Thoughts from the peeler: The artisan obsession and where does it end?

There is in just about every artisan, a touch of obsessive compulsion. Whether or not it's a disorder depends on how you feel about being both obsessive and compulsive at the same time with sharp implements in hand.

I don't want to make light of a genuine medical disorder. As someone who suffers the black periods of lost joy and time that is depression, far be it from me to make light of someone else's affliction.

Obsession and compulsion exist on a sliding scale, which is set by the same people who have categorized an affection for coffee as a mental disorder.

So let's ignore those folks for a bit.

For all practical purposes, it boils down to whether your obsession/compulsion is positive or destructive influence on your life.

Be ye moderate in all things except moderation.

So it is with caffeine and beer and so too it is with handicrafts.

But where is that moderate line? When do I stop? How far do I take each of these explorations of a craft? When do I tie it off and call it good? Do I keep going until I've got it perfect? Is perfect the enemy of the good?

I discovered recently when I began exploring the uses of the sector, that I was wrong in a very important way when I discussed the many ways for finding the angle at which the staves of a bucket or tankard meet.

My methodology was modern. For one thing, we started with an equation. For another, it depended heavily upon looking at the tankard as an equilateral polygon and we did some really sweet math based on that assumption.

That was an inaccurate assumption.

Even though it worked.

As I examine more coopered buckets and tankards, it because clear to me that the old coopers didn't think that way. The staves of a bucket are rarely all the same size, and no two identically-sized buckets seemed to have the same number of staves.

My math was accurate, but my method was wrong.

The period method is really cool. It's easier. And it involves a sector and some different neat math having to do with isosceles triangles and dividers.

My assumptions were wrong and even my successful result was... I don't know. Was it a failure to achieve the goal by apparently modern means?

A period item was created, but it was based on best guesses made with a modern mind. My methods of arriving at that item were modern even though I used my best period tools to achieve the result.

I know all of this because I didn't finish exploring coopering when I finished writing about it. I kept going. I kept talking to other coopers. I examined barrels and buckets in antique shops. I made a bucket. Then I made a butter churn. Then I repaired some damaged buckets and barrels and tankards back to working order.

I know I was wrong because I didn't stop.

I made an ale pail that would hold ale, but did I succeed or did I fail.

Sorry, that was Seussical. Sometimes I can't resist.

At some point do I stop going back and adding to these projects?

Or is this exploration of artisans a reflection of artisanship itself in that the learning never actually ends? And if that's so, is my quest really impossible after all? Will I ever have more than the most surface knowledge of any of these crafts if I cannot devote more than the duration of a few blog posts to each of them?

How do I know when to stop?

And if I'm honest with myself, can I stop even if I want to?

- Scott

Now What? The evolution of the project...

Today is December 1st. The state of the project? It is to laugh...

I've been very sick since the end of September. I have this stupid... thing that happens to me periodically. Around here, we call it Sporadic Lego Head Holiday Syndrome. We call it that because it's apparently un-diagnosable by modern science. Perhaps the dumbest assumption I made at the beginning of this year was that I'd be able to stay healthy for the entire year so that I could complete the rather daunting task list I'd written for myself.

All that is somewhat beside the point.

The brief interstice moments the past couple of months, I've spent working on our kitchen. Because family comes first and I keep my promises to others before I keep the ones I made to myself. So I have a functioning kitchen and a non-functioning artisan project...

I'm proud of the work I've managed to finish on the kitchen, but the "One Year Mission..." part of this blog has not fared nearly as well.

Have I failed? 

It would be difficult to argue otherwise. I certainly can't knock out two dozen trades in the one month I have between now and January 1st. So it would be pretty stupid for me to say I haven't failed at my original mission.

If you feel the urge to say I told you so, please feel free to swallow that urge. Seriously. Don't be that person.

The truth is, this project was beginning to morph into something more long-term long before my head swelled to cartoonish proportions. If I'm honest with you and with myself I began to second-guess the format I chose for this back in August when I experienced the true difference between learning an aspect of a trade and truly practicing it.

Of course, it's impossible to practice 111 trades from 54 guilds at once.  There are valid reasons why tradesmen specialized and it wasn't only because the guilds required them to. The requirements for specialization forced them to focus on a single trade and operate at the top of their game.

