Clifton (0 products found)

Clifton hand tools are made entirely in Sheffield, England with care and precision by experienced and skilled workmen with the woodworker’s requirements firmly in mind. Our products have received favourable reviews from discerning practitioners and authors in such magazines as Fine Woodworking (USA), Furniture & Cabinetmaker (UK), British Woodworker etc and from David Savage, John Lloyd, Jack Hill, Paul Sellars and others.

We are always pleased to hear from woodworkers about suggestions for possible improvements to our products and also feed back whether positive or negative.

We use a blend of time honoured traditional production methods – such as hand forging and hand polishing – and modern techniques such as laser cutting and CNC machining; all are aimed at producing the best possible product. For instance our bench plane soles are ground one at a time to ensure flatness, whereas most volume plane manufacturers grind them in rows of 10 pieces or more so causing inconsistencies from one plane to another.

We believe that a hand tool must fit comfortably in the hand, have the right “feel” and balance to it …otherwise the user will be “fighting” the tool to make it work properly. To this end we put much effort into polishing sides, components and sharp edges (other than the blade, of course) which might otherwise lie poorly in the hand, to make them smooth and rounded. We receive many favourable comments on how good our tools feel "in the hand".

We have designed our plane castings to be thicker than normal so as to allow the heat to flow out of the cooling metal more evenly between thick and otherwise thin sections of the product; this eliminates brittleness (from too rapid cooling) and reduces distortion from uneven cooling of different sections of the casting.

We put our casting through a rigorous heat treatment process to remove any traces of tension caused during the casting process and to ensure that the grey iron is “inert” and capable of absorbing shocks (eg if dropped on a hard floor).

However we do not believe we are perfect and should a sub standard product elude our watchful quality control we shall be pleased to hear from you so we can rectify the shortcoming both for an individual end user and for the market in general.

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