A Joiner's Toolbox: The Axes of Evil?

The TSA doesn't tend to like me very much. You see, I like to fly to the Midwest or South and bring back loads of rusty things that make metal detectors go "BEEP!" It's not my fault that all the good old tools, all the greatest houses of rust and dust really, are in the middle and southern reaches of our country.

As The Engineer says: "All Scott's favorite souvenirs are all on the No-Fly list."

The axes of evil?

If you look at the many, many, many* paintings of medieval and renaissance woodworkers and their tools, you will note four tools that are given particular prominence: Planes, chisels, a frame saw, and a nice big axe.  We'll get to the frame saw soon, but in most of these images, the axe is front and center.

A Joiner's workshop from my old nemesis: Jost Amman's "Das Standebuch" 

of 1568 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Everyone who just said "Aren't those for chopping down trees?" gets three demerits and must report to the Forbidden Forest after class, where Professor Ash will teach you why chainsaws were invented.

Have you ever chopped down a decent-sized tree with an axe?

I have and I don't recommend it. Of course you can do it and once you get the hang of it, it's not the worst thing in the world. It certainly didn't seem to keep our ancestors from darn near clear cutting the Americas, but never forget how eagerly they took to an invention that was originally a surgical tool (yes, really) once it had been properly biggie-sized and offered up as a bane for trees and zombie hordes alike.

But that's another tale. We're not chopping down a tree today, just cutting it to a manageable size for employing other tools and to do that, we will need a range of axes.

The prominence of the axe in woodworking has fallen considerably since the saw mill became more prevalent and lumberyards grew neat stacks of sawn and pre-dimensioned lumber. While the chainsaw might have spelled the end of the big felling axes, it was the 2x4 that killed the carpenter's axe.

(Left to right) Carpenter's axe, large "Kent" style side hatchet, small "Kent" style side hatchet, and a head for a broad axe.

Thankfully, great grandpa kept his and I picked up a couple more in my beloved web of rust emporia scattered across southern Missouri. The largish Kent hatchet in the picture above was an inheritance, the rest I rescued and brought home to Washington to the consternation of my wife and airport security.

Use your axes for good, my friends. Never evil.

Axe? Hatchet? Plumb? Side? Broad?  (Watch who you call a broad, pal...)

An axe, Roy Underhill likes to say, is essentially a piece of steel mounted on the end of a stick. One of the few things everyone can agree on is that. After that, the nomenclature gets a bit contentious. We can't even decide how to spell it with England and America using an axe or an ax, respectively. The main problem is that the axe has been around almost as long as humans have, and every culture has named it and the parts of it as suited their fancy.

Thus, we're going to be a bit generic with our terminology. Also, a hatchet is a small axe. Alas, there are sizes of these tools where different people will refer to it as one or the other at whim, sometimes in the same sentence, but really it's about size more than anything else.

As you already know, I tend not to get too caught up on taxonomical issues anyway. Honestly, as long as you can tell the handle from the sharp bit, you're going to be fine.

Here are the absolute basics...

Just remember this: shape dictates the use.  

In the drawing above, you can see that I delineate a difference between a "wedge" axe and a "side" axe. 

A side hatchet and a "boy scout" style wedge hatchet shown

side-by-side for comparison.

The side axe is flat on one side and specific to a right or left handed user (actually many can be either, you just flip the head over and mount it the other way on the haft). A side axe is mostly used for hewing a round log into flat faces. The bevel forces the wood off to only one side and tends to take relatively small pieces, leaving a relatively flat surface behind to be dresses with other tools such as a plane. Logs are turned into timbers by hewing away the rounds with enormous broad axes which are 'sided' like the hatchet you see in the photo at right.

The wedge style is for cleaving or splitting. You can dress logs with a wedge axe if you want to, but it's more work because the double bevel pushes the wood in both directions and tends to break fibers and knock out a chunk of wood rather than taking a slice. I'm tempted to say that there's not as much finesse in a double-beveled axe, but you can use it to do most the things you can with a side axe if you're willing to put in the work.

