The Joy of Sectors: Getting our Galileo on...

"For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented to the beholder."   

- Vitruvius, De Architectura 

Of course, a major part of the "rebirth" heralded by the renaissance was a revival of the mathematics and geometries of the Arabs and the ancients. By harkening back to the glories of their Hellenic ideal with their domes and pillars, the Renaissance brought with it a new and almost slavish devotion to finding the sacred in geometry and symmetry. Not just buildings, but furniture and textiles began to push painted, woven, and carved decorations to ostentatious heights.

I'm not particularly well known for being good at math and certainly didn't receive high enough marks in school to give one the feeling I would go on to write fluently about engineering and architecture. Thankfully, our typical renaissance artisan wasn't particularly well known as a mathematician either.

Please note that here I am drawing a line between the theory and the application of maths. Although the loftier theories may have passed him by, the practical maths of proportion and symmetry were alive and well in 16th century workshops. The average Elizabethan joiner may or may not have known who Euclid or Pythagoras was, but he could apply their theories well enough to please the eye and the customer.

We've discussed some basics of dividers before, when we were coopering. Add a sector and by their powers combined, you can accomplish an amazing number of tasks with very little actual number-crunching.

I first learned the magic of the sector in the same math class where I learned about the Fibonacci and the various permutations of the Golden Mean. Then I didn't think about it much for several decades.

Like most woodworkers, I've always kept a set of dividers. Dividers are handy for drawing circles and arcs for those fantastically symmetrical carvings I mentioned, also transferring dimensions from a ruler or a drawing to the wood. I've used them for laying out dovetails and for finding center and a host of other simple tricks.

But when they're accompanied by a sector, they can do much, much more.

My geometry teacher knew that the wickedly-sharp compasses we were equipped with as part of our standard kit were capable of more than stabbing us through our canvas bookbags. When paired with a sector, they could be used to accomplish great feats of proportion and scale

And she had no less a personage than Galileo Galilei backing her up on that.

I didn't care, I was nine; I wanted to draw circles and stab ants with the damn thing. Education is wasted on the young. Sometimes, I think adults should be required to repeat primary school periodically to pick up all the sharing and math and social studies that we missed, never mind the history. We seem so determined to keep repeating our history anyway, it might as well be in a classroom.

"I'm sorry, boss, I can't come in today, I have geometry class and then detention because I said I was thinking about voting for Donald Trump..."

Anyway... flash forward to a 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine I picked up at the newsstand because of a cool cover article about Thomas Jefferson's stacking bookcases. Inside was an article by Jim Tolpin on the use of the dividers combined with a sector (see the video below) to derive a host of useful proportions and measurements for cabinetry design.

Like my teacher before him, Jim attributed the invention of the the sector to Galileo. I'm a big Galileo fan, going way back, and ere the end of things, we might even get into some of his experiments with optics because I enjoy that sort of thing.

Galileo's Sector displayed in the Putnam Gallery -- Image via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0

They were both likely wrong about the inventor. The basic principles were first proposed by Euclid and put to various uses since. It seems more likely that he was the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of the late Renaissance. He was a technological entrepreneur who envisioned new and popular uses by combining existing technologies and concepts in unique ways. That said, who initially turned a compass into a more complex instrument matters little, because ere the end of the 16th century, the concept broke out in a Big Way in the manner that technological leaps always seem to.

The sector as Galileo created it is partly well known because of who he was, and partly because it was enormously successful as a commercial product. The sales of the instruments made his fortune long before he started tweaking the beards of the Inquisition with his planetary models.

Galileo primarily sold his sector as a military tool, an instrument which in addition to its more basic Euclidean functions carried additional scales useful for the gunner in the trenches.

I have no use at the moment for determining powder loads and trajectories. There just aren't that many armies out there right now that need that sort of thing done the old fashioned way. I will be making a simpler, significantly less schmancy, workingman's sector along the same lines as Jim Tolpin's.

If nothing else, I have a lot of period carving and surface decoration on my project list, so we can look forward to seeing great granddad's dividers and sectors come out for that.

And for now -- since sectors weren't all that widely used until the 17th century anyway -- that will be the soft limits for our use for the things. I'll make a couple in different sizes and we shall see what use can be made of them without gunpowder getting involved.

