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. 

Cordwhatnow? A layman's guide to shoemaking tools and terms

Much to The Engineer's chagrin, my shoemaking project has quite overtaken the library. Thankfully, I've recently obtained a toolbox capable of organizing it all, so at least it's contained.

My leatherworking kit has been taken over by shoemaking. (Giant robot panda bear is optional equipment. Coffee is not.)

For whatever reason, shoemaking more than any other craft I've yet assayed has a language all its own. You don't have to speak the language in order to do this thing -- you never really do to be honest -- but you should know at least the basics if you want to communicate with other shoemakers out in the world or on the interwebs.

In the course of my research, I have assembled a short (and woefully incomplete) glossary in my notebooks of just the terms that pertain to what I plan to do. For an exhaustive list of shoemaking terms, I recommend this excellent one compiled by Marc Carlson: Glossary of Footwear Terminology.

For us, the following shall suffice:

Awl: For shoemakers, this is a dedicated metal bodkin with a handle, designed to poke holes in leather. They are very fine and very sharp and shaped specific to a task. Not to be confused with woodworking "scratch" awls or bookbinding awls, which are not suitable for most shoemaking tasks.

The wrong tools: From the top, A large scratch awl, a small scratch awl, and a 

bookbinding awl. These are not appropriate tools for sewing leather and will 

do more harm than good.

The correct tools: (from the top), an 1800's inseaming awl, a modern sewing awl with 

interchangeable blades, and another 1800's fine closing awl. Note their shape and how 

fine/sharp they are. These will not mangle your leather. Find them and use them.

Boot: A shoe with a cuff that extends up the leg as low as the ankle or as high as the upper thigh. The most common argument about footwear is how common were boots, how high, and under what circumstances were they worn and by whom.

Channel: A groove cut in the leather to protect a row of stitches that are laid at the bottom of the groove.

Clicking: Cutting out a pattern.

Clogs: Not just for Dutchmen any more. They never were, really; wooden shoes 

showed up anywhere there was mud or the potential for stuff falling on your toes.

Clog: A wooden-soled shoe with a leather upper, commonly worn as work boots are now, also worn over a lighter shoe as a type of patten. In particularly muddy or dangerous places, they could be made entirely out of wood with a carved-out inside for the foot.

Closing: A general term for sewing the leather pieces of the shoe together, usually edge-to-edge (a butted seam)

Closing Block: A half-round piece of wood used as a sort of sewing anvil, used to maintain the tension of leather that will be sewn on a curve. Usually held strapped to the showmaker's knee with a leather strap while sewing.

Cobbler: A shoe repairer, forbidden by English law from working with new leather, enforced by the guilds. (Do not call a shoemaker a cobbler.)

Cordwainer: A shoemaker, derived from 'Cordovan/Cordoban' leather, a specific durable leather named after a city in Spain from whence it was exported. Commonly a deep reddish color and used today to describe that color.

Counter: A reinforcing layer of leather sewn inside the shoe as a stiffener to prevent additional stretching or wear in a zone that would prone to that, such as the heel or instep.

Cowmouth: A broad-toed shoe that was common in the early-Tudor period (peaked during the reign of Henry VIII) commonly thought to have been brought to England, as so many early fashions were, from Germany.

Flesh-side: the side of the leather that was facing the animal.

Foot: A place to keep your shoes. A thing that usually hurts at the end of the day, often an indicator that your shoemaker doesn't know what he's doing.

Gouge/Plow: A tool used to cut away a broad channel of leather, sort of a combination of a skivving knife, a chisel, and a shovel.

Grain-side: The side of the leather that was facing the world when it was still attached to the critter that made it.

Tools for dealing with tacks: (from the back, left) Two english style shoemaker's 

hammers, a French shoemaker's hammer, a tack hammer made by a local 

blacksmith, pincers, and a tack-puller.

Hammer: Shoemaker's hammers are broadly split into English and French styles. They are used for a variety of purposes from forming/compressing leather to driving tacks (though I don't advise using one hammer for both)

Heel: Made of wood or stacked leather, shoe heels did not commonly appear until the very end of the Tudor era. It's believed that the advent of heeled designs was the complcating factor that lead to the abandonment of right/left (see: Crooked lasts) designs.

Sewing: From the top, anti-clockwise: Sticky wax for binding thread to bristle,
beeswax, long-fiber hemp thread.

