About Me :- Not a lot to tell really.....

The name's Mike.  I dress in Black most of the time so I adopted the name of a Legend, The Black Stag.  I live in the coastal town of Kirkcaldy, in the Kingdom of Fife, Scotland.

 As you will realize by now, I’m a woodworker with a passion for hand tools, especially planes. I trained in furniture design and manufacture and made country furniture in Perthshire for many years but had to give it up and move back to Kirkcaldy due to a family tragedy. I still try to keep my hand in when the opportunity arises but now, arthritis is setting in to my joints and it can make working extremely painful for me.

 I have always had an interest in antiques in general and a particular fascination with the skills of the long gone woodworkers of yesteryear so for about 30 years now, I have been collecting vintage and antique woodworking hand tools. I figured that only by owning, studying and using old tools could I fully appreciate the training and skills that were involved in producing some of the magnificent pieces of antique furniture and other woodwork that I have encountered through the years. This certainly does not imply that I have made myself proficient in the use of all those tools although I have tried most of them out.

Anyway, all this collecting and studying and using tools has given me a fair bit of knowledge on the subject.

My other interests include listening to music, especially Dean Martin, The King of Cool and photographing ships that come into the Firth of Forth
and, (bizarrely some might think) studying the UFO phenomenon.

If you wish to contact me about any of the above, please feel free to do so at

mike@stagtools dot co dot uk

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sorry for removing my email link but I couldn’t cope with all the spam I was getting from the automated email bots so you will have to type the address in your e-mail client, remembering to replace “dot” with a .