Newbould Plane

This might get a bit wonky. A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a plane that manifests so much of what I love about early tools.

It is a fore plane, intended for the job of rough surfacing. I would estimate that it was made in the 1780s or 1790s. The plane is beech wood, and is very well crafted. There is, however, no maker's mark and given the idiosyncratic detail on the wedge, I suspect it was made by a craftsman rather than a professional plane-maker. With its rounded chamfers and 50 degree bed-angle, the plane was probably made in England. The iron is pretty exciting to me. It is round-topped and stamped Newbould - an early mark associated with Samuel Newbould of Sheffield, which dates it to the 1780s or 1790s. It is remarkably thin. I've read that as high-carbon cast steel was expensive in the 18th century, early iron were thin, but this is remarkable. The iron is barely used, and still has the curved, or cambered edge meant for the rough planing of lumber. I am really interested to see how this single, thin, steep, iron cuts.

But the best part? When I bought the plane, the price was low on account of the handle being a replacement. I had to take it apart, and when I removed the screw that held the handle in the body, it got my attention. When I did survey work of early 19th century architecture I had, oddly, the need to learn a lot about screws and how to date them. And this screw? 1820s-1830s And the handle itself is made of poplar, which is important.

So in the last years of the 18th century, when English steel tool-makers were still sending out batches of blades to be finished by laboring families, this plane iron was shaped and tempered and ground in a series of Sheffield households. It was bought by an English tradesman, who made a plane to fit it. Somehow, it made its way to the American mid-atlantic region, where, in the 1820s or 30s, its handle broke. Its owner carefully made a new handle out of the poplar so ubiquitous in the carpentry and cabinetmaking of that region; the light shows the scores of facets left by his knife. And, now, this plane sits on my bench. Amazing

The Little Dutch Plane

In 2001, I had just graduated from college and my Great Uncle proposed we go stay in Sweden for a few months with our family there. I realize this wasn't exactly backpacking through Indonesia for six months with a passport, a backpack and trail of furtive hostel hookups, but it was an amazing trip.

A memento of it is the sketchbook I kept. I didn't have a digital camera, so when I would get sick of lugging my ancient Nikon, so I would just draw. At the museum where the sunken and raised warship Vasa is kept, I drew several of the discovered ship's carpenters' tools, among them a little smoothing plane:

And just last month, I came across a series of entries on Peter Follansbee's blog examining the Gerfschaaf - the Dutch version of the little horned plane. Since I use a 20th century horn plane that I bought in Sweden nearly every day, the notion of experimenting with its formal ancestor was intriguing. I thought I would make one based on a photograph Follansbee posted.

I actually have had a need for a new plane, as well as this curiosity. I've been worn out of trying smoothing these big planks of curly walnut with 45 degree planes. The higher the pitch angle of the blade, the better the plane's ability to manage reversing grain without tear-out. Over the 20th century, nearly all planes were made with irons bedded at 45 degrees, but steeper angles were once the norm for planing hardwoods and an increase of ten degrees to 55 makes a tremendous difference. Try back-beveling the iron in your smoothing plane 10 degrees, seriously.

It isn't perfect yet, but it has potential and a Swedish steel iron.

The Grim Rip Saw

For some time, I've considered the the idea of making a veneer saw - not the wee thing used to trim delicate veneers, but a Veneer Saw.

From Hugh Chapman Mercer's Ancient Carpenter's Tools of 1929

Once, this is how logs too precious for pit sawing were reduced to veneer-thickness sheets. 

I've never worked with veneer, but I don't have a bandsaw, and I imagined such a saw might be a faster way of resawing planks for drawer sides and the like. Also, I enjoy large, fast saws, and the frame would make it possible to employ a saw blade toothed for frightening savagery. 

 

I should have made this a year ago. It took less than a day, and I wasn't particularly picky about the wood used. In the past, with smaller frame saws, I've riven the stock to be sure the frame members were straight-grained and clear, but here I just sawed out quartersawn ash ends and maple stretchers. 

To size the saw, I stood with my fist against the wall and drew my arm back, as though withdrawing the blade from a cut. This distance turned out to be 28" to which I added 6" more for gusto and figured this was my maximum stroke-length. 

How does it work? Beautifully. I assumed I would need to reshape the teeth on the 3tpi bandsaw blade I scavenged, but not so. Its first true test was sawing a stopped slot in an 8" wide slab of walnut and it was cruising downward at about 3/4" per stroke. At this point, I've probably lost the attention of any who isn't a woodworker, so I will address myself directly to you folks: This is outrageously fast.  And easy to steer. And awesome.   

The Real Thing

Truly, I felt like George Nakashima last week on the drive home from a sawmill in Lincoln County with a huge, gorgeous and raw slab of Walnut in the back of the truck. In the following days, this slowly turned into a small, floating dining table for a client. 

The very beginning is so often the best moment of a project. This time particularly so. The day before I started work, I visited my Great Uncle in his shop. He's been cleaning and sorting the shelves and boxes out, and we played a game I love: "do you know what this is?" I've gotten much better at this over the years, but that day, he stumped me with a few slender bits of stone. 

"What on earth are these," I asked.

"Really? It's soapstone. Your Great-grandfather used this for his rough layout. You just rub it to a sharp edge."

He drew a line with a piece on the lid of toolbox and held out a handful of stones.  

"Put 'em in your toolbox," he said. 

Next morning, I stood beside that walnut slab with a saw and that stone, still sharp from the hand of Olaf Nilson, dead fifty-five years, whose blood is in my veins.   