Hemp: Alongside linen, hemp was probably the most common plant fiber in all of history. Spun from strands of the cannabis sativa plant it is strong and rot-resistant and historically widely used to sew all manner of leather goods as well as weaving durable cloth and spinning rope. These days a fiber most commonly used to make beaded jewelry by and for those who want to 'stick it to the man' in defiance of laws designed to curtail the plant's use as a psychotropic drug. Cultivars used for fiber production are absent or extremely low on the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) that makes carbon-based life forms crave Twinkies when ingested.

Last: The foot-surrogate over which the shoe is formed.

Lasting: Stretching the leather over the wooden (usually) last and nailing it in place. Commonly divided (at least for our purposes) into crooked or straight lasts. Crooked lasts have a defined instep, dictating the right/life nature of the final shoe. A straight lasted shoe can be worn on either foot, but requires months of tortuous breaking in.

Latchet: A strap that holds the shoe in place, commonly with a button or tie. Latchets are the defining characteristic of a shoe by the same name, that became more common in the later Tudor period.

Mule: A backless slip-on shoe, worn in our period by all genders, but still common today in the women's section of the shoe store.

From the top: a gouge, a paring knife, an edger, a plow/plough, another paring knife.
Not Shown: Sharpening stones. All tools used in leatherworking should be razor-sharp

Paring knife: Before it was a common kitchen implement, the paring knife was used to clean up the edges by trimming away excess leather away from the shoe after the sole and upper were joined.

Patten: A protective wooden platform strapped to the foot to raise a walker out of the mud or at least to provide traction.

Peg: A wooden stake driven into a heel to bind and stabilize the stacked/laminated leather.

Pinking: Decorative cuts and holes sometimes cut into shoes and clothing in the Tudor period. It survives today as broguing.

Pump: A light turnshoe with a thin sole meant for wearing mostly indoors. Worn by all genders, but survives today in the women's section of the shoe store.

Quarter: The sides of the shoe extending around the back.

My favorite skivving knife was made by sharpening a butter knife I picked up at a 

thrift shop. Probably the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Skivving: Using a sharp blade on the flesh-side of the leather to thin the leather, especially in areas you want to sew through.

Sock: Not a sweatsock you wear on your foot, but a cloth liner sometimes sewn into a shoe which serves a similar purpose.

Sole: The bottom layers of the shoe, usually broken down by layer: insole, midsole, outsole, etcetera.

Stirrup: A leather strap that goes under the shoemaker's foot and up over the knee to hold secure a shoe and/or closing block while working with it.

Many skivving tools of modern design: From the back: A round knife, a 'potato 

peeler' skivving 'knife', and a modern razor skivving tool. The benefit of the
top two is you can change blades if they get dull. 

Trenchet: A multi-use shoemaker's knife and the symbol of the cordwainer's trade. They were often given elaborate blades and pokey bits until it seems like something stolen from a Klingon in the Star Trek universe, but quite real and very difficult to find these days. Survives today as the round knife, which is little better than half a trenchet.

Turning: When a shoe is sewn inside out so that the seaming is all on the inside and thus protected from wear.

Vamp: The part of the shoe that covers the toe, upper foot, and extends around the instep to meet the quarters on either side.

Welt: A strip of leather used to join the upper to the sole of the shoe.

If you're lucky, your shoemaking will also include one or both of the following:

Read whatever you want, but did I mention that coffee is not optional?

Coffee: In order to make shoes, the shoemaker must be awake and preferably alert.  The Elizabethan tradesman was woefully deficient in caffeine, but he had pretty much all the beer he cared to drink, so alertness while working might be my biggest anachronism.

Why do fools fall in love?

An Engineer: Actually, a mate who finds your tomfoolery charming rather than annoying, who is willing to put up with odd tools and odd looks from TSA agents. They don't have to be an engineer, but it helps. It's high time I acknowledge that this silliness would not be possibly without my lovely, talented, and above all patient mate, Kristin.

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

Learning Curves and the State of the Project: I know now why apprentices are a Thing...

Part One: History and Hubris 

“History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.” – Henri Fabre

That sounds familiar.

That quote, attributed to Henri Fabre[1], sits at the top of page one, chapter one in the book Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob. The book is a vast and noble attempt to fix Mssr Fabre’s problem, and it goes a long way toward doing so. It is the latest of many books I’ve found and wished I had and/or read before we embarked on this journey. At risk of stacking quotes, an old adage that’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln says that the purpose of reading is to remind us that our original ideas aren’t all that original.