Mostly though, a wedge is a splitting tool and boy can it split kindling.

Speaking of splitting kindling, there's one other type of axe that we need to talk about: The Froe. A froe is an axe in the same sense that an adze is -- they are technically axes, but their blades are turned at angles to the handle that we're not used to seeing so that they can do some very specific jobs.

The froe is all about riving wood. Riven wood is split, but not in a haphazard manner like firewood, but very accurately and in careful consideration of grain direction so that you have boards you can work with when you're done.

My froe making short work of a fresh bit of a plum tree.

Almost all the wood used by an Elizabethan joiner was riven rather than sawn to dimension. Sawing was reserved mostly for shaping or doing any sort of cutting across the grain (which a froe or axe are ill-suited for).

All of this is preparatory for doing what's nowadays generally known as "Green" woodworking. In this case, "green" isn't used in the Al Gore sense, but rather in the sense that no one is baking the tree in a kiln before it gets to your workbench. Many of these tools and techniques we're going to talk about are sort of useless on kiln-dried fir from Home Depot. The bit of plum tree I'm splitting in the picture above was cut the day before from an old tree growing in my garden.

The nice thing about greenwood is wet and springy and above all, easy to work. Unfortunately, it will also rust your tools, so you have to take care.

More on that later when we start making things with all these tools out of all this wet wood. For now, I'm going to refer you once again to Peter Follansbee and Jenny Alexander's excellent "Make a Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th Century Joinery" (Lost Art Press, 2012) or to any of Peter's excellent appearances on The WoodWright's Shop on PBS.

If you don't have access to a trove of old tools, can you make do with a double-beveled axe or modify one to make it work? Of course you can. But I'll let an expert deal with that. For expansion of this topic, this is a video that woodworking gurus Christopher Schwarz and Peter Follansbee filmed on this same subject.  Enjoy.

~ Scott

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*It helps that Jesus was a carpenter, or at least his dad was. Depictions of the Holy Family are almost inevitably filled to the rafters with tools. In many ways, the artifacts of the Mary Rose ship's carpenter and the Vasa ship's carpenter are just confirming things we already knew from period depictions of Joseph. 

A Joiner's Toolbox: The Hand Plane

If this sometimes feels like a woodworking blog, I apologize. It's not intended that way; it's just that so much of the technology of the 16th century revolved around items made from wood or iron. Often both. 

Despite the fact that modern woodworking has largely become a matter of "He/She who dies with the most tools wins" it hasn't always been that way. In no small part, this is owed to the fact that there wasn't as much unnecessary variety in tools. The tool box if the 16th century joiner was relatively simple. Even today, there's not much you can't make if you have a couple of measuring implements, a sharp knife, a few decent chisels, a saw or two, a hand drill, a nice heavy mallet, a hammer, and a few simple hand planes. (Your apprentice will also need an axe, a mallet, and a froe for splitting lumber as well since you can't go down to ye olde Home Depot to buy it.)

Some details can be found in period sources:

"A Rule a compass a hatchet a hansawe a fore plane a joynter a smothen plane two moulden planes a groven plane a paren chysell a mortisse chesell a wymble a Rabbet plane and six graven Tooles and a Strykinge plane..."  

- From a 1594 apprenticeship contract of John Sparke and Humfrey Bryne, outlining the tools of the joiner's trade. (As quoted in "Seventeenth Century tool kit." Peter Follansbee, joiner's notes (blog). September 8, 2009.) 

If you're engaged in a specific trade, of course, there would be a couple of additional items such as lathe tools or spoke shaves, but there's really not really much variance from that central list.

A small selection from my toolbox...

The primary tool in the joiner's toolbox is the hand plane. Roy Underhill has even said that the difference between a carpenter and a joiner is the joiner's plane. He's right in a very specific way: guild laws actually forbade the use of certain key tools by other craftsmen in order to discourage generalists. For the joiner, the hand plane -- especially the plough plane -- was his identity as much as the lathe identified the turner.

