Wood-working for Beginners: A Manual for Amateurs. Charles G. Wheeler
you wished to, of course (except, perhaps, when you go to some of the remoter regions in vacation), and you are doubtless better off for all the advantages you have now and for all our time-saving contrivances, but the advantage depends partly on how you use the time saved from their laborious tasks, does it not? You can, however, get inspiration from the example of those older boys and from some of their methods, and can put their self-reliant, manly zeal, grit, and perseverance into your work, and have a capital time making the things and more sport and satisfaction afterwards for having made them.
This book does not try to show you a royal road or a short cut to proficiency in architecture, carpentry, cabinet-making, boat-building, toy-making, or any other art or science. It does not aim to cram you with facts, but merely to start you in the right way. It is for those of you who want to take off your coats, roll up your sleeves, and really make things, rather than sit down in the house and be amused and perhaps deluded by reading enthusiastic accounts of all the wonders you can easily do—or which somebody thinks you would like to be told that you can do. It is for those of you who do not wish to have your ardour dampened by finding that things will not come out as the book said they would, or that the very things you do not know and cannot be expected to know are left out.
It does not aim to stir up your enthusiasm at first and then perhaps leave you in the lurch at the most important points. I take it for granted that if you have any mechanical bent or interest in making things, as most boys have, and are any kind of a real live boy, you have the enthusiasm to start with without stirring up. In fact, I have even known boys, and possibly you may have, who, strange as it may seem, have had so much enthusiasm to make something or other that they have actually had to be held back lest they should spoil all the lumber within reach in the effort to get started!
What you want is to be told how to go to work in the right way—how to make things successfully and like a workman—is it not? Then, if you mean business, as I feel sure you do, and really want to make things, read the whole book through carefully, even if it is not bristling with interesting yarns and paragraphs of no practical application to your work. You will not find everything in it, but you cannot help learning something, and I hope you will find that it attends strictly to the business in hand and will give you a start in the right direction—which is half the battle.
"Man is a Tool-using Animal. … He can use Tools, can devise Tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing—with Tools he is all."—Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
CHAPTER II
TOOLS
You can do a great deal with very few tools. The bearing of this observation lies in "the application on it," as Jack Bunsby would say.
Look at the complicated and ingenious curiosities whittled with a jack-knife by sailors, prisoners, and other people who have time to kill in that way! Have you ever seen the Chinese artisans turning out their wonderful work with only a few of the most primitive tools? But of course we cannot spend time so lavishly on our work as they do, even if we had their machine-like patience and deftness acquired through so many generations.
We cannot hold work with our feet and draw saws towards us or do turning out on the lawn with a few sticks and a bit of rope for a lathe; carve a set of wonderful open-work hollow spheres, each within the other, out of one solid ball of ivory; and the rest of the queer things the Orientals do: but it is merely a matter of national individuality—the training of hundreds of generations. We could learn to do such things after a long time doubtless, but with no such wonderful adaptability as the Japanese, for instance, are showing, in learning our ways in one generation.
Fig. 1.
Examine some of the exquisite work which the Orientals sell so cheaply and think whether you know anyone with skill enough to do it if he had a whole hardware-shop full of tools, and then see with what few simple and rude tools (like those shown in the following illustrations, or the simple drill, Fig. 1, still in use) the work has been done. Mr. Holtzapffel describes the primitive apparatus in use among the natives of India as follows[4]:
Fig. 2.
"When any portion of household furniture has to be turned, the wood-turner is sent for; he comes with all his outfit and establishes himself for the occasion at the very door of his employer. He commences by digging two holes in the ground at a distance suitable to the length of the work, and in these he fixes two short wooden posts, securing them as strongly as he can by ramming the earth and driving in wedges and stones around them. The centres, scarcely more than round nails or spikes, are driven through the posts at about eight inches from the ground, and a wooden rod, for the support of the tools, is either nailed to the posts or tied to them by a piece of coir or cocoanut rope. The bar, if long, is additionally supported, as represented, by being tied to one or two vertical sticks driven into the ground. During most of his mechanical operations the Indian workman is seated on the ground, hence the small elevation of the axes of his lathe. The boy who gives motion to the work sits or kneels on the other side of it, holding the ends of the cord wrapped around it in his hands, pulling them alternately; the cutting being restricted to one half of the motion, that of the work towards the tool. The turning tools of the Indian are almost confined to the chisel and gouge, and their handles are long enough to suit his distant position, while he guides their cutting edges by his toes. He grasps the bar or tool-rest with the smaller toes and places the tool between the large toe and its neighbour, generally out of contact with the bar. The Indian and all other turners using the Eastern method attain a high degree of prehensile power with the toes, and when seated at their work not only always use them to guide the tool, but will select indifferently the hand or the foot, whichever may happen to be the nearer, to pick up or replace any small tool or other object. The limited supply of tools the Indian uses for working in wood is also remarkable; they are of the most simple kind and hardly exceed those represented in Fig. 2; the most essential in constructing and setting up his lathe being the small, single-handed adze, the bassōōlăh. With this he shapes his posts and digs the holes; it serves on all occasions as a hammer and also as an anvil when the edge is for a time fixed in a block of wood. The outer side of the cutting edge is perfectly flat, and with it the workman will square or face a beam or board with almost as much precision as if it had been planed; in using the bassōōlăh for this latter purpose the work is generally placed in the forked stem of a tree, driven into the ground as shown in the illustration."
If we are inclined to feel proud of the kind of wood-work turned out by the average wood-worker of this country or England with his great variety of tools and appliances and facilities, we might compare his work with that done by the Orientals without our appliances. Read what Professor Morse tells us of the Japanese carpenter[5]:
"His trade, as well as other trades, has been perpetuated through generations of families. The little children have been brought up amidst the odour of fragrant shavings—have with childish hands performed the duties of an adjustable vise or clamp; and with the same tools which when children they have handed to their fathers, they have in later days earned their daily rice. When I see one of our carpenters' ponderous tool-chests, made of polished woods, inlaid with brass decorations, and filled to repletion with several hundred dollars' worth of highly polished and elaborate machine-made implements, and contemplate the work often done with them—with everything binding that should go loose, and everything rattling that should be tight, and much work that has to be done twice over, with an indication everywhere of a poverty of ideas—and then recall the Japanese carpenter with his ridiculously light and flimsy tool-box containing a meagre assortment of rude and primitive tools—considering the carpentry of the two people, I am forced