It’s a simple thing, really, to make a woodworking tool. It’s quite another thing to make a tool that is balanced, perfectly suited to the task and beautiful to hold.

I should know. As a practicing (always practicing) woodworker, I make tools here and there for specific tasks. I’ve made a dozen marking knives, probably 10 drawbore pins, a few awls, and a handful of handplanes. But I’m certain (and perhaps counting on the fact) that my homemade tools will end up in the dump when I’m dead. My kids will pass them up as mere bits of metal embedded in pieces of wood. Nothing worth saving.

But when my daughters lay their hands on the marking knives, awl and chisels I’ve purchased from Blue Spruce Toolworks during the last four years, I’m certain that those tools will make the leap to the next generation.

Blue Spruce Toolworks is actually one man and two shops crammed with metalworking and woodworking equipment in a two-car garage in Oregon City, Ore. But in the first two years of operation, David Jeske pumped out more than 6,000 tools (or parts of tools) to eager customers.

That is an astonishing output for a man with no employees, no time for marketing and no office. And it’s even more of an achievement when you realize that it from the same man who turned his first handle for a marking knife on his drill press not too many years ago. But when you look back at Jeske’s life history it’s clear that every career move and every hand-chopped mortise in a deck (yes, a deck) was leading up to a career in toolmaking for this happily married father of two and deeply Christian man.

An Early Love of the Mechanical
Jeske was born in Southern California, the son of an engineer, and he spent his youth designing, building and flying remote-control model airplanes and racing around on dirt bikes dreaming of motorcycles. His father wasn’t a woodworker, but he taught him how to run shop equipment and he made a few choice career moves that shaped Jeske’s future.

After Jeske attended junior high, his father moved the family to rural Arizona where he bought a large metal recycling scrapyard. The young Jeske was his father’s forman and did a little bit of everything around the business, from working the scrapyard’s shop to driving a forklift.

After a year, his father left the business and moved the family to West Chester, Pa., where Jeske got a sizable dose of East Coast history: furniture, historical houses, museums.

“When you are growing up, you don’t really see things until you look back,” Jeske says about Pennsylvania. “But there is a huge amount of history there. And I was picking it up.”

After graduating from high school, Jeske went to engineering school at the University of Delaware, specializing in advanced materials and staying deeply entrenched in the world of metal by building a hot rod Mustang. After graduating, he followed his wife to Chicago and got a job designing tooling for a plastic extrusion company until a friend’s phone call lured him back West to San Jose, Calif., to work for the FMC Corp. and work on the ceramic armor for the Bradley fighting vehicle.

He and his wife also bought a house, which led to Jeske building a deck, which probably started him down the path to where he is now. But there was still a lot of steel flowing through his veins because he also build a 4-wheel-drive jeep from scratch and began working on the “Star Wars” missile defense system.

After the birth of their son, Andrew, the Jeskes decided to leave California and more to Oregon. Jeske got a job with Warn Industries, which makes off-road equipment and winches. And Jeske got his first taste of manufacturing.

He also bought a house that needed a lot of work and so he started buying the woodworking tools to fix it up and add a 1,200-square-foot cedar deck with a hot tub and hand-cut joinery.

“I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to pay someone else to do something I think I could do myself,” he says. “I built a deck. And I wanted to do it right. So I mortise-and-tenoned all the rails into the deck uprights. I hand-chopped all those because I didn’t have a mortiser. Many of the joints are actually half-lapped andI fitted by hand. It took me two years to build that deck. ”

After seven years at Warn, Jeske switched to Climax Portable Machine Tools, which makes specialized machine tools that could work on-site, such as machining an area flat on a large ship to install a radar array or do precise machining during nuclear reactor repair.

“It was a neat place to work,” he says. “However, I always wanted to have my own company.”

An Internet Discussion Plants a Seed
Meanwhile, Jeske was becoming more interested in woodworking. He didn’t have anyone around who could show him how to build things so he started reading posts on Badger Pond, an early (and now defunct) discussion forum on the internet.

“I was all about power, power, power,” Jeske says. “But there my eyes were opened to hand tools.” He took a trip back to West Chester, Pa., and studied the line-and-berry inlay furniture that was a feature of 18th-century Pennsylvania furniture. He bought books. Then moulding planes. Buck Brothers chisels. And then, most importantly, a dovetail saw.

“I was learning how to cut dovetails and I learned I needed to use a knife to mark them,” Jeske says. “So I made a marking knife on my drill press and posted a photo of it on Badger Pond. People got excited.”

Jeske bought a vintage Montgomery Ward lathe and turned a few more knives, which people bought and liked and then told their friends about. Meanwhile, Jeske’s day job was becoming more difficult. He liked designing and working with his hands, but he was spending most of his time managing other people. “I was working so many hours and had a long commute,” he says. “I didn’t have time to see the kids. I was feeling that I’d missed the boat.”

But no matter how hard he tried, Jeske couldn’t figure out how to make his tool-making enterprise into a full-time business that could support his family. He and his wife prayed for guidance. And it came in the form of John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tool Works.

The Bridge to a New Career
Jeske and Economaki started a friendly relationship that would seem odd to observers of the tool-making world. Economaki is outspoken, demonstrative and (I know this from personal experience) quite hilarious when unleashed on a group of people. Jeske is just as friendly, but in a low-key way. But both men love making tools, and so they decided to make a marking knife together for the Bridge City catalog.

Jeske presented his idea for a marking knife with replacable blades. Economaki liked the concept but wanted a different aesthetic.

