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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine, be that way.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just in case.

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

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

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

Bertie makes the best bertte in all of Bavaria!

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

                                                                                                                         Photo Source: Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg 

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

This is mine...

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

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

~Scott

----

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

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.

Wired: The Worshipful Company of Pinners & Wiredrawers

So... why am I focusing on a group of people who weren't able to foot the bills necessary to remain an independent livery company all by themselves? Because the plight of the pinners epitomizes to me all of the highs and lows of trade in the Renaissance. It is a tale fraught with foreign competition driving down prices and wages, trade wars, protectionism and nationalism, and the dependency that one trade has on another.

The pinners were in many ways under the thumb of the Worshipful Company of Wiredrawers. That is to say, the makers of pins were more or less taken over by their main suppliers.  It was an alliance that ultimately failed, but it was an important one in the history of the guilds.

Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg 

Wire drawing by hand was obviously a laborious process, dragging yard after yard of flat metal strips through a tiny cone-shaped hole. Early on, this was done by hand without so much as a pair of vice grips to ease the load. I honestly did not realize how this worked until I read Chris Caple's book "Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past" and he only went into it to explain why so many pins have a faint groove down the side. It's the seam.

Some of the most interesting stuff in books like this are the asides.

This process (along with a higher zinc content) made the brass used by Elizabethan pinners significantly stiffer than what I can find on the shelf at my local hardware store. The technical term is "work hardened"  which is difficult to repeat with modern softer brass.

So, yes, they started with flat strips of brass, and dragged them through ever smaller holes in large plates of iron as the chap above is doing. Was it always done by hand? Thankfully, for his sake, no. Sometimes they used a water wheel or similar apparatus to gain some measure of automation, or at least mechanical advantage.

Maggie Secara sent me this image of a goldsmith's shop that she used for a scene in her book The Dragon Ring (which I admittedly designed the cover for). The kid at the left of frame is operating a wire drawing windlass, though I imagine that drawing gold would require less force, it being a softer metal. (Any jewelers out there please correct me if I'm wrong about that.)

The goldsmith obviously drew his own wire in his own shoppe, even though there was a guild devoted to drawing gold and silver wire as well as brass and copper. The implication I draw from this is that the wiredrawers lacked the power to stop him from breaking their monopoly just as the pinners lacked the funds to enforce their crown monopoly by hiring inspectors to police the ports.

And ultimately, just as they absorbed the pinners, so too were they absorbed by the Worshipful Company of Girdlers. So this too became an all but defunct entity subservient to the greater company of belt makers.


That's what wiredrawing is. What it's not is something I'm going to demonstrate. I might get around to making my own draw plates and accumulating enough brass to make it worthwhile, but if so I will do it at the end of the year... if I can find the time.

It is time to return to the Big List and especially The Worshipful Company of the Haberdashers. Because the Haberdashers sold small homegoods like pins and combs and thimbles and whatnot, we will do a couple of quick projects on this one and talk a bit about Tudor economics.

See you this weekend!

~ Scott

Special Thanks to:
Rachel Jardine, The Elizabethan Costuming Bees on Facebook, and Maggie Secara (King's Raven, her new novel from Crooked Cat Books came out last month and it's excellent. I especially like the cover!)  A writer's only as good as his sources and his sources should never be blamed for his mistakes.

Pinned into your clothes: A study in silk, linen, thread, and lead

That noise you hear from behind the curtain is us preparing to polish off the Haberdashers, which will catch us up.

In the meantime, pins? Why were they important and how in-demand were they, really? 

There's one order for pins in Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe accounts for 121,000 pins. No, I din't mistype that number. One hundred and twenty-one thousand pins.

"Item to Roberte Careles our Pynner for xviij thousand great verthingale pynnes xx thowsand myddle verthingale Pynnes xxv thowsand great Velvet Pynnes xxx and nine thowsande smale Velvet Pynnes and xix thowsand Small hed Pynned all of our great warderobe."

---

Arnold, J., 1988, p. 218. From PRO, LC5/33, f. 150, warrent dated 20 Oct. 1563. quoted by Rachel Jardine

Furthermore, according to Rachel Jardine's research, this was followed less than a month later by another order of similar size. The wardrobe accounts of the queen, in fact, are full of pin orders of all sizes for all sizes of pins, plus orders to have existing pins straightened and sharpened.

Elizabeth didn't always order in those quantities, but it illustrates handily how many it took to pull off the kinds of fashions that were rampant in the later Elizabethan period. Because you can't dress like this without using tons of them.

It's really no wonder so many pins are found by metal detector enthusiasts and construction crews. The internet is awash with 16th century pins for sale at astonishingly (to me) low prices considering the age of the artifacts.

More later. Much to do, many irons in the fire... so to speak.

~Scott

In Search of a Haystack: Pin Making Part II

As you know, we had a power outage that was compounded by power issues in the house proper that kept us mostly without power until around 3:00 pm today. Which meant that I would have to adhere rather more closely to my pledge for period methods than even I anticipated. For instance, when I was making the die for cold-forging the heads of the pins, I had to haul out the eggbeater drill I inherited from my dad. (I'd have used a bow drill but I don't have one.)

Fate is a big fan of dramatic irony.

Anyway: Part II of our ongoing quest to build the ultimate angel disco...

The bone, as it turns out is invaluable in this effort. Whether or not it needs to be bone is an open question. Now that I've done this, I can imagine why the Tudor pinners used bones. They were cheap and plentiful, they are incredibly dense, and plastic hadn't been invented yet. Antler or horn would've worked, but horn had other more valuable uses and antler came from deer, access to which were controlled by the nobility.

These days, if you want to do this, you could use just about anything dense enough to resist the teeth of the files.

The wire sits in the grooves that I carved into the bone. The grooves are angled between 10 and 20 degrees. The wire sits at that angle and you run a fine file along as you roll it with your fingers, creating a nice round taper as you feed it into the teeth of the file.

The bone acts to shield the parts of the pin you want to retain, allowing the files to
take away anything that stands proud of the surface.

It's easier to do than it is to explain. In short order, with a nice, sharp file, you can make an astonishingly sharp pin.

That's easy enough, right?  The tricky bit isn't putting the point on the pin. The tricky bit is putting a head on the darned thing...

In the episode of "Worst Jobs In History: The Tudor Age" that showed Bodger Hodgeson and his crew making pins, they flatten the top a bit to give you something to drag. Then, using a pliers, you twist a three rounds of softer brass wire round the shaft, tin it, and then cold-forge it between a die and a stamp.

In Bodger's pin making shop, they seem to be making springs and cutting them into bits of three turns each. I'm not mass-producing them at this point, so I just wrapped it around.

I made my anvil and stamp by drilling impressions into a couple of enormous bold heads that I utterly failed to take pictures of. Here's the general idea illustrated, though. Probably better than any picture could show.

Cold Forging: A stamp and an anvil with matching depressions
form theball at the top when the stamp is struck with a hammer.

Below is the first pin I made, I used some lead-free solder as Bodger showed (he's using tin, but I didn't have a forge fire laid to melt tin, so I used solder). I think tin will work better on many levels because it's so much more malleable than solder can be.

The second pin I made used considerably less solder, really just enough to fix the wire twist in place.

Summaries and "What I learned" will be posted later this week. It's been a crazy weekend and I hear friends playing games in the next room, so I must away to join in the fun.

~Scott