Continuing on with Costrels, Cordwaining, and 6th Grade Leatherworking Lessons...

Welcome back. Where was I? My workbench is such a mess right now...

Oh, yes... cordwaining. We were making shoes, weren't we? 

When we left off, I was getting started on a pair of shoes to cover those wooden lasts you can see on my bench in the photo above. Unfortunately, it took about ten seconds of testing my hand on the short list of necessary stitches provided to me by Francis and the site of Marc Carlson, before I remembered how out of practice I am and just how long ago it was that I learned all this stuff.

When I was in sixth grade, back in Missouri, I was enrolled in a class called "Industrial Arts" where we learned to work with wood, plastic, and leather. It was fun and it taught me nothing that would be useful in any industry practiced anywhere in that postal code, even in the 1980's. But it did put me on the path that led straight to this project.

Flash forward to a new century, and I started going into more three-dimensional leather sculpting, making Commedia dell'arte masks. As I believe I've mentioned before, those masks are complex and challenging and fun to make , but I didn't fully appreciate how much they are just an entry-level project compared to proper shoemaking.

Cordwaining might well be the most advanced class of leatherworking I ever attempt. I was ready for shaping leather, but not for the sewing. There's not much sewing in the masking trade.

To prepare properly, I'm going to make two projects that are neither mask nor shoe, but which will allow me to practice key aspects (read: sewing) of the craft that are specifically relevant to the cordwainer.

The first project will be a costrel, which is a water vessel and a step back into the guild of horners and leather bottellers. Last time, we made a jack with a flowerpot, but this time we're essentially going to make a leather barrel for holding water.

When it's done, it will look something like this.

But we have a few steps we have to take to get there, and at least one cool cordwaining tool to make in the interim.

More tomorrow.

~ Scott

Occupational Hazards: My mother the shoemaker...

My mother was a nurse for most of my life, until she retired. Except at one point when I was a kid, out of frustration with some aspect of the nursing trade, she went to work in a local shoe factory. More than anything, I remember the smell of the glue on her clothing when she came home.

And you thought my grandfathers were my only link to the trades...

It's probably just as well that I did not know at the time about n-hexane polyneuropathy, an occupational disease endemic to these shoe factories brought on by exposure to the very glue that I remember so well. Thankfully, factory life didn't agree with her and she went back to nursing in pretty short order.

Nursing has its own hazards, just as sitting at a desk typing does, but occupational diseases are not a modern invention. Our repetitive strain disorders and bad backs and neuropathies born of the chemical age are nothing new. N-hexane polyneuropathy is just the modern equivalent of an 18th century disease known as 'shoemaker's colic'. Hatters were famously driven mad by the mercury they used, and so on and so forth...

Something we should probably talk about more often is the occupational hazards of the artisan life.

To get a bit nearer our period, let us wander off to Jamestown and take a gander at some scary-looking femurs that bear the marks of a lifetime of cobblers using their upper legs to pound on.  In the image at the right, you can get a glimpse inside a 16th century shoemaker's workshop from my old nemesis Jost Amman.

Note the way the two men in the foreground are working with the shoe on their thigh. The strap you can see holding the shoe in place, running under the heel of the bloke on the left is the shoemaker's stirrup I described last Sunday.

Image from the Jamestown.org

website's "Written in Bone: 

Forensic Files of the 17th 

Century Chesapeake" exhibit. 

Jost's guys are sewing, but hammers were also used to condense and work-harden leather, especially soles, and if you do that on your leg for a lifetime, your body is going to defend you from the damage. When you damage a bone, it repairs itself -- damage it enough repeatedly over a long enough period and your body will adapt, build up extra bone to protect itself from the next blow. Eventually, the layers of bone will build up and you end up with a sort of anvil attached to your femur.

Do me and yourself a favor: learn from their mistake.

It would make sense, in a way, for this to be more common for cobblers than cordwainers since sole repairs would've fallen to the cobbler. Though I should note that the Jamestown website doesn't draw a distinction between the two, and on the frontier there might not have been one.  On the muddy reaches of the Virginia coast, I would think that pounding hobnails into soles was a more common task than not.

A bone spur like that must've leant itself to one hell of a limp.

It's a cobbler's life, I guess.

Not all occupational markers are skeletal or so terribly painful. Bakers and blacksmiths have burns, which would theoretically heal and leave your skin all the more impervious to future burns. As I mentioned, the scars and bone spurs were the result of the body's attempts to protect itself.

