Category: Historical Images

How many machinists know a good file when they see it? I don’t believe one in fifty can take a pile of files and pick out the best one. The average man will pick up two or three, turn them over, squint along the corners, pick out the straightest one and call it as “good as any.” They don’t seem to have any idea that a file may be soft, or fire-cracked, or burned. If they were choosing a cold chisel they would look out for all these things, but “a file is a file” so long as it has teeth and tang.

Talk about certain tools being abused in the machine shop, or in any other shop. What is more abused than a file? No matter what job is on hand, they are expected to take right hold of it and never let go. Hard iron, soft iron, steel or lead, brass, copper or wood, it makes no difference. The file must go at it hammer and tongs.
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“I wish I had never learned this trade,” said a mechanic in our hearing a few days ago; and impatiently throwing down his tools he left the shop, with his day’s work but half completed. He went out to spend the remainder of the day in idleness, dissatisfied alike with himself and with his employment.

How often do we hear the very same expression and see the same disgust evinced in nearly every trade or avocation with which we are acquainted. Why is it? Is the evil in their occupation, in their employers, or is it in themselves? Some might presume one thing and some another; but we answer:—Mechanics, it is in yourselves.
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During the last year, Jeff Burks, Suzanne Ellison and I have been investigating the history of the holdfast. We’ve found some clues that this essential bench accessory is older than we first suspected.

It’s a long story that involves decaying frescoes, letters sent overseas, e-mails to Yale and lots of dead ends.

As we move forward in our research, we have a question for our multi-lingual readers: How do you say “holdfast?”

In French, we know it is “les valets.” But as we search databases around the planet, it would be good to have a more complete list of this common trade word in a bunch of languages, such as French, German, Dutch, Swedish and the like.

In English, we know the word goes back a bit. In 1575, G. Gascoigne in “Noble Arte Venerie lxxii” states: “You may take them out aliue with your holdfasts or clampes.” That’s the earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But we think the tool is older than that.

Let us know. We thank you.

— Christopher Schwarz

Probably few of our readers have any idea of the number and scope of the questions that continually pour in upon us, or of the labor involved in satisfactorily disposing of them. We certainly do not answer them all, and for at least two very good reasons, one of which is that we do not know enough. This is of course, very much to be regretted, both by ourselves and by those who apply to us.
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Workmen in almost all trades can be separated into two classes, and pattern makers are no exception to this rule, for everywhere we find on one hand the careless workman and on the other the ambitious man who looks ahead. The indifferent pattern maker still abounds and seems to have no ambition at all, or rather none except one which is all absorbing and has for its goal six o’clock and pay day.
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