So now what?

Yes, I am a craftsman, but I am first and foremost, a storyteller. So I will finish the story.

This story has grown in the telling, as stories are wont to do. With every blister, splinter, burnt loaf, and failed thimble, it has become about more than the making of the stuff and less about the making of the artisan. For the past year, I expended too much effort on the tasks and not enough on the tradesmen.

A story like this deserves all the space it needs to tell it properly. It deserves more than scene setting, it deserves character development. I don't rightly know how that will look, but that's what I plan to do. So my continuing mission is a purer, more thorough version of the original one, but without the artificial time constraint.

I said at the outset that I had a problem with how history is taught, with the People Magazine approach that is a pointless litany of glittering celebrities carrying on, mostly behaving badly. It's no wonder that students view history as a list of dates to be memorized and the names of kings and generals to regurgitate. I found myself doing the same thing on a different level, ticking off a list of items to make and move on to the next.

Material culture is only interesting in how those materials reflect the culture. The tools are only interesting in the way that they reflect their user and their maker. I lost sight of that as I focused on the sprint.

Spending three weeks in the smoke and flour dust of our ersatz renaissance bakery showed me how thin my understanding of these trades was. How superficial the project had become, mostly because I had set an artificial deadline that made it look more exciting from the outside and forced it to become less in-depth on the inside.

By failing, I've set myself free from my own constraints. There's probably a deeper metaphor there for those who have an urge to mine for such things.

In the meantime, I've a story to tell. I invite you to stick around and help me tell it. If you don't, I certainly understand.

~ Scott

Historical Homebrew, Part Three: I have no words...

Historical Homebrewing Part Two: Sickness Demons and Yeast

Today was supposed to be a work day for our kitchen remodel, but then the back gremlins showed up and now I stand at the new kitchen counter typing this because I cannot really sit. Probably twinged something when I moved the anvil off the kitchen counter so The Engineer could do some tiling next to the stove.

Yes really. Why, where do you keep your anvil?

Since I can't really undertake anything new, let's rejoin the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives, already in progress...

Part Two: Exorcising Our Sickness Demons

The Elizabethans were not as dirty as advertised. They bathed more often than frontier Americans (who I wager were also cleaner than reputed) and even brushed their teeth. Okay, they chewed on a sort of bushy stick, but it sort of amounted to the same thing. The Waterpik hadn't been invented yet. Unfortunately, any benefit of this brushing was somewhat undercut by their affection for raw sugar. I've read that black teeth were a status symbol and most records of her majesty recount her black teeth.

Which honestly must've hurt like holy heck.

They even had sewers... open ones for the most part, but they did have them, and we'll get more into the transit of muck from city to sea when we discuss the Worshipful Company of Plumbers (yea verily). If you want to get ahead of the class, Google "Gong Farmer" some time. Or you could just click that link.

Hint: Gong farmers don't maintain fields of east Asian percussion instruments.

All that being said, they had no idea how sickness happened, how it spread, or what caused it. As the author of my ale book said: "Alewives... would've taken your word for it if you told them that invisible sickness demons lived in the water and could only be killed by being boiled alive." Cleanliness may well have been next to Godliness, but the definition of cleanliness was as flexible and multi-defined in our time period as was the concept of Godliness.

I noted in a previous post that the idea of "They drank ale because water was unsafe" is a popular notion, put forward once more by Dr Cookson in the book I'm using. But it's a concept that is currently, finally, under fire. The easiest counter-argument is that the claim is flawed at its core for the exact reason she just mentioned: avoiding water and supplanting it with beer would imply more knowledge of disease vectors than the early modern person actually possessed.

Also, the duration and amount of boiling in ale-making is insufficient to actually kill some popular water-borne "sickness demons".

This article by medievalist Tim O'Neill will do a better job of presenting the counter-argument than What Was the Drink of Choice in Medieval Europe?  He makes a good case for water being the go-to for most Europeans... and yet, in his first sentence implies that the problem is with misinformation on the internet. I've been reading the factoid that ale was safer than water and preferred for that reason in history books, including textbooks, since I was a small child. This isn't a new idea or one of those bits of net-lore that get argued about in the fora of Straight Dope and Snopes.

