1869 Carpenters' Shop

Earlier this week Joel Moskowitz, proprietor at Tools for Working Wood, posted a photo to his blog of a wonderful engraving he found while at the public library on the day after Thanksgiving.

The engraving, from the June 26, 1869 London Illustrated News, shows the interior of a "carpenters' shop"- really a cabinetmaker's shop if you ask me.  The men are building furniture here, not houses.

The library where I work owns a fairly complete run of this periodical, so I located the image in question and scanned it at high resolution to get a better look at it.  Here it is.

The level of detail in the image is wonderful.  In the foreground, two men work at low benches: one at a saw bench ripping a plank of lumber, the other sitting astride the stile of a panel frame while mortising it with a mallet and chisel.  As it so happens, I was working in just the same fashion just a short time ago, chopping mortises in the stile of the frame for the back panel of a book case I'm building.


Other delights abound in the image.  The man on the foreground left is working on a large glued up panel, perhaps a table top.  There are completed tables with lovely cabriole legs on the right.


I did a very small amount of manipulation of the image in Photoshop to clean up the image.  I removed some wording from the bottom of the image: after the title, on the original it says "-see page 641", a reference to the article in which the image is mentioned.  The article tells that the shop is part of a facility built on Vauxhall Bridge Road by the Guards, where soldiers could socialize and- in this shop- "learn the trade of carpentry."

If you'd like a print of the engraving to hang on your shop or office wall,  I've uploaded the image to imagekind.com at full resolution (600dpi).  From Imagekind you can select from a large number of sizes, paper types, mounting, matting and framing options.  For $16 you can get a 16"x10.5" print on enhanced matte paper.

Here is the full size scan if you'd like to download and print it on your own.  It is 6175x4048 pixels and about 25MB in size.

I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do!

Big pieces smaller

The wag refers to woodworking as the process of making big pieces of wood smaller, and as I was spending a small amount of time in the shop messing about on a project over the weekend, the aphorism seemed particularly apt.

The procedure in question is making dowel pegs.  In cabinetry, these are traditionally used to pin mortise and tenon joints.  The joint is actually drawn together and held by the dowel pin.  The pins are best made when the wood is still green.  Straight grained wood is a must, and usually wood like oak is used.  In this case, the pins are for a piece I'm building using cherry.

Flash back two weeks, when I took down a small decorative cherry tree for a neighbor.  The tree had died so I offered to remove it.  I sawed the six-inch diameter trunk pieces into firewood lengths and tossed them on my pile.  The other day I stood at our kitchen window, just above the firewood stack, admiring the yard.  I looked down and noticed that one of the pieces of cherry I'd cut was straight as a rod and didn't have any knots in it.  Dowel stock!

The process is to split (rather than saw) the still-green wood to allow the length of the piece to carry the strength inherent in the grain of the wood.  So, I work from the back of the above picture to the front.  It begins with the froe and maul.  The froe is that L-shaped tool in the top right.  This cleaves the wood in half, in successively smaller pieces.  Next is the drawknife- the blade with two handles right in the middle of the picture, which I use to get the stock roughly round and roughly 1/2" in diameter.  The finishing tool in the process is the dowel plate in the lower right of the picture.  This is a piece of tool steel in which I've drilled successively smaller diameter holes.  The stick of green wood is beveled at the end to get it started in the hole, then pounded down through, peeling it like a banana to that diameter.  Those three next to the dowel plate are just about finished.  Once done, they'll be allowed to dry completely before being used to pin the 14 or so mortise and tenon joints on my bookcase project.

Old Tools

You would think that with a newborn child in the house, projects involving old tools would come to a screeching halt. You'd be wrong.

For the last two weeks, Grandma Pam has been a whirlwind of projects (as well as cooking and cleaning). With Anna, she has made puppets for a school project. With Maggie, she whipped up a batch of delicious chocolate frosted eclairs for French food day at school. And late into the night, the house has been echoing with the sound of the sewing machine. In the short time she's been in Cleveland, all three kids have new curtains in their bedrooms, and Sam's room has a fully coordinated decor- curtains, crib ruffle, bumper pad and storage bins, all in colorful, monkey bedecked fabric.

I, however, was quite distracted by the machine with which all of the sewing projects have been created. I knew that Kim had a sewing machine stowed away on our third floor, but it hadn't seen the light of day since I moved in. Pam unearthed it shortly after she arrived, and it has been whirring away since.

