about us

TIMBERLINE TOOL owner Jim Williams at the planing bench in his shop in Medanales, New Mexico.

I’d been using cabinet scrapers for many years on the occasional pieces of furniture and other woodworking projects for our home, but I was never able to get a really good burr on a scraper, at least not the kind that could “micro-plane” the clean wood shavings I’d seen in woodworking magazines.

After playing around with a few ideas that “sorta worked,” I finally hit on one that worked really well, shown at the bottom of the inset at left. It soon became clear that this simple tool would allow even beginning woodworkers to turn a consistent “microplaning” burr on both rectangular and curved scrapers.

And so in 1992 I started Timberline Tool out of my home and small garage shop adjacent to Pike National Forest four miles north of Woodland Park, Colorado. The SB-1 soon became a product for sale to other woodworkers who want to master the hand-held cabinet scraper.

A year later, my wife, Nancy, and I moved to the northern New Mexico village of Medanales where we have been fixing up an old adobe casa – a never ending job, it turns out.

Today TIMBERLINE TOOL is a family owned business based in Medanales with a manufacturing operation run by our son, Tom, in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Tom also designs and crafts custom fine furniture.