The Four Horsemen

On Fri, 29 Nov 2013 14:40:19 -0800 (PST), Frank Krygowski
wrote:

By coincidence:

I visited the library today. Since I'm fighting off some sort of upper-respiratory thing, I don't have much energy, not even serious reading. When I get like this, I pass the time by browsing through books on unusual topics. Preferably books with lots of artwork.

So just an hour ago, I came home with _The Forgotten Crafts: A Practical Guide to Traditional Skills_ by John Seymour, 1984. Seymour's British, and had a very skilled pen-and-ink artist (Eric Thomas) on the team. It's a very pretty book, illustrating the old ways of doing everything from coopering to weaving to making horse collars, knives, log cabins, etc. etc.

There's a chapter on wooden boat building, more thorough than most in this book. But the boatbuilder is using either copper or galvanized "iron" (I'd have guessed steel) to hold the strakes to the frames. No treenails here.

Actually wooden boat building isn't forgotten.... except in the
"developed countries" :-) Here in Thailand it is still practiced, with
80 - 100 ft. fishing boats still being built.

From what I've read treenails were somewhat of a compromise anyway.
Cheap but apparently not considered as strong as metal. One article I
read stated that the Romans had used copper as a boat fastening
material and that the English navy ships had used iron, copper, bronze
as fasteners particularly in the backbone timbers, keel, keelson,
stem, etc. Another article stated that if treenails were used than a
few steel bolts should be used.

But there's a short chapter on making traditional wooden rakes, the kind with short (maybe 4"?) wooden tines protruding down from a sort of wooden cross bar or "head" " These tines are cylindrical.

Here's how they're made: An ash or willow pole about 6" diameter is cut into tine-length slices. String is tied around each 6" slice, and it's rived with a froe and mallet into square pegs. "You are then left with a bunch of square sectioned pieces of wood tied together with a piece of string."

"There would be nothing to stop you from carving each of these square sections round with a pen-knife, but a much quicker way is to use a "tine-former" ... a steel pipe with one end sharpened and tempered. ... The pipe sits in a stand and you place it over a hole in a bench. Sitting astride the bench, with a pile of square-section tines to hand it is an easy and satisfying thing to place each tine over the sharpened end of the pipe and wallop it with a mallet."

An illustration shows a bucket under the bench to catch the falling cylindrical tines.

Although I don't see it stated specifically, ISTM that most of the traditional crafts illustrated would have been in use perhaps 1800s to early 1900s. (There are some photos as well.) Which techniques were used earlier than that, I don't know.

Probably "what worked for him". After all, there you are, sitting
there looking at two cord's of wood to be made into pegs. Some people
will just get at it and beaver away making pegs. Another guy might
well think while he was whittling and figure out a different and
"easier" way to get the job done.


- Frank Krygowski
--
Cheers,

John B.