“I said, ‘John, you need to put your John Economaki signature design stamp on the tool, but I can manufacture these for you,’” Jeske says. Economaki ordered 500 sets of knives. That was in 2004, and David H. Jeske was making the leap to full-time toolmaker. He left his comfortable job (his salary is now one-third of what it was). He evicted his wife’s car from the family garage, and he moved some serious machinery into the space.

Jeske built a CNC wood lathe from parts he had lying around and got to work. After the marking knives, the relationship with Bridge City continued. As Jeske made knives under his own brand, he also was helping manufacture a deadblow mallet and the handles for Bridge City’s anniversary chisels. The order was for 4,000 assembled and packaged chisels handles.

Jeske works alone in his small shop, which is divided into two rooms. One area is for woodworking; the other for metal (though there is a radial arm saw and CNC wood lathe in the metal room). The woodworking side is filled with mostly vintage machinery: a Walker-Turner 16” two-speed band saw and powered-downfeed drill press. A Davis & Wells horizontal boring machine and a Yates-American lathe with leather belts. Plus a Powermatic table saw, Delta planer, nice workbench and an assembly table with an ultra-high molecular weight top. And if that’s not enough, every cranny of the shop is stuffed with odd wood – manzanita bush wood from his parent’s house, wood from a plum tree from a friend, spalted oak from the firewood pile.

The metal shop is also crammed with equipment: a CNC gang-tool lathe, a CNC 3-axis milling machine, grinders, buffing machines and a four-disc wet-platter system for grinding tool bevels.

The irony of it all is how machine-oriented things are to manufacture hand tools.

“I wear earplugs and headphones over those earplugs,” he says. “It’s kind of stinky, the coolant mist. My daughter won’t come in the shop when I’m working.

“And so when I do my woodworking, I retreat into solitude and use primarily my hand tools.”

Precisely Made Jewels
Jeske’s attention to detail and his passion for handwork are evident in every one of the tools I’ve purchased from him. It started with a marking knife I purchased from him before he went full-time. Compared to all the other spear-point marking knives on the market, Jeske’s has the thinnest blade – just 1/32”. Yet despite its long length (about 1”) it was as stiff as the other knives I tried because of the double-nested ferrules Jeske adds to his tools. It’s an ingenious way to improve a knife and it allows the tool to sneak into the tightest dovetails.

The handle is cocobolo, Jeske’s standard handle stock, and it is finished only with wax applied on a buffer; but it has remained smooth and lusterous during years of work. The butt end of the knife ends in the shape of an acorn. I thought it was purely decorative at first but my ring finger rests there when I use the knife like a pencil.

Soon after receiving the knife, I ordered a scratch awl with an ebony handle. This tool also has the double ferrule, but the handle is decidedly untraditional. Instead of the traditional lightbulb shape, my Blue Spruce scratch awl has a pencil-like handle that ends with a detail that resembles a Shaker peg.

At first I was unsure of the design, but the tool ended up in my hand constantly. For marking, the handle shape is ideal when held like a pencil. For starting holes, the peg-like end is a perfect home for your thumb to apply downward pressure. This is not the shape I’d want for a birdcage awl, but scratch awls aren’t designed for boring holes.

New to the Line: Dovetail and Skew Chisels
Recently, Jeske has started producing dovetail and skew chisels that are as well-made and thoughtfully designed as his marking tools. The side bevels of the tools are hair-thin-to-non-existant, almost like a Japanese dovetail chisel. The tang of the tool fits smartly into its ferrule without hardly any gap, and the ferrule flows neatly into the rosewood handles.

The chisels aren’t based on any historical design; they are clearly from the same DNA as the knives and awls. They are well-suited to be pushed by hand, either horizontally or vertically, thanks to the handle’s thin waist near the ferrule.

The steel is A2, which holds an edge longer than high-carbon steel. But A2 has a peculiarity you have to deal with when you use it for some operations. When A2 is groud at a standard or low angle (25° or less), the edge tends to crumble quickly. So it’s not suited for low planing angles or low paring operations with chisels.

However, when you sharpen it at 30° or higher, its edge-holding properties shine.

Jeske’s first round of A2 chisels were ground at a low angle with the inevitable result. The new ones are ground steeper and are excellent workers. That is typical of Jeske, who is constantly making small improvements to the designs or the manufacturing process.

Recently I bought another marking knife from Blue Spruce for my toolbox at work and I was surprised at how different it was from my original knife. It has more dramatic lines and crisper details, yet both tools are equally charming to my eye.

So what is next for Blue Spruce? Jeske says he is going to continue to work with Bridge City and other toolmakers (he also makes sawnuts for sawmaker Mike Wenzloff, another local toolmaker), yet he is intent on building a strong brand image for Blue Spruce Toolworks. So he’s finishing development of a marking gauge/mortising gauge and some other tools he’s not ready to discuss.

“I don’t know exactly what the future holds,” Jeske says. “I’m trying to build a foundation for the company right now. I still do everything. I manufacture. I market. I run to the dump. I do deliveries.”

But what is clear from Jeske’s tone is that he’s not tired or frustrated by that fact. It seems instead that he’s simply trying to find some way to top his production output for the last two years. It seems a bit impossible (6,000 tools in two years is about one tool an hour if you worked seven days a week with eight-hour days). But if anyone can do it, it has to be the guy who turned his first knife handle on a drill press only a few years ago and turned that into a full-bore toolmaking enterprise.

This article originally appeared  in The Fine Tool Journal.

Chris is the editor of Popular Woodworking.