Touché, Mssrs. Lincoln, Fabre, & co. A hit, a palpable hit...

What 6,000 Years of Bread really does well, though, is map out a very reasonable twenty-years spent by the author trying to understand the origins of bread. And it reminds me that what I’m doing here has become less and less about the world, trade, and tools of the renaissance craftsmen and more and more about their tools.

In other words, I’ve gone about this entire thing in entirely the wrong way. 

For instance, when I ventured into the world of the Worshipful Company of Turners, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what kind of lathe to build, how it operates, and how to build one. Then I built one. From scratch.

Now, while I knew this would be part of the process, I wildly under-estimated how long it would take to build all of these tools. (Or perhaps underestimated the size of my own creative ego, you be the judge.)

The next project includes baking and cooking.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my house didn’t come equipped with an Elizabethan spec kitchen any more than it came with a wood shop, which means there’s a cob oven and hob rising from nothing in my back yard. And I’m doing everything myself except baking the bricks.

And I really ought to be baking the bricks except that I haven’t found someone with a large enough kiln yet who will let me near it. 

Which all sort of argues that my project has veered more toward a re-imagining of the renaissance as something that was invented from nothing. Or perhaps springing from some post-apocalyptic hellscape where each piece of technology has to be re-created from stuff I find lying around. 

 Mad Max, circa 1560.

Part Two: Tools and Their Users

Sometimes I feel like I’m not so much learning how an Elizabethan artisan lived his life as reenacting the 1600 odd years that preceded his life as we moved from whittling to bow lathes to springpoles and treadles and onward. Sometimes it’s a bit like studying the lives of Indy drivers and starting by learning how to make tires from scratch...

Because I’m almost literally reinventing the wheel with every one of these projects, it eats into the time I can spend actually learning about the craftsmen and the things they made. Which is fine, studying the tools is a fine thing and I’m learning a mind-blowing amount of information about fabricating my own tools. But I think that the key thing I’m learning is that this should have been two projects: a yearlong preparation stage where I build the tools and then a second year when I learn to use them to create standard period artifacts and study the people who used them.

Which isn't the worst idea I've ever had, actually.

There's an inherent drawback to inheriting your tools. You were either not alive or too young to care when they were purchased. (Actually, in my case, my grandpa was either not alive or too young to care when some of them were purchased.) So you don't have a really close relationship with that punch to the wallet that accompanies some tool purchases.

Seriously, I bought my first new hammer ever just this year.

When I first embarked on this project, I thought that with easy access to the internet, I could get my hands on anything I really needed to get a project done. Going out into the community to see if I could source things locally was a bit of a lark because I could always just order it online. And that's certainly true, as it turns out... but there's a hitch.

Take this adze for instance.

If you've never seen one of those before, that's okay; it's not exactly a common tool in modern America. An ancient tool, the adze is sort of a sideways axe, used to dig out hollows (as with a dugout canoe) or smooth a surface (as shown above).

The adze in the image above was an adze-shaped ball of rust when I found it in the bottom of a bin at a flea market. The seller thought it was a gardening tool, and priced it at the princely sum of $5.99. In the past couple of months, I've procured three adzes in precisely the same manner, and in the same state of disrepair. As followers of the Facebook feed know, I recently spent the weekend bringing them back to life.

That one tool took six hours to bring back to life. I worked the sun into and out of the sky and still wasn't finished with the smaller of the three, a cooper's adze.

It was time well spent and it makes my heart glad. This tool is truly a joy to use, as are the other two.

My forbears left me a big box of serious tools because they took their tools seriously. And even if that wasn't true, standing opposed to the disposable aesthetic is part of maker culture.

Part of what makes me... me.

I also refuse to spend the money on anything that won't survive regular use. (Except computer equipment, which is a rant for a different time.) There's no economic sense in spending a $100 for a tool that will last five years (maybe) when you can buy a thirty or hundred-year tool for $200.

This is complicated by the fact that at the outset of this endeavor, I had to agree not to bankrupt us in my quest. The Engineer is smarter than I am and always has been. She's followed me into many a woodworking store and while I was oohing and ahhhing over the figured cherry, she was flipping price tags. She knew this would not be cheap and extracted a promise from me before I caught on.

See? Smarter.

Everything I could ever possibly need is indeed available to me via the internet, but there's a catch. Real tools cost real money.

