Meet the Maker: Red Pig Tools

By Jeff Kocan

“Most off-the-shelf tools have been manufactured to be efficient to make, not to use.”

We’ve always taken great pride in working with small manufacturers and individual makers—true craftspeople whose devotion to their trade is evident in the quality of their work. For this series, we’re spotlighting some of our longtime (and more recent) makers. Red Pig Tools hand-makes an expansive line of garden tools that longtime Garrett Wade customers will almost certainlybe familiar with.

When Seth Pauley took over day-to-day operations at Red Pig Tools in 2017, the company was already well known for its hand-forged garden tools. Founded in the late 1980s in California by Bob and Rita Denman as a retail outlet for gardensupplies, Red Pig began producing its own tools once Bob saw a lack of hard-wearing, old-school forged garden implements. After a few years, the blacksmith who made the tools for the Denmans told Bob—who already designed all the tools, in addition to “handling” them (literally attaching the wooden handles)—that he might want to learn to make them himself. Bob agreed, diving in headfirst to learn the art and craft of blacksmithing. Now the family-owned business could expand its line of tools in any direction it saw fit. Over the years, the company expanded, eventually migrating north to Oregon, where Bob and Rita constructed a blacksmith’s shop and retail space from the remnants of two century-old barns.

Red Pig Tools became a fixture in the area, manufacturing and selling its tools and taking on all sorts of custom jobs, from repairs and sharpening to custom-making specialty tools. The Denmans also liked to frequent garden fairs and local garden-club events. At the 2017 Spring Garden Show in Canby, Oregon,they were approached by a young man named Seth Pauley. Pauley was something of a polymath—he had taught creative writing and literature at Temple University, founded several small businesses, and studied ceramics under the famed Mahmoud Baghaeian, among other endeavors—and was immediately fascinated by the Denmans and their high-quality, hand-crafted tools.

Pauley first proposed an idea for tools specifically engineered for women, and while Bob had to decline the project—already in his seventies, he was too busy with the tools he was already making—he offered to teach Seth how to make tools himself. After taking a blacksmithing course to get up to speed, Pauley returned to the Denmans’ shop, eager to learn. As Bob passed on his skills and Seth proved a quick study and a capable maker, their partnership evolved and a way forward for the company appeared.

“As Bob was getting close to retiring, he started to teach me so I could take over,” Pauley explains. The transition has been successful, to say the least.

“Over the course of a year I make between 250 and 400 different types of tools,” Pauley says. “We make several hundred to a couple thousand of a few tools that are very common—the range of trowels and things like that. But there’s a lot of things that I’ll make 10 of a year, or 50 of a year, because there’s not the demand for them—which is a nice niche to be in, because people discover tools that they thought could no longer be bought.”

As demand for Red Pig tools grew, Pauley realized he’d need help keeping up. Instead of outsourcing the work, he brought on assistants and trained them, just the way Bob had trained him.

“I couldn’t possibly make all the tools that we have to ship every year if I had to do it all on my own,” he says. “So although I am involved by touching every single tool that we make at some point or another—andin some cases that entire tool—teaching more people the skills and the knowledge is really critical.”

And it’s quite an eduction. Pauley trains his assistants from the groundup, with no requirements for experience in blacksmithing or toolmaking.

“It takes an assistant about a year and a half to two years to develop the range of skills necessary to make even a single tool from beginning to end,” he explains. “So that just demonstrates there’s quite a high level of skill required in making these tools, and a knowledge base. But beyond that, because it takes so long, even though we’re a small shop, we work very collaboratively. That’s how a lot of artists and shops in a lot of different fields will work. But most people think of making something, they just think of the manufacturing concept where there might be people operating the machine, but everything’s been planned and preprogrammed from the front. But with the amount of variety and the things that we do, that’s just not possible. What’s efficient is developing skilled people to help and be able to make a tool by hand, and then look at it and judge the quality before we ship it off.”

If that sounds like a throwback to the old system of masters and apprentices, you’re not far off. And the tools themselves are made the old-fashioned way, too—for the most part.

“If you came to my shop you’d see mostly anvils and hammers,” Pauley explains, “and one press that I use, called a forging press. That still requires a lot of training and skill use it, because we just use it as if you would a hammer. We don’t squeeze something into a die or anything. We use it more like one of the hand-shaping tools.”

Pauley is thoughtful about the way he makes his tools and the way he runs his company—he cites Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard as an inspiration, believing that any product you make should be high-quality, long-lasting, fixable, and, ideally, recyclable at the end of its lifespan.

“Our tools are made of only steel and wood, minus the label that we put on,” he says. “We minimize packaging. We don’t do a lot of external packaging because of the environmental impact of that. If you take care of our tools ... I mean, I get tools that just need maybe need a handle replacement after 20 years in use.”

When asked to take us through the making of a tool, Pauley is happy to oblige.

“I think of every tool as being a steel tool head and a wooden handle, for the most part—there’s a couple exceptions,” he says. “The handles I have made by small companies in the Southeast, either in Tennessee or Arkansas. We use American hickory and ash—ash for our long handles. We have those made for us, and they get sent to me here. Here in my shop in Portland, we start with steel stock, standard bar and plate steel. We cut the bar to size and hand-hammer it in the forge to the shape that we need. For the plate, we have another small business locally that takes the plate for us and plasma cuts it to the shapes of our blades. Our next step is then welding the shank to that pre-formed blank—we oxy-acetylene weld it, and then we put the whole tool in the forge and do a series of bends and cupping and shaping, either by hand or with the hammer. That gets us to a ‘dirty’ tool, and from then we clean it up—clean up all the scale that will rise to the surface of the steel when it’s in the forge. Then the tool is handled, the tool is sharpened and enameled, the label goes on, and it’s ready for the customer.”

Red Pig Tools is an inspiring success story, and it’s encouraging to know that people are willing to spend a little extra money for a real tool that’s built to last—and designed to work well.

“Many of my customers say they’re finally giving in after years of buying off-the-shelf tools that keep bending, keep breaking, or don’t feel good or hurt their hands,” Pauley says. “They’ve been burned too many times by tools that are cheaply made, whose design and ergonomics are somehow even less than an afterthought. Most off-the-shelftools have been manufactured to be efficient to make, not to use. Often, the engineers behind those designs have shifted away, little by little over the last 40 or 50 years, to tools that are more and more gimmicky and less and less effective. Fewer and fewer people even know how to take care of a tool anymore, where that would have been common knowledge up until right after World War II.”

Going back to Pauley’s origins with the company, Red Pig is still a fixture at gardening events and clubs just like that fateful one where he met Bob and Rita Denman. Pauley, ever the educator, can frequently be found giving talks about tools, how to use them, and how to care for them. And we certainly think Red Pig makes tools that are worth caring for.