The machine is a thing of beautiful industrial design. A Singer 99K, its curves and lines evoke a time when such things mattered. The gleaming black enamel, golden pinstripes, and art-deco embellishments are worthy of a vintage automobile. Its cast iron heft is also a thing of the past in todays age of plastic and aluminum. Lifting it inspires confidence that the tool you are about to use is a serious one, not a toy. Looking at its beauty inspires the worker to create similar beauty in fabric and thread. It sports a "Made in England" badge, and according to my research, was probably built in the early 1950s. It was available in both hand-crank and electric versions- this one is electrified.

As with all old tools in our house, I plan to keep this one in top condition, even if it is only used during visits by Grandma. I've already poured through the owners manual and found other manuals online to make sure I can keep it correctly cleaned and lubricated. I have no doubt it will last another fifty years.

Old Red

Yesterday I said goodbye to an old friend. Old Red saw me through nearly fifteen winters of dark and cold times. Early mornings of wet snow, nights of blistering cold winds and deep drifts, days when I asked for his help not once but two or three times between sun up and sun down- in all of these cases Old Red would cheerily rise to the occasion and help me with my work.

Sure, there were times when Red would complain. The 10 degree mornings when I'd have to open up his bonnet and replace shear pins. Or the major surgery of replacing drive belts. But in each case, he responded with the ability to roar through knee-deep snow, leaving neatly carved paths in his wake.

And it wasn't just my own paths and driveways that Red helped with. He did equal work on the aprons, sidewalks, and driveways of neighbors in three different neighborhoods, earning the unsung praise of schoolchildren and postal carriers alike.

Yesterday, Old Red moved on to his next call of duty, the driveway and sidewalks of my friend Roger. I'm sure Red will prove equally skillful, industrious, and tireless in his new home.

Red, a tip of my toque to you!

Miter Box Goodness

Last week Christopher Schwarz posted about his Langdon mitre box, surely a precision gizmo, as he says, and one which is highly prized by Galoots far and wide. I thought I would post about my own miter box, a lowly Craftsman. Or is it so lowly?

This tool was given to me by a friend who had inherited it from an elderly neighbor. I guess it's vintage as 1960s or so, a time when Sears was still producing some good tools. This is one of them.

The box has several very nice features. The angle setting has notches at the critical angles which are engaged by a trigger release catch. Any angle is then secured by the red-handled and sure gripping adjuster.

The 25 inch back saw rides in two guides, each of which has a catch at the top (in which they are caught in this picture). When the catches are released, the saw is free to ride up and down. The guides can be adjusted to assure straight cuts for right handed or left handed apprentices. Back and forth motion is then guided by bearings top and bottom in each guide.

It appears to have mounts for hold down accessories, but these accessories did not accompany the box when I got it. I generally use small clamps if the work requires it.

The saw itself hasn't got the most comfortable or attractive handle in the world but its plate is of good quality, sharpens well, and cuts cleanly.

The box itself is also plenty wide, able to handle 5"+ wide stock if necessary. I use it quite frequently, for trim, picture frames, and any stock that needs to be cut to length with precision. While it may not have the cachet of a Langdon, it does the job extremely well, while also reminding me of the good friend who gifted it to me each time I use it.

But I will have more

Samuel Pepys' diary is well known among those who are interested in seventeenth century English history. It offers a candid and lively view of London during the middle of the century. I find Pepys' descriptions of his daily flirtations with women friends (and occasional flirtations with his wife), his obsession with his fortune, and his fascination with music particularly fun to read.

An enterprising person has created a website for his famous diary, on which Pepys' daily entries can be read on a daily basis, and upon which equally enterprising and knowledgeable people comment. I've found myself reading the RSS feed each morning and following Samuel's London comings and goings.

Yesterday's entry was particularly interesting to me. He begins the entry by saying

Up, and comes Mr. Foley and his man, with a box of a great variety of carpenter’s and joyner’s tooles, which I had bespoke, to me, which please me mightily; but I will have more.

I was not aware that Pepys had a predilection for tools, but how I feel his pain!

I was also not familiar with the name Foley as tool manufacturer, but one of the beauties of the Pepys' Diary site is that there are many notes and annotations to the entries, including one for Foley, which explains that he is a member of the Foley family which built a manufacturing dynasty in Worcestershire.