That said, the Honorable Artillery Company was knocking about, but they weren't really what you'd call a trade guild. Nevertheless, I picked up a copy of Galileo's instruction book that was sold alongside his sector because you never know when you might need to hit something a long way away with a ball of something fired out of a tube full of grey powder.

- Scott

Time-Traveler: The man from nowhen...

"I bet you think you were born in the wrong era," she said. I smiled grimly and shrugged. I didn't want to point out to her that Everyone Says That. And it drives me just a little nuts.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time delving into the past and exploring what life was like at various points in history. I've written about WWII, Prohibition, the Great Library of Alexandria, and Shakespeare. So "Do you feel like you were born at the wrong point in history?" isn't an uncommon or even unreasonable question.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed that since I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World no one has asked whether I felt I might've been born on the wrong planet.

It annoys me at times, but it's a fair question because if anyone was ill at ease in the modern world, it's me. Let's face it, I have a lot of skills that aren't of much use in the 21st century.

By the metric of the rest of the country, my childhood was more on like my dad's than it was like the rest of my peers. We didn't have a video game system or a computer of any kind. Dad didn't believe in video games and didn't like computers. I learned to type on a typewriter (as is right and proper) and only saw digital systems when I went to a friend's house or a mall.

My friends refer to this as a 'sheltered upbringing' but I'm not sure I'd agree.

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' farm where grandpa taught me woodworking to keep me out from under foot and where I made a lot of my own toys. I built rafts because I read a lot of Huck Finn. They all sank or broke apart, so I swam to shore and built new ones. It was a world of pocket knives, toy guns, frogs, wooden airplanes... I played with GI Joe while we listened to Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio. I watched Star Wars like every other kid of my age, but read voraciously from a library that was stocked mostly with books written over a half century before I was born.

My childhood was a Mark Twain novel ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury, filtered through an Archie comic.

The world that was shown to me on TV seemed distant and somewhat surreal, simultaneously more modern and less than the world around me.

I still prefer hand tools to electric, my typewriter to my laptop, and a printed book to a digital one. I have no real attachment to those wonders of modern technology that people around me can't live without. I don't own a cell phone, though The Engineer has one. It's not inarguable that I really am a man out of my era and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that if given a time machine and license to use it that I'd be off like a shot.

I certainly used to think so. I may have been misplaced several centuries! I said as much to my dad once. Dad, who had very little tolerance for bullshit, looked at me and kind of snorted and said "Take off your glasses."

Touché, Dad. 

I have allergies and poor eyesight and I have an asthma inhaler in my pocket as I type this. Even when I join in a historical reenactment and try to sink into a past age, never far from my mind is the fact that I never would have survived childhood in these past worlds.

Books are my time machine along with projects like this one. This is my preferred method of time travel. If someone offered me a trip through time I might not take them up on it if I cannot close the cover and return to the modern era any time I wish.

And it's not at all about the asthma inhaler. The women around me are valued as highly as the men. My wife is an engineer. My boss is a woman.  I can see someone passing me on the street and talk to them without my judgement of them stopping at the color of their skin. I can say whatever I want here and as long as I don't libel anyone, no one can stop me.

Because honestly... the 'good old days' weren't that good.  The Elizabethan era may have birthed the modern world, but it was still firmly anchored in the medieval. The streets stank of the latrine, death stalked the streets, the laws were Draconian and the punishments cruel, the cast system was becoming porous, but only just.

So until the man in the Blue Box comes to escort me to the opening night of Hamlet and then safely home again... I like this time period just fine, thanks.

Frankly, I like it here. The people are mostly friendly, the medicine is pretty good, and I don't have to worry about people teleporting into my house unannounced yet.

---
This post first appeared in a slightly different form on my writing blog Pages to Type Before I Sleep... in February of last year. People keep asking the question, though, so I find myself continuing to answer it.    ~Scott

Tools of the Trades: If you can't inherit them, buy them

Without a doubt, the best way to get tools is to inherit them. Not because it means you lost a loved one, but because inherited tools usually (hopefully?) come to you after years of tutelage in how to use and take care of them. Which is also to say that tools inherited tend to be in better shape than antique tools tend to be when you find them for sale somewhere.

A sad old Bailey No 5 awaiting rebirth as a usable tool. Rescued yesterday
for $12.00 from the shelf of an antique store.

