Once you start looking, it’s easy to see (or think that you see) Melencolia squares in many old drawings.
Suzanne Ellison sent me this 1863 ink drawing of a Sikh carpenter that is in the collection of the University of California. Look at the guy’s feet. One is next to a marking gauge. The other is next to an odd angular thing.
As there is no try square shown in the illustration, it’s plausible that the thing touching the carpenter’s big toe is a simple square with a shaped blade.
After you make a bunch of these 16th-century squares, two things become apparent.
1. Gee, these squares are handy, compact and easy to use when scribing lines on work that has been trued up.
2. Gee, these squares are a pain to true up because of all the end grain in the handle.
In fact, truing them up is the only difficult thing about making them. If I’m careful when I build them, then they come out of the clamps dead square and ready for a coat of finish. If they aren’t square, it usually takes me about 15 to 20 minutes of fussing around to get them square. You have to bevel off the moulding profiles on the handle with care so you don’t spelch the corners when truing things up.
The best plane for this task is a heavy jointer, which has the inertia to plow through 2” x 2” of end grain without complaining.
When truing up my fifth or sixth square, I thought about making the blade a little wider than the handle – like an 18th-century wooden try square. That would make the square a piece of cake to true up – no end grain. But none of the images in my library showed that detail.
Jeff Burks to the rescue.
One of the coolest images Jeff dug up is from a Romanian fortified church in Biertan. The pews are decorated with carved tools from the craft guild that built the church furnishings. Construction on the church began in 1468 and continued into the 16th century. Jeff and I have been discussing whether the carving of the tools is indeed from the 16th century or might be later.
In any case, the Melencolia square shown in the sculpted grouping of tools has its blade wider than the handle. Score.
If you’d like to investigate this church some more, Jeff provided these links. Here’s the set of photos where that original image came from. You can read more about Biertan here. Warning, it will make you want to visit. And so don’t read these travel blogs on Biertan here and here.
So I have one more square to make. Then I really have to stop fooling around with these squares and start building a big piece of casework on my calendar.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I posted a couple of SketchUp drawings of these squares on my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine. Here’s the link. Other stories in this too-long series:
Hubert Robert – Fountain of Apollo gardens of Versailles – 1774
This painting depicts the rejuvenation of the park at Versailles, begun in 1774 with the cutting down of the trees for sale as firewood (not FORP).
Scieurs de long, (literally ‘the long sawyers’) is the French name for what we know in English, from the British tradition, as ‘Pit Sawing’, albeit with trestles instead of a saw pit. This entry will continue with a set of old French photographs and postcards that show a method of holding the log that utilizes a single trestle or scaffold (echafaudage de scieur de long) to hold the timber in a cantilevered position for sawing. (more…)
Sketch of two sawyers – 17th century – artist unknown
Besançon; Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology
This entry is a continuation of the previous series on sawing lumber. (See also China, India, Japan) These images from Italy, Spain & France depict a once common method of sawing timber that was inherited from the ancient Romans. These images span the years 1180 A.D.- 1829 A.D. The final image shows the Roman version of this technique. (more…)
One of the variants on the Melencolia I square has its blade stretched out in width until it looks almost like a bat’s wing.
This square shows up in the late 16th-century Wierix plates shown from my first entry on this topic. A nearly identical square shows up in the title page to the book “The Childhood of Jesus,” by Hieronymous Wierix. (By the way, that plate is a treasure trove of rabbit holes for investigation.)
The Wierix square looks a lot like a modern SpeedSquare, with a wide and triangular blade and a small stock. The curves on the blade have a gothic look to them.
While it is easy to start thinking of uses for these curves, I think they primarily serve two purposes:
1. To make it efficient to cut two blades from one rectangular blank. After cutting out about a dozen of these early-style blades this week, I’m struck by how often the waste can be used to make an identical blade. This, I think, is more important than the decorative shapes on the blades.
2. The decoration exposes more end grain along the length of the blade, making the tool more responsive to changes in humidity.
These squares are even easier to make than the Melencolia I square. The stock in this example is 3/4” thick, 1-3/4” wide and about 12” long. The blade is 1/4” thick, 12” wide and about 20” long.
The stock of these squares isn’t always moulded – sometimes it’s just a rectangular stick. I planed two moulded edges on mine using a 1/2” square ovolo plane. Then I plowed a 1/4”-wide x 1/2”-deep groove along one edge.
The shape of the blade was the most difficult part. I mucked around in SketchUp for a while, but then found the correct arches by drawing them out on paper with a set of French curves. A saw and a rasp finished the blades.
Then I glued up the two parts, trued up the blade and added a coat of finish.
These are handy for layout because the blade rests on the work and won’t let the stock totter. This makes it easy to mark square lines across a board. As a result of the large blade, however, these squares are no good for checking an assembly for square on the outside of the assembly.
But for two scraps of wood, they are pretty handy.
Suzanne Ellison sent me this 1863 ink drawing of a Sikh carpenter that is in the collection of the University of California. Look at the guy’s feet. One is next to a marking gauge. The other is next to an odd angular thing.
