, Altman has all his vintage collectibles meticulously catalogued.

"Oh, yes, they're all listed." Altman said. "These antique tools were used for furniture building, home building, cabinet making, all of those." The oldest documented tools, according to Altman, are those made in Great Britain.

"You can trace the age of tools like planes because the person who made them always stamped his name and the date they were made on them." Altman said. "A lot of people have done a lot of research, and there are books written about who made what when, and how many, and you can accurately pinpoint when a tool was made."

The characteristic stamp of ownership on items like wooden planes actually have made two of these kinds of tools the prizes of Altman's antique tool collection. Each was made by a man named Walter Lithgow, who Altman said was one of the earliest tool makers in the Pittsburgh area. "These planes were made between 1810 and 1813, which is very old for a Pennsylvania plane," Altman said. "There are only about a dozen of his planes known to exist...and two of them are here."

Altman's venture into this hobby began roughly ten years ago when his wife, Sylvia, suggested he attend some tool auctions as a means of winding down from his rigorous work schedule. "The first one I went to had some nice old woodworking tools and a nice tool chest. I ended up buying the tool chest that day and a number of his tools, and I kind of got the bug for it," said Altman, who's since purchased additional tool chests packed with accompanying tools.

He then began attending more auctions and meeting more people with like interests in finding antique tools, which led him to join a local club known as the Three Rivers Tool Collectors, as well as Ohio Tool Collectors, Potomoc Antique Tools & Industries Association, Inc. in Maryland and Mid-West Tool Collectors. "When these groups meet, they bring people together from everywhere, and they show, sell and buy excellent antique tools. It's a big thing," Altman said.

A niche of the antique tool world that Altman has centered on recently is coopering tools, which are used to make wooden barrels and buckets. "I think what I like about them is that they are a design of their own, exclusive to the coopering trade," Altman said. This tool group comprises an entire tabletop and four shelves on the adjacent wall in Altman's tool room.

They inclue the crocz, which cuts the groove in the barrel top that the lid fits into, the howel which helps bring the staves or planks to one level around the barrel edges; and the sun plane, which is rounded to cut the staves even around the barrel top.

The cresset he has is a cylindrical-shaped steel-frame object used to hold shavings accumulated from tapering the staves, which were then set ablaze and used to heat the partially completed barrel. Since the cooper worked alone most of the time, the cooper's brace in Altman's possession was designed to rest against the sternum.

"He would hold the wood part with his other hand and drill, and what he was drilling were the boards he was putting together to make the lid," said Altman, who also owns a cooper's bowcompass for marking diameters for barrel heads. "That's a scarce tool, also."

The lack of electrical tools dictated a much more intense brand of maual labor for early carpenters and most of the furniture and housewares were made primarily from softer pine and cherry woods. And, ironically, Altman pointed out that using modern-day tools to cut softer woods actually is not recommended. "They can gun up the machinery a lot," Altman said. As mass production of metal-bodied planes began to increase, the need for wooden-bodied planes began to diminish, despite what Altman said is their almost timeless usefulness based on the way each was made.

"You can find old planes that have been in a barn for maybe 75 years, and the top of that cutting iron is complely rusted, but the bottom of that iron is so fine that it's hardly rusted," Altman said. "Once the foundries got established, they could pour iron to make planes, and it was a more reliable product, not affectd by the weather except through rust, and it doesn't change dimension like wood does or give you wearing problems." "There's a lot of high-tech tools out there that certainly make it easier and better, quicker and safer."

A 1972 Elderton High School graduate, Altman credits a shop teacher named Richard Kaufman with teaching him a lot of what he applies to his craft today in his business and his hobby. "He did me a world of good and taught hundreds of other boys; he was an excellent educator." Altman said.

During that time, Altman first became acquainted with both modern day wood-working tools and those of the past. "They had a reasonable amount of what's here (in my shop), but more basic machinery. The saws, joiners, planers, shapers, those kind of tools, we ran all of them in school," Altman said.

Altman credits the research of author Eric Sloane in helping him properly categorize his tool collection.