Weekend Woodworkers
Turn To High-End Tools

By KEN BENSINGER
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal o­nline

Tony Pearson loves power tools. And that's the problem: The 40 or so hand-held and bench-top tools he had acquired, polished and admired were filling his 2 1/2-car garage beyond capacity. So he bought a new house.

"I moved to build a 1,000-square-foot shop," says Mr. Pearson, a 59-year-old stockbroker in Tarzana, Calif. Not satisfied with the Black & Decker and Craftsman power tools found in most suburban garages, Mr. Pearson turned to professional-grade tools like Porter-Cable, Makita and Milwaukee -- names previously known best by contractors, plumbers and electricians. Now he has a collection worth, by his estimate, more than $45,000. "I have a love affair with my tools," he says. "I don't even let my wife use them."

Weekend woodworkers have discovered high-priced, industrial-grade tools. It started a few years ago when mass retailers such as Atlanta-based Home Depot Inc. began stocking professional tools in an effort to lure contractors away from lumber yards. Then overeager do-it-yourselfers and status-conscious yuppies started snapping them up.

Never mind that most people have no use for the kind of horsepower they're buying. "DeWalt sells you an 18-volt cordless drill. . . . It will break your wrist with that torque," says Greg Wessling, a senior vice president at Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, the chain based in North Wilkesboro, N.C. (DeWalt Vice President John Schiech responds: "All power tools require a certain level of performance to do their job and must be used safely.")

"People are venturing into tools they were never involved in before," says Jerry Cozzo, a Home Depot salesman in Brooklyn, N.Y. Indeed, sales of power tools shot to $5.82 billion last year from $2.95 billion a decade earlier, according to Freedonia Group Inc., a Cleveland marketing-research firm. Dollar-sales growth during that period was more than 6% annually, while prices remained constant; meanwhile, industry insiders say, the number of units sold increased at a slower 3%. Translation: People are buying more expensive tools.

The premium consumers pay to upgrade is considerable -- the latest professional cordless drills, for example, can cost close to $300, while basic drills start at $25 -- raising the eyebrows of cynics who doubt whether amateurs need such stuff. But industrial tool vendors can't keep up with retailers' orders, home centers say they are now selling more professional than consumer-grade tools, and former o­ne-brand monoliths such as Sears Roebuck & Co. have begun stocking outside brands of professional machines that compete with their in-house lines.

Manufacturers explain the trend in part by pointing to the aging U.S. housing stock, 70% of which was built before World War II; they claim that many purchasers of heavy-duty tools are serious do-it-yourselfers who plan to use them for home-repair projects.

But consumers, confronted by racks filled with scores of drills made by a dozen manufacturers, talk about a more elemental impetus."It all comes down to power and what you can do," says Adrian Taylor of New York, eyeing a $160 DeWalt jigsaw by Black & Decker Corp. at a Home Depot in Brooklyn. A salesman for an architectural-ornamentation company, Mr. Taylor was shopping with his fiancee for their fall wedding, and added the jigsaw and a $240 DeWalt drill to their gift registry."We're getting married; we need a drill," he says.

Manufacturers are happy to meet the call to amperage, touting the most muscular tools in magazine ads such as the o­ne in which Robert Bosch GmbH says of its reciprocating saw: "Instead of a logo, we should have given it a tattoo." A new ad by Hitachi Ltd. taunts: "You don't have our new 14.4-volt drill? Pray hard." The tools themselves are designed to appeal to the id of the male consumer, with names evocative of battle pitched o­n the fields of Ilium: Annihilator, Thunderbolt, Magnum and Brute. (This, despite the claim of o­ne company spokesman that "we want to make sure our power tools are perceived as non-gender-specific.")

"People think bigger is better, and more powerful is better," says Steve Jacob, a contractor in Brooklyn. "What does the homeowner need some of these tools for?"

Even tool makers sometimes admit that the answer is: Not much. "It's almost an image thing. People are definitely buying over their heads in the power-tool industry," says Steve Karaga, vice president of sales and marketing at Hitachi, maker of a $200 circular saw and a $460 sliding compound miter saw, among other tools.

Many in the building and related fields look down their noses o­n tool-hungry novices, considering their zeal yet another yuppie indulgence. "You should see how many suits come in here from Wall Street buying the expensive stuff," says Michael Barabash, a salesman at Garrett Wade Co., a New York provider of premium woodworking supplies. "Most amateurs really don't know what they're doing. They'll buy a nice tool and never use it again." Todd Langston, a spokesman for Porter-Cable Corp., Jackson, Tenn., recalls that a surgeon walked into a trade show in Anaheim, Calif., saying he wanted to buy a woodworking shop, and walked out with $40,000 worth of power tools.

In their scramble to insure that people like the surgeon keep buying, power-tool makers are introducing new products several times a year, and upgrading older tool lines. Porter-Cable, for example, rolled out 25 new designs last year, compared with fewer than 10 in 1993. In the rapidly growing cordless market, the manufacturers are cranking up the voltage every year. The 12-volt drills that seemed so brawny two years ago now look like weaklings next to the 14.4- and 18-volt drills available today. Bosch has even come out with a 24-volt cordless hammer drill, the $619 Annihilator, for boring holes in concrete. (Rock climbers like to use it for drilling holes in mountains for their spikes.)

Meanwhile, manufacturers of traditional consumer lines, fearing the loss of the top segment of their customer base at the hands of the industrial toolmakers, are rushing to create better-performing entry-level tools, and some are launching professional lines of their own. Black & Decker's DeWalt brand of bright-yellow, professional-grade tools, introduced six years ago, is now a top seller in many home centers, and Sears is offering the new Craftsman Professional and Industrial lines in addition to its regular Craftsman brand.

Do-it-yourselfers insist they aren't being sucked in by heavy-duty marketing. "I'd rather have a few really good tools that I can use to get the job done, instead of a mess of lesser tools that won't," says photographer William Waldron, leaning over the Delta table saw in the tool shed adjoining his post-and-beam farmhouse in upstate New York. Mr. Waldron spent about $1,000 o­n the seven tools he is using to restore the farmhouse, which was built in the 1760s.

Others say it's all about gender identity. "Guys are tool nuts," says Tom Silva, general contractor for "This Old House," the popular home-improvement television show. "Guys want tools. They love them."