The only serious injury I’ve sustained in the workshop was with a drawknife. In 1997, I was sharpening my grandfather’s tool with an oilstone at work. My hand slipped, and I gashed a finger.
It took a dozen stitches to close the wound. And as it was a workers’ compensation claim, I had to go through a very interesting series of interviews with the government.
Nice government lady: “What was the tool that caused the injury?”
Me: “A drawknife.”
Lady: “Hmmm. We don’t have a code for that tool. Is it a pocketknife?”
After a long series of questions (No, it’s not an axe. Nope, not a corn knife), she decided to create a new code for the tool to enter into the government forms. This, of course, required more interrogation about my boo-boo, and the case dragged on for many weeks.
In the 19th century, drawknife injuries were much more common. Jeff Burks has compiled this amazing array of news accounts of people who hurt themselves with the tool. Some wounds were self-inflicted. Some very odd. And many of them to the knee.
The knee?
The weirdest one is the guy who burst his bladder with a drawknife.
While I’m a huge fan of hot hide glue, it is one culprit in many examples of death and disfigurement when combined with shavings. Perhaps we can blame handplanes for the problem.
Jeff Burks sent me the following grisly gallery of news accounts involving shavings, fire and sometimes glue pots.
Most of us are haunted throughout our lives by the wide gap between what we feel we could do and the little we actually accomplish. “Man’s reach is wider than his grasp.” As children we embarked eagerly on cherished projects and when we failed from the lack of experience and skill were daunted and exasperated by our impotence. To feel within oneself the power to do a thing and then to make a hash of it!
Later, when our fingers had gained skill the problem posed itself in a different form. We might now have the knowledge and at least sufficient confidence to do a good job, but still there was something that eluded us, some secret vision of perfection to which, in spite of many efforts, we failed to attain. The trouble with perfection is that it looks so misleadingly simple, but the cost is high. We can spend quite a considerable part of our lives discovering just how high and that unless we are prepared to pay the price perfection will continue to elude us. Recently I came across a mathematician who, so that he might demonstrate some mathematical law to his class had made a wooden model which, in order to function, needed an upright board, grooved in zigzags set at certain angles, down which tiny balls cascaded to operate the model. It was not the main part of the model, merely the necessary prelude which made the demonstration possible, yet it had taken him, he said with a smile, three hundred hours to make. The wood was unpolished but so glossily smooth, with perfection in each incisive line along which the little balls capered, that it had a beauty all of its own. Obviously it had been a labour of love and infinite patience.
Usually it is our impatience that defeats us. There are so many other distractions tugging at us that it is difficult to devote ourselves unswervingly to one particular bit of creative work with the unhurried effort that a first-class job takes and we are content to give less than our best. The craftsman’s best needs something more than an acquired skill of fingers sufficiently well trained not to mar a job with rash, impatient movements. It needs besides an attitude of mind that can sustain a prolonged effort with enjoyment and when a man takes pleasure in his work for its own sake he has acquired the true craftsman spirit which makes the best work possible.
Even so, we have to accept our human limitations. They are different with every individual man, divergencies of talent, of temperament, of circumstances which must inevitably produce differences of achievement. The temptation is strong to say: “Ah, if I was that man, or had that gift, or that opportunity, I should do very differently.” Should we, I wonder? If, instead of sighing for the moon, we accept ourselves as we are, with our own gifts and potentialities, our own weaknesses and faults of temperament, and set ourselves to do the best creative work that lies inside of us in spite of them, we shall work with an awareness of ourselves that will be half the battle. The naturally impatient man has more patience to learn than his less impulsive brother, the man who yields so easily to discouragement has to make up his mind to grit his teeth and hand on and that “it’s dogged as does it.” We are all these things by turn and at times but in each of us the proportion is different. We are each, as it were, our raw material and by working creatively and setting ourselves to do good work we are shaping and making ourselves as well as the thing we do. In this way alone can we discover our hidden potentialities by learning to do the things which can give them release. It is their presence within us which gives us from childhood upwards that sense of power to do things which, given no outlet, may well prove illusory.
Lack of confidence or an impossible ambition may both cause failure but if we work realistically, accepting ourselves as we are, confidence will come or vaulting ambition learn a moderation that leads to success. As the power of achievement grows, we shall find that we have it in us to do work stamped with our own distinctive character, because character develops inevitably with the things we do, and that we shall be making a contribution in itself unique to our surroundings.
The only fatal thing is to give up trying, to allow that sense of innate ability to become submerged, turning to a feeling of frustration and finally indifference. By so doing we shall cheat ourselves of some of the best things in life.
Once started on the good road to craftsmanship there is no knowing where a man will stop. One thing has an odd way of leading to another, interests and accomplishments grow and thrive by the way. To the end of our days we shall probably feel conscious of the things we might have done and did not, but in so far as we were willing to pay the price of achievement we shall have something to show for having lived.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, April 1955 issue (paintings dug up by Jeff Burks)
The modern craftsman is in a far happier state than the modern painter or sculptor, so much of whose work seems to have lost touch with reality. Not for the craftsman the strange, erratic impulses which would bid him present a chair looking like some queer mastodon from the past. He is tied inexorably to facts. The chair he makes must have stability and a measure of comfort because it is made for someone to sit on, and a person who discovered he was expected to sit on some kind of revolving hippopotamus might turn into a very severe critic indeed. So the chair must be made with precision and care, conforming to certain rules which will act as a brake on his imagination – and even a craftsman’s imagination can have its wilder moments – and will keep him, willy nilly, tethered to the world of common sense and reality. And it is good for us to be so tethered. It is the world for which and in which we are working, whose needs we share and to whose ideas of graciousness and beauty we have it in our power to make some contribution. But only if we are willing to work within the framework it imposes.
It is in this way we attain full freedom to do our best creative work. If we make a table, for instance, giving insufficient care to exact measurements and the accurate fitting of the joints, the results will be a rickety article which will inevitably lessen our chances of making a good finished job of it. For who can put his whole heart into the artistic finish of a thing which is constantly lurching under his hand, and will, moreover, perversely defy all attempts at last-minute remedies. It may even be difficult to find the fault, so small may have been the inaccuracies which, added together, have resulted in a piece of furniture in which its maker can feel no pride and which will be a constant source of irritation to everyone who tries to use it. And so he learns to be sure of his beginnings; that he has first to be accurate and careful, combining knowledge and skill to produce a sound piece of work suited to its purpose before adding the finer, decorative touches which will give shape and reality to his imaginings.
It is here, of course, that the amateur so often fails. He is in such a hurry to reach the “nice” work at the end, when the piece will be assembled and only awaits finishing, that he goes through the preliminary stages at best grudgingly, and it is in these stages that his troubles begin.
— Charles H. Hayward, The Woodworker, March 1955 issue (photos courtesy of Jeff Burks)
A journeyman joiner in Kelso, having procured some arsenic for poisoning rats, mixed it amongst oatmeal, and laid it in his tool chest. His wife accidentally finding it, and not knowing the meal contained poison put it into their porridge on Monday morning last. Her eldest child who was about three years of age, upon taking the porridge, said they were bad, and would take no more, but she and a child she was nursing took a few spoonfuls of them, which they had no sooner done, than they were seized with violent reaching [sic] and vomiting, attended with a heat and pricking pain in the stomach. The husband coming in soon after for his breakfast, she told him what she had done, when he exclaimed, “You are all poisoned!” He immediately run [sic] for a doctor, who made use of every proper means to expel the poison, which was happily effected, as they are now in a fair way of recovery.
— from The Pennsylvania Packet Friday, Nov. 18, 1785, courtesy of Jeff Burks