Anyway, it's a great article and I'd love to talk to him about it sometime... maybe over a pint.

For whatever reason, it's indisputable that people drank enormous amounts of ale and beer. Several liters a day by many counts. We're impressed by these statistics because we think in terms of modern beers, but they got away with it because alcohol levels were so very low in early beers and carbohydrates were incredibly high by modern standards. The recipe I've been brewing has a pound and a half of oats in it, for heaven's sake.

Calorically, it's a meal in itself.

Academic arguments aside, whether it was because the local water supply was suspect or because it was the early modern equivalent of a protein shake, we can all agree that ale was the lynch pin of the early modern diet.  And whether or not the average medieval schmoe was as dirty as popular imagination would have them be (they weren't) the sanitation of the modern kitchen is vastly greater than the sanitation of the Alewife's kitchen.

Did I say "vastly"?  I meant "somewhat".  As far as you know, I decided to forego sterility for reasons of historical accuracy. Yeah... that's it.

Part III: My Yeast Can Beat Up Your Yeast

Mistake #3: Sanitation is such a Thing in modern brewing because we have a much better understanding not only of disease vectors, but also we have a much greater knowledge of what yeast is and how it works. Pathogens that cause food poisoning are one thing (and of greater concern in bottling than brewing) there are also pathogens that will just show up to eat your yeast. Also, wild yeast, which exists naturally on almost every surface, can get in the way of or inhibit the operation of cultured yeast, leading to problems, or at least unpredictability, with your brew.

Honestly, can you really sanitize a broom? Or even a wooden spoon (which is what we were using)? The God's honest truth is this: I forewent sterility in this project because sterility was an unreachable goal. Note that JoNell, quite accurately, said "sanitize" rather than "sterilize". That's because outside of a clean room in a science lab, it's all but impossible to really sterilize anything even in a modern kitchen. 

When Janet Winter commented on my Facebook wall that her husband's foray into homebrewing seemed to be more an exercise in washing dishes than it was in making beer, she put a lovely point on things. I won't define Godliness for you, but I can tell you that cleanliness looks like soap suds because I am, at the core of my being, a modern man. 

Besides, even if you do get something sterile, that stops the moment it makes contact with the air because the air itself is rife with things like wild yeast.

But we're making beer! Yeast is a Good Thing, though, right?

Yes and no.

Modern ale yeast, "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" is top-fermenting and operates best in warmer temperatures, as opposed to Lager yeast, "saccharomyces pastorianus" which is a "bottom fermenting" yeast which operates over longer periods at cooler temperatures. Top and bottom fermenting is a bit of a misnomer, frankly, and has to do with where the foam shows up as opposed to where the real action is. Both types of yeast are free-ranging, hunting down every scrap of sugar they can get their yeasty teeth into and chomping it down to turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide.



The foam that forms atop a top-fermenting beer is the stuff I was talking about in the baking post, called "barm" and though I was looking too early when JoNell posted that the next day, I knew I was in trouble when I messaged Patrick a few days later and he told me he still didn't see any barm forming at the top of my ale batch.

My yeast were failing me.

Still, I would have to wait a week for confirmation of my failure.

Special thanks once again to Patrick and JoNell Franz for not only generously offering their kitchen to host the brewing of this oatmeal-soup-which-we-will-agree-to-call-ale-in-order-to-humor-Scott, but also their generosity of spirit and wonderful good humor along the way. Would not have been the same without JoNell's play-by-play documentation.

Today's Unsolicited Endorsement: Patrick is a professional Robin Hood (yes, really) as well as the founder and president of Presenters of Living History. JoNell and Patrick bring hands-on history demonstrations into schools and organizations, giving kids a chance to make a tactile connection to history by participating in demonstrations and crafts from the renaissance through the American civil war. Aside from being two of my favorite people on the planet, they do Good Work showing kids that history is NOT BORING. You can find out more about their work at PatFranz.com.

Next: We drink!

- Scott

Historical Homebrewing Part One: Alewives like us...

