The Beginning You Didn’t Know About
By Matt Jobson
Union Mfg Co Chairman, Board of Directors
Where did the new Union begin? In the strangest twist of fate, it started with an eBay listing for a Union X5A bench plane. I had been collecting antique woodworking tools since 1992, and I was looking for something different for my personal “working” collection, something to make shavings in my shop instead of collecting dust on the display shelf. Every woodworker has the ubiquitous Bailey or the less common Bedrock style bench plane. (Even to this day, all new bench planes are some re-hash of the Bedrock.) However, I was looking for something unique that was robust and had the same modern adjustment features. When I hit the “Buy It Now” button, this unknown eBay seller and I had no idea that this purchase would eventually restart a historic company.
I expected the Union X5A to be another run of the mill tool, but what was delivered to my door was something truly stunning in its refined simplicity. I was hooked. I had to have the whole graduated set. I scoured the web, but I couldn’t find anything about these planes. Nothing. I figured that they had the same graduated sizes as Stanley, so off to collecting I went. I bought all of the numbers I could find.
Now, you have to understand that our current house didn’t have a workshop or a basement like our last house, so a workshop and a basement was now clogging a two car garage. My workbench (picture to the right) was a shelf, and most of my hand tools were in boxes.
This situation didn’t change for the entire 15 years we lived there. As I bought X planes, they disappeared into various layers in the garage. Fast forward to 2015, and we moved again. I now had a basement the size of our last house. The archeological dig through my tools began and organizing followed. My records showed that I had a pretty complete set of X planes, but they had never been seen together at the same time. I lined them all up on the basement floor and snapped a quick picture for posterity.
I was writing a blog at the time and decided to do a quick post about these unique planes and used that basement floor picture as the header image. I talked about the differences between the planes and made some guesses about the manufacturing changes over time. I hoped that by posting about these planes, others would take interest and flesh out the type study that I began.
The comments started to roll in. Other collectors found planes I didn’t know about. I stumbled across old catalogs. Bits of info grew. Something had taken hold. If you Googled “X plane”, my blog pictures were the very first pictures to show, and my blog was the first website listed. This led to new posts and new information.
One day I got a call. “I’m making X planes again” said the voice on the other end. Rob said he had been inspired by my post and bought the rights to Union and the X plane. And that, my friends, was the beginning you didn’t know about.