Things Can Go Wrong

So here is the craftsmanship of risk.
I've been fussing around with round stands recently, and this had been a road of bitter failure until I decided to try explore one of my favorite Shaker pieces in the American Museum in Bath. It is gorgeous, but its concept has never seemed fully realized to me. So I played with it. Success.
I've been interested, as well, in the interplay of bare with painted wood surfaces. So, with much excitement, I set about making a painted top for the stand. I had never used Milk Paint on wood with a bold, open grain pattern, but I had a likely piece of Ash to work with. My first sign of trouble was that the grain was horrifyingly twisted, refusing to submit to any plane on the shelf. So I planed across directly across the grain which, surprisingly, worked. A couple hours of axe and spokeshave work and I had my round and beveled profile established.
Then it was time for paint. And........it sucked. Grain that laid sleepily flat through three coats rose up startlingly on the fourth. And even once I had the finish just about perfect, I was left to appreciate the flawless execution of a bad idea. The rough texture of the grain steals the grace of the stand.

But this is still forward progress. The white top works for me; I only need to try it again in a mellower timber like maple or poplar. This is forward progress. I keep repeating that to myself.

Ripping

Descriptions of the early American system of cabinetmaking apprenticeship almost always touch on how little one received at the end of seven years labor: some proper clothes, perhaps tools. You also, with luck, could look forward to getting an apprentice of your own and doing very little of this again. Sigh.  

Today I'm breaking down a fantastic slab of curly maple for a small table I'll be building this week. There are many different ways to go about this. Most, perhaps, pin the board with a foot, lean low and saw away. For material this thick, I prefer to borrow a method of the old-timers. I just sit in the board, hold the saw vertically and work up and down, sawing towards myself. Its surprisingly follow a the line and, with big, large toothed saw, it flys.  

Saws of Despair

Sometimes, I don't even realize I am discouraged until I realize I am doing what I do when I'm discouraged. I start working on my saw. 

I do have a table-saw. There are times when its the only thing that will do and, as Wharton Eshrick once said regarding to tool selection, "if I have to use my teeth..." 

While some people buy saws, this tool, more accurately, happened to me. It was purchased by a family member who gave it to me knowing that I (1) needed it badly and (2) would be a total sucker for it.  

It was made in 1939 and though it has a Craftsman nameplate and flaking Craftsman blue paint, it was built by the Atlas Press Company. It was designed to work in a shop with a great spinning shaft along the ceiling and leather belts flapping down to each tool. Every part of the saw is cast iron or steel. It weighs a damn ton. It requires oil and grease to be squeezed into its gears and bearings and I feel like a train engineer. It is simple enough to be plain to me. 

 

And so last week, feeling low, I turned to the old girl. She got a new wooden stand and a new drive belt. She had her blade checked for wobbling (definitely, lots) and her arbor flange milled flat (flater). It thrums along now well enough for me to move on to other things. 

And she'll wait for the next dark mood. I'm thinking new blue paint.  

 

   

A New Bench

When I found a huge slab of Ash this January, and began to think about building a new bench, I thought a good deal about the Dominy family of woodworkers. The Dominys, beginning with Nathaniel, worked on Long Island from around 1716 until the early 19th century and, by happenstance, their workshop survived intact, tools and all, until it was purchased by Winterthur museum during the 1940s. Their main workbench is a massive oak slab 16 feet long, with legs tenoned into it like the posts of a house. They built clock cases and tea tables, planed unthinkable miles of boards on it. At one end of the bench, a massive vise is wide enough to acomodate the seats of the windsor chairs they made. The bench looks exactly as if it had been beaten with a century of continuous work.

Nathaniel Dominy's bench is essentially utilitarian. Every moment spent to build it was stolen from the completion of orders and the making of a living. The same thoughts crossed my mind as I built my own new bench this Winter. Still, though, it was hard not to polish something that seemed so lasting and monumental. I found myself planing out the last of the saw marks, striking a bead onto the stretchers.

And so, this week, I was shaping the underside of a table top. This is axe-work - hewing the wide bevels that define the thin edge of the top. Half-way through, the blade glanced outward and straight into the bench. I winced, but that's how you get to be like the Dominy bench.

On the Tracks

We finally had an afternoon sunny enough to take pictures of the new table, so we carted it to the old rail yard. I'm not sure if this is trespassing, but its my new favorite place to shoot furniture. 

It was a huge relief to see this piece come together. Making it successfully meant getting the hang of the the tapered-tenon construction used in Windsor chairs - basically the top of the leg is shaped to match a tapering hole in the top, then locked in place with a wedge. This required a new tool - a reamer.

With a description written by the great chair-maker John Alexander, this was fairly straightforward to make. Basically, the tool is a wooden shaft with a cone turned at one end with a pitch  identical to tapered ends of the legs you turn. A blade fitted to a slot in the cone scrapes a matching hole as you slooooowly twist, clear shavings, and twist some more. The body is ash, and the blade is filed from the crooked end of a saw I found in our garage when we moved in. It took a few hours of tweaking and testing to get the thing working right but it eventually did. There is a particular thrill in getting such fine, precise results from such a dead-nuts simple tool. 

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An Unanticipated Development

So, I have actually found myself flipping back through a variety of blogs for some instruction on the point of how to begin. Most launch immediately into discussion as though,  some afternoon,  an idea dawned so fascinating that it demanded a blog. This will be a more gradual unfolding, and I should begin with introductions.  

I am, of late, a professional woodworker. I work with hand tools, and mostly old tools. I make things with saws and chisels and planes. This is a small way of introducing something that is, in small ways, astonishing. 

Billy Collins writes about splitting wood:

"the darkness inside the tree they shared

now instantly exposed to the blunt

light of this clear November day,

all the inner twisting of the grain

that held them blindly

in their augmentation and contortion

now rushed into this brightness

as if by a shutter

that, once opened, can never be closed."    

And so, today, I thought of the pine planks in the lumberyard, each torn from the wet darkness of the tree, and with a fragment of that exact darkness inside of them.