Three: The Internet & the Deep Blue Sea

As we've discussed before, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose went down on July 19, 1545, she sealed for the ages a time capsule of life in Henrician England. The artifacts preserved included the tools of the ship's carpenters. Eight chests of period tools, preserved by the waters of the Solent and a strange quirk of unkind fate.

Despite there being eight chests of tools, this is not by any stretch an elaborate or even complete example of a wood worker's trade. The tools aboard Mary Rose were specific to the task of keeping her upright and fighting. Nevertheless this gives us that rarest of gifts for a project like this one: an intact example of a 16th century tradesman's tools.

Which made me wonder what it would cost if I just went out and bought the modern interpretations of those classic hand tools. Hewing as closely as possible to their historical counterparts, of course, and bearing in mind the quality standards already outlines, I pretended I had a Hollywood budget under my belt, composed a selected list of key tools from Mary Rose, and went window shopping.

Broad Axe (Woodcraft).... $300.00

Broad Hatchet (Amazon).... $125.00

Carpenter's Adze (Lee Valley).... $250.00

Hand Adze (Lee Valley)... $50.00

Wimble (A wooden brace or hand drill)... Metal varieties are a dime a dozen. No one seems to sell wooden ones anymore and anyone that wants one, makes one. Antiques are priced from $50 up.

Spoon bits (no spiral bits in the 16th Century - Lee Valley).... $80.00 for a set of five

Bow Saw (Gramercy Tools).... $150.00

Wooden Smoothing Plane (Closest I could find to the Mary Rose example - Lee Valley).... $239

Wooden Rabbet Plane (Or what looks like one in the few pics I can find online - Lee Valley).... $39.50

Marking/Mortise Gauge (Rockler)..... $49.50

Dividers (Lee Valley).... $23.00

Ruler (Primitive).... It's a stick with marks burnt into it. Can't imagine buying one from someone.

Draw Knife (Daegrad).... £ 27.99 (Call it $43.00 at today's exchange rate)

Handsaw (Northwind Toolworks).... $275.00

I stopped when the total hit $1600.00 and remember that he would also have had various nippers, pliers, clamps, and miscellaneous whatnot which were made primarily of ferrous metals and therefore lost to time and tides.

I'm not saying that my tool chest is worth anywhere near that much (because it isn't), or that these are worth that much (though they are) you can see why I rely heavily on the antique stores and flea markets. And why I jumped at a carpenter's adze for under $6.00, even if it was a lump of ferrous oxide.

Also, bear in mind that this list would just cover tools for the carpenter's portion of the project. Leaving aside the overlap with the coopers, joiners, and turners which would still add to the total. There's also cooks and bakers and embroiderers and knitters and spinners and weavers and woolmen...

Thankfully, I am only metaphorically doing this on a stage, so there's no reason for me to go out and buy the perfectly period versions of these tools unless it genuinely affects the outcome in some way. Even Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation advises aspiring joiners to get close and get on with it.



So that's what I'm doing, but it's still slow-going.

Which is why a large and growing portion of this project has been about tools. Hunting, creating, rehabilitating, tools. And if at the end of the year all I've learned or earned is about the tools and toolmaking, I suppose I'll just have to spend another year learning about their users.And I'm going to call that a win.

With that settled, rest assured I will be posting more often in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

- Scott

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[1] Though the quote is attributed to Henri Fabre (inventor of the sea plane) in the book where I found it, I suspect that it’s actually attributable to Jen-Henri Fabre, entomologist and social commentator who also said “The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.” Which I find similarly germane to my mission.

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 Staves Are Numbered: Making a Mary Rose Tankard Part Four

I forgot to mention one of my mistakes in that last post, but that's okay. I didn't need to dwell any more than I did and thankfully, it's not like hide glue wasn't available in the 16th century*. Oak is a cantankerous wood and tends to be ultra-dense and sturdy except when it isnt, and when it isn't, it tends to be at the worst possible moment.

That chunk missing from stave #8 is not intentional. It's the result of a slipping chisel and a fault in the oak that was just ready to slip.



It will be repaired after the tankard is fully assembled.  Which brings us to numbering the staves. It almost seems logical to just number them one-through-eight, but that ignores an important fact of handworking wood: each side of each stave is different.

So, as you're fine-tuning each stave to match up to the one next to it, it's important to number the joints rather than numbering the staves.