The hand plane is essentially a chisel held in a frame and secured in place with a wedge. Sometimes, there's a handle at the front or back, depending on where and how it's used. They've been around since pre-Roman times and arose independently in cultures cut off from one another as the obvious next step to save labor from smoothing large surfaces with hand chisels and adzes.

The parts of a hand plane (I realized I haven't done a custom illustration in awhile)

The amount of change between the Roman hand plane linked to above to the hand planes that were found in the wreck of Mary Rose (below) and the ones in my wood shop today is very slight. The drawing above could cover any one of them. Most of the changes were matters of metallurgy as the blades got better and better and the chip-breaker was introduced to help alleviate the clogging problems endemic to the old beasts.

It wasn't really until the industrial revolution that any great change in plane technology was introduced and took root. In 1865, Leonard Bailey's patent hand plane changed the plane from the wooden carcass we see in the archaeological record (and my tool chest) to the iron-bodied planes that we see today.

If you've been following along, you've seen this tool before in a far more decrepit shape. It's my recently refurbished Bailey Number 6 with my custom over-sized walnut tote (I have large hands). This is the most common form of hand plane seen in workshops today. My friends might mock me as a Luddite, but even in my focus on hand tools, I'm a mostly modern worker of wood. Iron body planes have it all over the wooden ones in durability and adjustability. They're easier to use, easier to set up, and less finicky by far than their old wooden counterparts. Want to adjust the iron on a wood plane? Grab a mallet. Whack the tail to retract the blade, the front to extend it, the sides to adjust the pitch, and hit the wedge to set the blade... then do it all over again if you get too much or too little. Yet wooden planes are still made today and used religiously by many.

Why?

I wondered that myself until I bought a couple of them from my local antique dealer and put them back into service. First off, they're fun. I can't find a better way to describe it. Also, the weight of the thing does some of the work for you. I've noticed as well that once you've worked out the zen of setting the iron,  they don't chatter as much.

Another thing worth noting is that proper joinery of the period was all done with green wood. None of this kiln-dried nonsense that we get today: Cut down the tree, split it up, and make some furniture! If you try working green wood with iron-bodied planes you're going to have rust problems in pretty short order.

Incidentally, they can also be quite beautiful.

My favorite planes aren't as pretty as the one Robin Wood made (pictured in the link above) but they are elegant in their simplicity.

The fact that these tools changed so little from their inception to now is a blessing of a different sort: We can set up our (mostly) period-correct toolbox without making them. The differences, in fact, are so slight that in his book "Make A Joint Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Joinery," Peter Follansbee advises buying them and getting on with it. This is because -- other than the addition of a chip-breaker and handle placement -- the wood-body planes I can buy today in any antique store are virtually identical to the tools depicted in paintings, engravings, and other depictions of early modern joiners, as well as the first English-language treatise dealing with the joiner's art: Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (available via that link as a free download), published in 1694.

We'll be referring to Moxon again, so get used to hearing his name...

~ Scott

Image from Moxon found via Project Gutenberg's scan of Woodworking Tools 1600-1900

Doing Time in the Joint: Introducing the Worshipful Company of Joiners

I’ve heard any number of definitions that seek to draw a line between the joiner and the carpenter. Some people say the joiner is defined by his lack of nails. Others by the outcomes: the carpenter builds bridges and buildings while the joiner builds finer things. In an episode of the Woodwright’s Shop, Roy Underhill defines the joiner by his tools, saying he becomes a joiner the moment he picks up a jointer’s plane.

The Oxford English Dictionary takes the "Defined by his results" definition: "A craftsman whose occupation is to construct things by joining pieces of wood ; a worker in wood who does lighter and more ornamental work than that of a carpenter, as the construction of the furniture and fittings of a house, ship, etc." and dutifully notes that it first appears in print from 1386.

Back in May, my favorite woodworking blogger The Village Carpenter wrapped up her blog and signed off, but not before she added me to her blogroll under "Hand Tools Only". When she did this, I was unaware of it and I'm somewhat amused to note that looking back, I haven't done much woodworking since she did so.