I really feel you should mourn and doff your cap when you find a pile of old tools in a state of disrepair at a thrift store or in a flea market. It is the sign of a craftsman who failed to pass on his craft to the next generation. Rusted tools given away are the spoor of a dead craft lineage.

Then put your cap back on and buy them.

Apply some elbow grease to rejuvenating these treasures and apply them to keeping the craft alive in new hands that will appreciate them.

For me, this has been especially true with hammers and hand planes.

As you'll know if you've been following along for awhile (or will find out shortly if you're new here) I am something of a tool addict. From the antique stores, thrift shops, and flea markets, I have added to the hoard of 19th century tools I inherited. Or as I see it, I have given new life to tools that were destined for premature retirement on the walls of some kitschy restaurant or the shelves of some "Flea Market Chic" home.

Nothing annoys me more than to see tools used as bric-a-brac except maybe books abused in the same way and for the same reasons. I think tools are beautiful too, but as functional art, not inert sculpture to molder on your shelves. Use them or by God, give them to someone who will.

If you are a crafter, I hope you feel the same way when you see elements of your craft on the shelves at the local Goodwill. My wife supplements her inherited sewing implements with the same fervor I apply to woodworking and leather tools.

As always, the fall of one noble line gives room for new houses to rise and replace them. A quick tour of woodworking blogs will tell you beyond the shadow of doubt that the pursuit of handcraft is alive and thriving. While an increasingly mechanized world has undoubtedly managed to drive many to set aside the love of good tools meant to last generations in favor of ease and speed, the rise of the internet has also brought together communities of those who are fighting to keep their handcraft alive.

I mentioned Ravelry the other day as a gathering place for knitters both historical and modern. For the carpenter and joiner, there is LumberJocks and Sawmill Creek, for leathercrafters there is Leatherworker.net and for other crafts there are many more besides that I've forgotten or just haven't found yet. One of the great elements of these places is the sharing of resources and advice on rejuvenating these thrift store finds.

The wood body hand plane you see to the left is one of many that I've rescued from oblivion. The seller didn't know what they had. They'd duct taped the throat of the thing for some reason (without actually covering the protruding blade, so I've no idea what it was supposed to accomplish) and jamed the blade in backwards with enough force that it took some doing for me to remove it.

Because I do my research before heading out to go looking, I identified by its maker's marks right away as an English-made mid-nineteenth century Varvill & Sons plane. The plane iron (that's the blade) was original and in decent shape with plenty of good steel under all the rust. The tote (that's the handle) is solid with no cracks, a common flaw with antique planes, and just needs to be tightened a bit. It's a bit rough, but where weren't any cracks or splits that went deeper than a quarter inch, which meant I could fill them during the restoration and have a perfectly sound tool to leave to my heirs and they to theirs.

All of which ends with me buying it for $14.00.

If you look hard enough, these things are out there. Even though I really do live out in the middle of nowhere, I can drive less than thirty minutes and find a trove of antique tools. In fact, the closer to the middle of nowhere you get, it seems, the more likely you are to find these things. I've done this all over the United States, and I can tell you that these tools are to be found everywhere if you're looking for them.

I think it's definitely worth noting that if you don't want to restore antiques you can buy new ones that are being lovingly handmade by modern toolmakers. Specialty retailers like Lee Valley and Woodcraft are filled to the rafters with historically-inspired tools. If you want to talk to people making their own, there's St Thomas Guild, and if you want to buy them, there's even a group in England called Daegrad Tools that has begun reproducing museum-quality tools for the reenactor market, based on archaeological finds. I don't have any of their tools yet, but I'm hearing great things about them.

The toolmakers are really the unsung heroes of the craft guilds and the modern crafts movement.

One of the "projects in the background" for this blog has been to procure and restore almost all of the tools I haven't built myself.  At some point I'll do a full series of posts on 'how to evaluate antique tools you intend to use' but I haven't the time to devote to really doing it right at the moment. So you have that to look forward to.

