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

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

- Vitruvius, De Architectura 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Scott

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

The Last Last Post

For the record: I'm won't spend quite this many posts for the second last. However, on advice from Francis, I did go back out to the workbench and spent some more time zeroing in on the correct form of my last. He advised that I raise the sole about a 1/4 inch, sloping from the ball of the foot to the heel. This isn't to accommodate a heel so much as to accommodate the shape of the human foot.

This was done mostly with hand tools this time: the pattern maker's rasp and as I neared my final desired measurements, a spokeshave. I will sand it to remove most of the toolmakrs before putting a finish on it and moving on to the next one.

In the meantime, we're going to shift over and visit the Joiner's shop.  Stay tuned!

~ Scott

A bit of heel lift demonstrated by putting the heel on a handy speed square.

The less-flattened sole of the shoe.

 

...and Lasts, and Lasts, and Lasts

So apparently when Francis Class told me that the problem with modern/vintage lasts is that they're not 'flat' he meant 'didn't have a heel' rather than 'as a board'. (So to speak.)

You see, it didn't quite sink in that, unlike maskmaking, when you take the last out of the shoe, you don't cut it out. So there needs to be a bit of wiggle room in the form of a toe and heel rise to allow you to slip the last out of the shoe without stretching and distorting it in the effort.

That makes perfect sense.

Thankfully, in the conversation I had with Francis last night, it turned out I'm not the first aspiring shoemaker to grab a piece of scrap pine and try to turn it into a last. He shared this link to the shoemaking blog Where Are the Elves? Adventures in Historical Shoemaking. This guy turned up an historical last to copy. It's a 'straight last' and I'm making a 'crooked last' but more on that another time.

Also, the sole is generally a bit smaller than the shadow of the shoe. So my last needed to look even less like a shoe and even more like a foot.

I can do that.

Tonight after work I grabbed my patternmaker's rasp (Hand tools FTW!) and spent some time with my last in a vise, re-shaping the sole and putting more of a narrow waist on the new last.

I might have to shape it a bit more but I didn't want to overdo it. It's easier to take off too little than to put too much back. . . or something like that.

Worshipful Company of Cordwainers Part I: Something that lasts...

Don't call them 'Cobblers'. A cordwainer is a shoemaker, a cobbler was actually forbidden by statute from working with new leather. His purview was restricted to repairing a cordwainer's work after it failed. The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers controlled all aspects of the manufacture of new shoes.

Whence came the name? For that, we go straight to the horse's mouth, as usual...

"Those who worked with the finest leather were called Cordwainers because their material came from Cordoba in Spain. They developed a soft, durable goatskin leather known as Cordwain – the very finest leather available – importation of which contributed to the growing prosperity of London. Over a period of time, those who processed the leather formed their own guilds. The shoemakers, however, retained the name of 'Cordwainer'." - From their site: http://www.cordwainers.org

Yesterday I said I knew nothing about shoemaking going in. This is true, though I've done an extensive amount of leatherworking so "nothing" might be a bit of a stretch. My favorite form of leatherworking, in fact, is making leather Commedia Del Arte masks like the one you see below. 

Much like shoe making, masks are made with the leather worked wet and formed over a carved wooden matrix. (If you are interested in maskmaking, click here for a full tutorial I wrote last year). So the first step in making either mask or shoes isn't leather, it is carving wood.

And carving wood is something I understand completely.

First things first, I had a chat via email with Francis Classe, historical cordwainer extraordinaire and all around nice guy. He's been very helpful and supportive all along, providing not only advice, but photos and links to things he'd written as well as books of historical shoe making. Francis works with modern wooden lasts that he modifies for a period shape.

I like woodworking and I have some carving tools that haven't been taken for a spin in far too long, so we're going to make our own. (This is not to be confused with the fact that I have a size twelve foot and couldn't easily find a modern last to modify. Nope! Not at all.)

Seriously though, I shake my fist as these hobbit feet on a regular basis.

Seriously, I had to get out the big sketchbook to even trace around them. I know people with larger feet than mine and I tell you now I don't want to make shoes for any of them.

The lastmakers weren't a proper guild in their own right, so I'll be going through this pretty fast and hopefully we'll get it in one. Essentially I'll be using a lifetime of carving experience to sculpt something approximating my foot. Then I'll do it again with the other foot.

Deviation(s) from Period Techniques: Near as I can tell, the standard practice for last makers in the period is much the same as now. Hardwoods (preferably beech) are cut to a rough shape using something called a 'stock knife' which aren't easily obtained in the United States. A stock knife is a large blade with a handle on one end and a hook on the other. I'll append a video at the bottom of this post of an experienced clogmaker using one.

The hook is secured to an eyebolt in the table as a fulcrum to form a 2nd class lever. I couldn't find one and don't have the werewithal to make one, also I'll be using scraps of pine since this doesn't have to survive the ages, just the one project. If I like doing this and want to do it again, I'll make another out of a hardwood. In the meantime: pine.

Because my feet are deep and wide, I glued up a some chunks of 2 x 6 I had lying around and transferred my traced outline of my foot to the wood, trying to avoid knots and grain funkiness. Or at least use the grain funkiness to my advantage.

Step two of any carving project is to remove as much waste material as possible. The fastest and cleanest way to do this would be to cut it away with a band saw, but I don't own one. So the second best chance is to cut to the line and chop away the waste with a combination of chisels and coping saws.

It's hard to do this and take pictures at the same time and The Engineer was grouting the kitchen tiles, so forgive me if these look a bit staged. It's only because my hands aren't in the shot.

Having pared away as much of the waste as possible, only resorting to the chopsaw for the bit that crosses the knot at the little toe.  Chisels tend to glance off of knots or chunk them out completely to the detriment of carving as a whole.  A real last maker would choose a clear piece of hardwood, as I said, but we're working with what we have.