One of the reasons you haven't seen many wood chips fly is that I've been remodeling my kitchen (using power tools, I confess). The other is that I've been doing research and acquiring a box of tools that are as near their period form as possible. As always, I get by with a little help from my friends and it never ceases to amaze me how many people have taken on this project as if it was their own.

I've had leads on tools emailed to me and received tools mailed to me from as far away as Georgia (thanks, Noel!) and the UK (thank you, Douglas!). As you probably know, some of them I've revived from the slumber of ages and some of them I inherited.

At this point I've acquired enough tools to begin building the rest of the tools I'll need and for that I shall need joinery.

I guess it's high time I earned that link. 

Well, it's a good start, anyway...

In the Joint, Part One

In the 16th century, there were many joints that did not rely on nails to hold together and it was the joiner whose specialty was the making and execution of those joints. The key joint, in my opinion, wasn't the dovetail so prized by modern cabinetmakers, but the mortise and tenon.

At its simplest definition, mortises are holes and tenons are slightly smaller bits sized to fit inside the holes.  The tenon is then usually held in place by pegs or nails or in the case of knockdown items like trestle tables, a removable key.

If you think about it, that seems a bit weak, but it isn't.  Houses and furniture that was built in the 16th century this manner are still standing today. A bit closer to home, I'm talked before about the 16th century wheelbarrow I made using mostly period joinery, the key joints being four through tenons that form the chassis.

See those two tenons that are sticking through the arms of the barrow above? Those are the tenons that lock the whole thing together. Even the wheel is held in place by those two framing members...

All those pieces in the picture above are held together and square by those four tenons. Until I had to repair the wheel a few years after this photo was taken, there were two nails in the entire thing. The only reason I used screws on the wheel is so I could change it more easily.

Eight years later it looks like this...

That sounds fine and I'll admit that it looks a bit ramshackle, but bear in mind that we're looking at a farm and garden tool that I made out of $25 worth of crap lumber from Home Depot and when I wasn't using it to haul sandbags and lumber, it was parked under a tree for eight years.

No matter how much I loaded the thing down, those tenons held tight.

The pins holding the tenons in place are known as "drawbore" pins, which means the holes are slightly offset and the pin is being yanked in two different directions, preventing it or the joint being held from moving.

This is one of the only two nails in the piece.  I didn't need them. Not sure why I bothered to use them. It's just that I was new at the drawbore tenon and didn't really trust myself yet.

Cutting a mortise

These days, a lucky woodworker with a decent machine cuts these with a mortising machine, which is a hollow square chisel that is dragged through the wood by an augur running through the hollow center. Most of the time these days, I remove the waste from the hole using a drill and then square the hole with a chisel.

We'll be doing this chopping it out with just a chisel.  Handily, this is the exact chisel my grandpa used to teach me how to do this thirty-odd years ago.

I really need to make a new leather washer for that chisel handle.

Draw your square with a knife or a mortising gauge and make a series of small lateral cuts... 

Then, go in at a slight angle and remove the waste between each lateral cut, working with a nice, sharp chisel and working slowly to keep your edges square.

Rinse and repeat, working as deep into the wood as you need to go. Not all tenons need be through-tenons and there are a dozen or so ways to stop them short and lock them in using wedges if you're not up to the drawbore technique.

Not all tenons are shouldered, which is what the parts of the timber on the sides of the tenon in the illustration above would be called. The mortises in the embroidery frame pictured below are the same size as the tenon pieces and are kept in place by the pegs in the frame and the tension of the embroidery. We'll see more of it when we pull thread with the Worshipful Company of Broderers.

I brought up the frame because it handily illustrates how everything made of wood in the 16th century at some point passed under the tools of the guilds of joiners and carpenters. Every embroidery frame, every box, every building. So this is going to be a big one...

Want to learn more about Drawbore Joinery?

Read this article at WK Fine Tools by cabinetmaker and Popular Woodworking contributing editor Christopher Schwarz:

http://www.wkfinetools.com/contrib/cschwarz/z_art/drawboring/drawboring4.asp

Peter Follansbee deals extensively with the mechanics of the drawbore in his book "Make a Joint Stool from a Tree" published by Lost Art Press.

~ Scott