Sometimes, I run out of resources and the chronicles are silent, so I end up doing things by the seat of my pants on this project. Beer-brewing was not supposed to be one of them.

After, all I had a book!

What could possibly go wrong?

I read the instructions in my book. Over and over again. I visited the local home brew store. I talked to the very knowledgeable guy who was there. When I told him what I was up to, he didn't bat an eye. Told me what to expect, gave me some advice, told me I didn't need to buy any extra gear, and sent me on my way with ingredients in hand. I read three books on the history of beer and brewing.

Then I re-read the instructions and read two books about modern home brewing and made notes on a bunch of things I didn't actually need to know, but wanted to know just in case I was wrong about what I'd need to know.

And then this happened.

Yes, it was going to be that sort of night.

My partner in crime Patrick has a partner in crime of his own, his wife JoNell. She was there to document the procedure for the edification and amusement of her friends on Facebook (and with her permission, you as well! Remember to thank her in comments.) 

It was supposed to be simple (according to the instructions, which I really did read) for Patrick and I to put together a basic, low-alcohol, late medieval ale. It would "be like liquid bread," the author assured us.

Deviations from Period Procedures: 

• Sanitation. (More on that later.)
• I make a very masculine alewife. In fact, both of us are a bit hairy about the jowls for a proper alewife.  In fact, if the ghost of particularly annoyed alewives of yore were haunting us and cursed the proceedings, I would not be at all surprised.
• Period alewives used a twig-broom known as a bessom or the branch of a broom plant (known hereabouts as 'Scotchbroom' to which I am fiercely allergic) to stir the mash. We used a wooden spoon.
• No huge copper tuns or kettles or oaken barrels were sullied in the manufacture of this small ale. My efforts were barely worth the plastic buckets and coolers that we did use.

Incidentally, when you're around theater people, mention the idea of dressing in drag very carefully or you'll end up in a dress before you can say "Milton Berle".

Welcome to the Brewery of the Bearded Alewives.

Part the First: Angus MacGyver, Patron Saint of Brewers

Mistake #1: As previously noted, I forgot to bring the kitchen scale with us and the Franzes didn't have one. As it turns out, you can weigh ingredients the way you weigh a cat: Weigh the person, weigh the person holding the cat/oats, subtract the difference. 

In all honesty, this probably had minimal impact on our results. The malt was pre-weighed by the home brew store, who also ground it for us.  We also tested our scale scheme with known-weight items like the bag of malt to be sure we could get into the correct ballpark for our weights and measures.

The oats were mostly present for flavor, so a slight deviation in weight probably didn't affect the brew much anyway.

Why yes, I did watch a lot of MacGyver as a young and impressionable child, why do you ask?  Look, if you want to read about brewing being done right and done well, there are places to find that sort of thing. Sadly, this is not going to be one of them.

The recipe was simple:

4.5 lbs of Malt

1.5 lbs of Oats

4 gallons of water

2 packets Ale yeast

2 five-gallon food-grade buckets

End of list.  How could someone as experienced at cooking pretty much every cuisine as I am screw up a recipe that simple?  

The careful observer will note that I even got to wear my own clothes! And a snazzy black Guinness apron.

And so the evening began. 

There was a bit of tumult early on as we encountered cracked and broken buckets. Patrick has tried home brewing before, but it was quite awhile ago and some of his equipment has moved all over the country to sit unused in various ports of call. Not all of it fared well.

Eventually, we discounted the idea of using the floor cleaner bucket and settled on a 5-gallon water cooler and the one food-grade bucket that had survived the moves. 

Mistake #2: This one might've been worse. The bucket substitution wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the broken one was the only bucket with graduations marked on the side for gallons. We used a pitcher that was almost a half-gallon to measure out our universal solvent.

The whole procedure takes several hours, long stretches of time are called out in the recipe as each step requires the mash (which is the term referring to the mixture that is allegedly going to magically become beer at some point) be left alone to saturate, meld, boil, sit undisturbed, settle, etcetera.  All with the aim of extracting the sugars locked in the barley, which will feed the yeast, which will make alcohol with them.