Now, more cuts to make the waste as small as possible before removing it with a smaller chisel...

Working in all three dimensions means more cuts and switching through a series of chisels and working top and bottom.  According to Francis, unlike modern lasts, period lasts tended to be flat-bottomed since heels hadn't really become a Thing yet.

At this point, it's time to switch to a gouge because it's easier to create and follow curves with a gouge than it is with a bench chisel...

Most of the waste is removed, time to get to the final shaping.

This is where I encountered a very modern conundrum. Because lastmaking is ancillary to the actual project and just this one had already eaten the heart out of a day, I was faced with another few hours of paring away at the last with a succession of knives and rasps, or I could use a machine.

My conscience got the better of me. In the end, I rasped away most of it until I's achieved something close the final shape and was starting to lose the light. Then I took it into the garage and chucked a drum sander into the drill press and finished the final shaping and sanding in one.

So... speed may kill, but it does save you from wasting more time than you have to.

Next: Do you know your left from your right? Did the Elizabethans?

~ Scott

----

Resources:

"Footwear of the Middle Ages" by Marc Carlson (Website) How historical shoes were made from the middle ages through the Tudors, working from primary sources and personal experience. Great site, lots of information.

"Handmade Shoes for Men" by Laszlo Vass and Magda Molnar (Book) Modern shoe making and some inaccurate history, but valuable information on measuring feet and fitting shoes.

"Stepping Through Time: Archeological Footwear from Prehistoric Times Until 1800" by Olaf Goubitz (Book) Just what it says on the tin. Francis swears by this book. I haven't acquired a copy yet, but I'm working on it.

"Chopine, Zoccolo, and Other Raised and High Heel Construction" by Francis Classe (Website) I hesitate to risk the pun, but Francis is a class act and a generous scholar of historical footwear and how it was made. Visit his site and his blog to see this done right, thoroughly, and well.

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

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.

Turn Turn Turn, for everything there is a cliche, turn turn turn...

I apologize for my absence. I've been having a... thing. I don't believe in writer's block so it's not that, it's just... I dunno. You can read about it at Pages to Type if you want: Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of writers and rituals otherwise, accept my apologies and let us move on to wood spinning in a circle with a blade placed against it...

The Worshipful Company of Turners

My lathe. Up close and personal...

I've never particularly liked turning. Modern lathes are fast and dangerous and freakishly expensive, which combined uncomfortably in my mind with the idea that has often been pushed on me that all woodworkers are aspiring turners.

I am not.

At least not until I discovered that I could build my own lathe, which appealed to my "Make Neat Things" aesthetic and helped me take my first hesitant step onto that slippery slope of wood turning.

The history of lathes is very interesting and rather closely parallels the history of the spinning wheel and the pottery wheel, all of which operate on much the same principals, though not necessarily in the same plane. By the 16th century, there were three kinds of lathe existing side-by-side: the fairly primative bow lathe, the springpole lathe and the treadle lathe, which I gather was a recent invention.

Almost anything that was round in Elizabethan England was turned on a lathe. Even if something was cast, the pattern from which it had been cast was probably turned. Patternmakers love wood and they love lathes.

My old nemesis/muse Jost Amman, of course, has a turner depicted at his trade. The lathe isn't well depicted, but you can just make out the springpole coming across the ceiling and the strap or string that is driving the sphere (apparently) that the guy is turning.

The turner at his trade from Jost Amman's "Das Standbuch" of 1568

I admit I'm curious about why he'd be turning a sphere. If anyone knows, leave a comment. If that's a bowl, he has it on the lathe sideways, but an engraver can't necessarily be expected to accurately depict the nuances of every trade, I suppose.

My lathe was built on the same basic plan as this one I found on Pinterest. I made the heads from two sharpened carriage bolts, which I carefully and painstakingly aligned to give a nice, flat spin for the workpiece.

The string started out secured to the springy limb of a pine tree, a suggestion made by Peter Follansbee in one of his videos, but I confess that I eventually swapped it out for a four-ply bungee rope when I got tired of being whipped by the tree for my temerity. 

Problems to Solve

As you can see from the image below, my oak billet (I'm starting small, a handle for a socket chisel) was chattering something fierce. This happens when the blade of the tool skitters across the work surface rather than biting into the wood as it is supposed. I suspect my lathe tools weren't as sharp as they needed to be in spite of my hours spent honing them. I shall return them to the whetstone again tomorrow and finish off with a good bit on some emery paper and then leather stropping.  

All else being equal, this shouldn't be happening.

Another thing I've decided to add to the design is a drive wheel. I got this idea from an article written by Roy Underhill, who explained that the diameter of the piece affected the speed of the turn. So I sat down with a bit I cut from one end of an old maple rolling pin and milled out a pulley, essentially. The trio of spikes will (theoretically) go into the small piece to be turned and drive it at a higher rate of speed. 

The concavity of the drive wheel should keep the string from creeping, which has been a bit of a problem already.

To compound my sin with the bungee, you can see that I began with a length of nylon paracord that I had lying around. It has abraded with a vengeance and I've already had to deal with broken lines and splicing new bits of line into my machine. 

I will be replacing the paracord as soon as I can with a proper bit of line, hemp if I can find it.

Once I have things worked out and in working order, I will get on with the real task, turning a small wooden bowl like the ones found on Mary Rose. But we're nowhere near there yet.

More to come.

- Scott

Late addition: 
Foot-powered lathes at The Woodwright's Shop with Peter Follansbee and Roy Underhill. Enjoy!

Watch Wretched Ratchet Reading Rack on PBS. See more from pbs.

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!