Stave 1-2 matches up against 2-3, which matches up with stave 3-4... etcetera.  On the bottom, that means numbering the points of the octogon. The bottom too will need to be individually trimmed and scraped to fit into the croze.

The tension of the wood as it swells (as it will when it gets wet) will push against the hoops, which will push back and that tension will seal up any miniscule gaps left.

And that's how coopering works!

I hope.

Anyway, as you can see, every piece is complete. You can see in the picture above, the lid and handle are complete and it's all ready to go. Come what may, leaking or not, this ends tomorrow.

~Scott

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*Speaking of 16th century glues, I was recently gifted with a copy of "Il Libro dell'Arte" (The Craftsman's Handbook) by Cennino d'Andrea Cennini by one of my readers. For the record, I don't court such random acts of generosity but I approve of them wholeheartedly. Thank you Noel Gieleghem for the kind gift and your support past and present. I have already put it to good use!

The Man with Three Bottoms: Making a Mary Rose Tankard Part Three

When I get stressed, I make things. Yesterday I made mistakes. But they were 100% lovingly hand-crafted mistakes, so at least I have that going for me...

Incidentally, if you ever want to try doing this, a book I recommend that you get your hands on is called "100 Keys to Preventing & Fixing Woodworking Mistakes" by Alan and Gill Bridgewater. There are probably a thousand books like it, and you're going to need at least one.

Just trust me on this.

Bottoming Out

I've been hunting around online and even reached out to the Museum of London and the Mary Rose Trust, but nowhere can I find a decent image that shows the bottom of one of these tankards. So I am going to have to guess.

I don't know if you've ever taken a good look at a bucket or barrel, but the bottoms sit in a groove called a "croze". Professional coopers have a special tool for cutting the croze into the barrel end which I do not posses, so to avoid making yet another tool (delaying completion yet again) and/or defaulting to my power router, I had to mark a line and cut the croze by hand.

The marking gauge from grandpa's toolbox is ideal for this. It has two sliding rules that I can set to separate depths. To scribe two lines at two different depths (the top and bottom of the croze in this case) all I have to do is set both pins and spin it around to make the second one.

As you can see, I've had to temporarily put the tankard together using cable ties. These are obviously not correct for the period, but a period cooper wouldn't need to do this step so I suppose I'll get over it.

The croze is, essentially, a dado, which is to say a groove in the wood to accept another perpendicular piece, the bottom of the tankard in this case. Incidentally, if I ever make more of these on a more generous deadline, I shall make that croze plane. Cutting an accurate dado on an inside curve is not something I care to make a habit of. This vessel is rather smaller than most antique croze tools I've seen, so I'll have to make it from scratch in the shop, hence skipping it this time in the interest of time.

So far so good. I was feeling pretty good about how things were going and forgot what Indiana Jones warned about Holy Grail about when things were going well.

"That's usually when the ground falls out from under your feet."

Bottom #1

The concept is simple. A piece of wood is cut into a circle and the edge narrowed to be wedged into the croze, forming a seal. In a barrel, this is called the 'head', as in the saying 'cash on the barrelhead'. I had a large piece of tulip poplar lying around and used a coping saw to cut out a circle. Then I used chisels to cut a dado around the edge to slip into the croze.

It's not as messy as it looks in that picture. Honest. I was mid-way through the endless attempts at accurate shaping at this point. It didn't even pretend to fit. And as I whittled away more and more of the poplar, it just got worse.

Finally it just fell out and I left it lying on the grass.

Bottom #2

The problem as I ascertained it was that because I didn't use the proper tool to cut the croze, the shape was not actually a perfect circle. I paused in my operations to clean up the croze and get a better handle on their actual inside shape. It turned out to be sort of a rounded octagon.

I took the last bit of poplar I had and used a handsaw to cut it into an octagon to better echo the interior shape of my tankard and then went back at it with my chisels.

The paring and whittling and chiseling and cursing went on for quite awhile before the wood split and I was left holding two bits of wood where only one should go. I was running out of daylight and poplar.

Time to switch woods and tactics.

Bottom #3

Pine. It was all I had handy that was wide enough to cut a bottom out of and I was tired of wasting better wood on a learning exercise. Get a working bottom done, I decided; then you can use it as a template to cut one out of good stuff.

You know... what I should have done to begin with. Pride goeth before the autumn and it was darn well time for spring.

More later after I sort this out...

~Scott