Not to blame my tools but if I had one criticism for Dr. Cookson (Author of Drinkable History) it would be to better list out the steps in the process. As it is, the recipe/procedure is shot through with jokey asides while you scour the instructions for some indication of how much water should be boiling and when it should be added can get a bit lost in the silliness.

Rather like trying to cook from one of my blog posts, come to think of it.

Through the clever use of an array of kitchen timers, we were able to keep on-track with our boiling and stirring and pouring routine...

Well... mostly.

Did I mention that my TV is only tenuously hooked to the rest of the world? It's been ages since I cut the cord, so any current television is a bit of a siren song. Honestly, between the television and the ghosts of alewives past, we probably never had a chance.

I ended up with a series of successive timers set to go off at specific intervals so that one would signal me to begin heating the water that I'd need to be boiling for the next step. I don't know how alewives did this, but for me, it was all about timers.

Sometimes, it was difficult to figure out what was going on and I think I re-read the entire book several times, trying to suss out the instructions from the asides.

Then, he asked me if I'd sanitized the spoon... crap.

Should've used a broom.

Coming tomorrow in Part Two: We tangle with the Sickness Demons

- 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

----------------------
[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.

No Fear of Failure

"I incorporated the idea of failure explicitly in all the courses I teach. I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number. "  

                                      ~ Henry Petroski, Duke Professor of Engineering & History

I've never met Dr. Petroski, but for his writings alone he is one of my favorite engineers. (Not my favorite, that spot is reserved in perpetuity, but maybe a close second.) Not least of all because he wrote two wonderful books on the history and design of two of my favorite things in the world: bookshelves and pencils.

He also teaches his Duke engineering students from the writings of Vitruvius and Galileo to underline for them the fact that failure is nothing new, and is something to be embraced and learned from.

All of which leads us from the heights of engineering to my humbling and bumbling attempts at thimbling.

It has occurred to me repeatedly the past couple weeks that it has been a long time since my high school "metal arts" class. The class was woefully misnamed because it was almost wholly devoted to preparing students for careers in the sheet metal and HVAC industries.

That I nevertheless managed to convince the teacher to let me make armor and two swords instead for class credit is almost beside the point. Nerds probably shouldn't be allowed to take metal shop. We're nothing but trouble. (The look on the face of the assistant principal when he caught me walking a broadsword to my locker was priceless, though nothing compared to when he found out I'd only brought it to school to be graded... but that's another story.)

Suffice to say, that the word "dapping" was never uttered in that metal shop and if I'd asked how to make a thimble, I'm not sure I'd have received an answer.  So I wasn't as prepared for some of the silliness that has cropped up between me and the sewing notions as I'd hoped.

The middle American high school just does not adequately prepare you for life in the real world of 1580. We should do something about that.

Here's where we stand on this project:

I've reached a standstill on the thimble making project. Now that I've solved my metal problems, I can adequately troubleshoot things enough to see that my tools are inadequate to the task. Even with a metal face attached, the hardwood dapping block is still not making the grade.

I need a better setup.

One of my failings in planning for this project was acknowledging that, pinners notwithstanding, most of the craftspeople in the 16th century didn't make their own tools. I don't know why I thought making my own dapping tools would be either easy or necessary. I won't be making my own anvil for the blacksmithing section of the show any more than I plan to make my own hammers.

My wife talked to some of her friends at work out in the metal shop and they agreed that the tools were the most likely hook on which to hang blame for my failures. Unfortunately, none of the commercially-available dapping pins and blocks look to be quite right for creating the shape of a period thimble.

So I'm sort of stuck for the moment on this project.

Inspired by a comment Maggie Secara made on the Facebook page, I made this topless thimble (wolf whistle) out of a bit of copper pipe I had lying around. It's a valid stopgap moves things along to the forming and dimpling stages. It's a bit of a cheat, admittedly, but it is the type of thimble I prefer when sewing since I tend to push the needle with the side of my finger instead of the tip.

It isn't pretty, but it is effective.  In the meantime, I'm exploring having a proper dapping block made if I can't find one that will work on the commercial market. (Any leads on that front would be most welcome.)

As I mentioned in the last post, I've also begun working on the Worshipful Company of Coopers and since the weather has turned, will have a parallel project that will keep me inside until it turns again.