On a side note, when I'm watching TV shows like NCIS or Bones, when they confidently describe the working lives of the men and women whose skeletons they're examining, I often wonder how hobbyists throw wrenches into the works on such occasions. I may be a writer, but I have several that might confuse a forensics team if I ever ended up on the table in an episode of Bones. My left incisor has been worn down years of cutting thread with it and I have a shoulder thing that's the result of a stint as a stockman at WalMart* in my youth preceded by a couple years in the pressroom of a local publisher. Compound that by all the adventures this project have led me on and I have to wonder what the CSI folks would make of my body.

That might seem a bit macabre, but ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Food for thought anyway.

~ Scott

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* You know that thing you hear about where Wally World comes to town and before you know it they're the only game in town? Yeah.

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

My kingdom for a horse: An Incomplete History of the Shaving Horse

I have a pile of oak staves waiting to be turned into something useful, a razor-sharp draw knife in my hand and a far away look in my eye. Like almost all of my best hand tools, the knife was left to me by my grandpa, who taught me an enormous amount about how to make wood do what I want it to.

I was always a little afraid of the draw knife.  In no small part, this was because the way my dad and grandpa used it seemed weird and unsafe. In fact, I said so once and got in trouble for my cheek.  Grandpa and dad tended to brace the piece of wood they were shaving between their stomachs and a table and scrape away.

They never cut themselves. Never even came close as far as I know. This might've been because they wore heavy jackets, but it was probably a combination of the way you hold a drawknife and the breadth of the blade, they might not even have been in any danger of doing so, but it still seems to me to be an unnecessary risk.

When I inherited grandpa's drawknife, it was put away until I built a proper shaving horse.  Because though dad and grandpa lived charmed lives (at least where draw knives are concerned) I do not. I'm clumsy and need to stack the odds in my favor.

What? You thought this would be a history of the shaving horse rather than a history of why I think I need one?

Fine, be that way.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The picture above is the stereotypical shaving horse from a 19th century book of trades.

The shaving horse is a key element of the cooper's art and mystery. It is, in effect, a foot-powered vice designed to hold wooden slats as they are shaped. The user straddles what amounts to a modified sawhorse with their feet on the pegs at the bottom of a timber that is hinged where it passes through the top of the horse. 

Note: Sadly, the hovering shaving horse didn't pan out, so I put legs on mine.

By pushing away with your feet you apply pressure to the top of a slanted portion of the horse, pinching your workpiece in place.

Here's a picture and you should go back and watch the video of the cooper at Colonial Williamsburg that I posted last week to see it in action. 

So much safer than holding the stave against your tummy.  Don't worry, mom, I'll be wearing a leather apron anyway. 

Just in case.

Is it period-appropriate for a 16th century cooper?

I was a bit surprised to discover that this is a controversial question in certain circles.

A rudimentary shaving horse is depicted in use in the 1556 book De Re Metallica. For the record, it's shown being utilized by a miner to make bertte, a wood billet with shavings left attached to be used as fire-starters. In the case of the miners in the etching, to light fires in a mine to fracture rock.

Bertie makes the best bertte in all of Bavaria!

The bertte maker is the image of a shaving horse most bandied about in these discussions online. And I thought it might be the only one in existance until I paged through the Mendel Hausbuch and noticed that half the coopers in the book are using a shaving horse of some sort.

                                                                                                                         Photo Source: Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg 

So there's a cooper at work, his tools in the background, including a shaving horse. Case closed as far as I'm concerned. More pictures of the same foot vice here and here. Since the monk in the second image is using his as a sort of ersatz workbench, you can see the whole thing in profile, including the arrangement of the foot pedal and vice dog.

This is mine...

It's worth nothing that none of the shaving horses I've found have the angled surface that mine (and every other shaving horse I've ever seen) has. That slanted piece makes shaving with knife or spokeshave easier, but would preclude using the horse as a work surface as that second monk was doing.

It might be a later addition to the design; I'm not sure and don't have any data one way or the other on that topic. Mine has the slanted second level and I'm not planning to remove it so we'll make a note of it and move on.

~Scott

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I was flipping through NetFlix videos and found an episode of Dirty Jobs where he learned to make a wine barrel. Hilarity ensues...
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/27751-dirty-jobs-building-a-barrel-video.htm