Two important notes, however, that I do want to mention:

1. Antique blacksmith hammers are best avoided. While I do use antique hammers in wood and leatherworking, a hammer intended to use metal-against-metal can be over-hardened by years of use, and thus prone to chip or crack and throw the broken bits in your direction. You'll note as we go forward that all of the metal and forge work I do will be using new hammers.
2. I tend to avoid buying planes that don't have blades unless I'm ready to add $40-$50 (or more) to the purchase price to get a decent replacement that will fit.  When we get to the Worshipful Company of Joiners, we'll discuss what goes into making our own plane blades, and you'll get a better idea of why they're so expensive.

In the meantime, the sun is out and my workshop is calling. I've a tankard that needs hooping and some horns that need to be cut and shaped into useful items. Not to mention a workshop in dreadful need of clearing-out before I can hope to do any joinery worthy of the tools I inherited.

~ Scott

Tools of the Trades: Dumb as a...

I don't know if it's a real memory or something my adolescent brain concocted after the fact, but I remember a day when my grandpa swore that something or someone was "Dumb as a bag of hammers." Being a kid that took an inordinate amount of joy from the tools grandpa let him use, in the memory I told him I didn't understand why that would be dumb. I couldn't think of anything better than a Whole Bag of Hammers!

I'm mostly suspicious of the memory because it makes me sound rather more precocious and clever than I suspect that I really was. It's one of the oddments of life that you can't always trust your own memories, but there you go.

Be that as it may, I still get an inordinate amount of joy out of my tools. And now that I actually have enough hammers to fill a bag, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that this apocryphal memory holds a kernal of truth: There really aren't many things cooler than a Whole Bag of Hammers.

I suppose that some of you are, quite correctly, pointing out that there's also a half dozen mallets in that bag. All the same, there are enough hammers to make the bag rather heavier than I'd like to tote around.

For the record, this isn't an example of excess. Each of those hammers (and mallets) has a specific purpose to which it is best suited. It is enormously frustrating to me to watch someone use the wrong hammer for their task. Or, worse yet, to use something else like a wrench in place of a hammer.

My wife thinks I need to seek professional help.

Believe it or not, there is a distinct difference between a claw hammer, a rip hammer, and a ball peen hammer. The face of each hammer is shaped to best suit the task for which it was intended, and the temper of the metal as well. Try to form metal with a claw hammer and you'll get a good idea why you shouldn't, no matter what Jamie from Mythbusters might wish you to believe. Will a hammer explode on you if you're using it wrong? No, that's a bit silly. But you will expend more energy than you would if you went to the toolbox and got the correct tool.

It's difficult to choose favorites, but if you put my feet to the fire, I think the shoemaker's hammer you see above is my favorite. Aesthetically, it's just intrinsically pleasing. Like the distilled cartoony ideal of the essence of hammerness. It's shape and the domed face are designed for shaping shoeleather, condensing the leather and forcing it down over the last without damaging or marring the finish.

The horn hammer underneath it is also a leatherworking tool used by mask makers for much the same purpose. The point of the horn forces leather down into the voids of the mask matrix as it condenses and hardens the leather. This also has the charming effect of dimpling the leather, giving the mask a characteristic look you can't get otherwise. 

These mallets serve various purposes. Top is a felloe mallet. These were originally used and made by wheelwrights, who would cut them from old sections of wheel. These sections are properly called "felloes". Pop a handle on it and sell it to your fellow craftsmen and you've got a lucrative sideline. Like most woodworkers, I use mine for carving and whacking chisels.

Next one down is a rawhide mallet. That head is made from rolled rawhide leather that has been varnished into a nice, hard, mallet head. The resultant head is hard enough to drive a chisel if you've a mind to, but not hard enough to knock a dent into wood. I bought it to use on leather tools, but since I rarely tool my leathergoods, it's mostly used in cabinetmaking.

The two gavel-looking mallets are also for cabinetmaking. They're used to knock together mortise and tenon joinery and also to set the blades in wood-body planes. I'll discuss those a lot more when we're in the joinery section of the project.

Of course, these are but a few of the mallets and hammers I'll use in the course of this year. Ball-peen hammers, blacksmithing and sheet metal hammers, even a mason's rock hammer. All of them serve a specific purpose, and have evolved over centuries, even millennia, into their current shapes.

So give a care to the humble hammer and choose the correct one for your task. Both you and your project will thank you.

Oh, and keep them in a toolbox. Don't keep them in a bag. Because grandpa was right; that is kinda dumb.

~Scott