More to come, as always!

~Scott

Thimbles: Reloaded

So the consensus opinion here and on the Facebook page is that annealing the brass is the cure for most of my ills.

I really should have thought of that. You may remember when I mentioned that the difference in stiffness between the modern wire and the 16th century wire for pinmaking was the result of work-hardening because of the way that their wire was drawn as it compares to the modern methods of wire drawing.  The folding of the metal in the 16th century style combined with the effort involved in forcing it through the die stiffened the crystalline structure of the metal.

Caple says that in order to wrap the heads, they had to anneal the wire first because the stuff didn't bend.

It's much the same problem with modern brass sheets. Brass, like all sheet metal, is rolled out to the desired thickness in a machine press that compresses the brass between massive wheels. This has the same effect as drawing wire through a period die.

In my sheets of brass, the crystalline structure is aligned and as stiff as it gets. In order to get more play in the metal, I need to excite the molecules by heating the brass and mess up that crystalline structure once more before it will ever suffer the hammer.  It's much the same as doing anything with iron.

The plan for today is to go out and get a thicker piece of brass and then heat it to a dull red heat using a propane torch and work it from there. I have high, cautious, hopes.

Thanks to the Wayne at Leatherworking Reverend, Louise Pass of Woodsholme, and Andrew Williamson for their advice on this.  I'll let you know how it goes!

~Scott

Sidenote: Because it's been so long since I was in high school metal shop, I looked it up online to make sure there wasn't anything I've forgotten.  All of the sites and videos on brass annealing are dedicated to the community of people who reload rifle shells.

I suppose it's the same thing, except my thimble won't explode if I do it wrong...

"So Sybil says to Marjorie, 'Well we didn't want you to come to the quilting bee any way!' and you know how Marjorie gets. She says 'I'll come to that quilting bee if I..."
ka-BOOM!! 

(Fade to black)

(Voiceover) Has this happened to you? Are you the victim of an reloaded thimble? Call Calvin & Hobbes, attorneys at law...

Failure at my fingertips: Thimble making is harder than it looks...

First of all, from one time traveler to another, happy 79th birthday to Tom Baker, better known to some as the 4th Doctor and to many as "That British guy with the hat and the crazy scarf..."

Aside from being my first Doctor, he was also a gifted Shakespearean actor and a member of Sir Laurence Olivier's company. I'd give anything to see him play Lear. Regardless of all that, to me and millions of others, he's the mad man in the blue box.

From the other crazy hat/scarf guy getting himself lost in the time stream, many, many more happy years, sir.
Seriously, folks. If you didn't realize I was geek by now, you just haven't been paying close enough attention.

It's time to talk about finger helmets.

I experienced the first abject failure of the project today. I was attempting to make thimbles based on the Jost Amman illustration of the thimble maker from his Book of Trades. I've reproduced the tools in the etching using hardwood, but the brass keeps tearing out at the bottom of the die.

"Der Fingerhueter", from Das Ständebuch by Jost Amman

Boom. Failure.

Is it that modern brass is softer than what these chaps are using? Do I need a thicker gauge? Should I make the dapping block out of iron instead of hardwood?

A book on the history of trumpet making (of all things) includes an aside on the above image, and some information on the making of thimbles, because it relates to the valves of the trumpet. The author proposes that the brass was 1 mm thick, which is roughly twice the thickness of the brass I've been using.

Ah well. Better luck tomorrow.

In the meantime, it is time to start multi-tasking or I'll never make it.  A least not with out cloning myself and the Calvin & Hobbes trick with the cardboard box didn't work. Might've needed more tigers.

Thankfully, while I was failing miserably at the fine art of thimbling, the books on coopering arrived from England. So, after I gave up on making finger helmets, I spent some time knocking together a shaving horse.

Here's a video for going on with. It's done by Kari Hultman, who is the woodworker behind the fantastic "Village Carpenter" blog. It's an extended interview and demonstration of coopering at Colonial Williamsburg, including the shaving horse I'm working on...

Here's to a more successful day tomorrow!

~Scott

Ramona Vogel: Journeyman Cooper at Colonial Williamsburg from Kari Hultman on Vimeo.