Lost Art Press

A Labor Dispute

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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I tend to view tools and machines as neutral things. To me, a handsaw, table saw and jigsaw are all tools of my personal liberty. With them, I can ditch the obligation to work on someone’s payroll. I don’t care if the tools plug in to the wall or pre-date the Rural Electrification Act.

We focus on handwork here at Lost Art Press because that is what is missing from the market. (The world does not need another book on router tables.) But we are not hostile to machines. To us, it all depends on how the tool is used – either to free yourself or to amass capital for others.

That said, history doesn’t always see technology this way. As I was using my iron miter box today to make some door frames, I remembered a fantastic passage from the “Report of the Industrial Commission of the Chicago Labor Disputes of 1900: The Disputes in the Building and Machinery Trades, Vol. VIII” (Government Printing Office, 1901). (Props to Jeff Burks for digging up the original testimony.)

It’s an interchange between a government official and union carpenter O. E. Woodbury.

Q. Did your union at any time forbid the use of the patent miter box, or the mortising machine, in a building?

A. I think they vetoed the use of the patent miter box; but I will tell you why they did it. In the first place, the carpenter that lugs a kit that he usually has to lug from job to job has got enough to carry without lugging an iron miter box; but not only that, they are a very expensive luxury, and the carpenter’s kit is a very expensive anyway, and he runs a great risk of losing it. A great many carpenters from time to time go home at night and leave the kit worth from $25 to $40 on the job, and go in the morning back to work and find that somebody has broken into the building or the lockup shed and stolen their tools, and they find themselves without a tool to work with; and if they haven’t got a bank account, and mighty few of them have, they will not have any money to put into new tools.

The iron miter box simply increases your kit, and adds more weight to it, and more expenses to it. We feel that it is a tool that if the bosses want you to have and want you to use, because it is perhaps more accurate than the average wooden miter box, they should provide the carpenters with them. We have never said to one of our members, You can not use it. But we forbid them – I believe at one time we forbade them to buy them and to carry them around with them, because the simple fact of the matter was that it would be but a short time before we should all have to carry them around and run the risk of losing them.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Found: One Leather-bound Edition of ‘Mouldings in Practice’

Posted on by john

Not sure how, but I found one copy of “Mouldings in Practice” bound in leather. Depending on how the book sells and when we re-print we may do another batch in leather. It won’t be anytime soon, however.

The book is on the site, so if you would like to purchase it click here.  The price is $185, which includes shipping.  If you click the link and can’t see the book that means it has been sold.

Best

john

It’s a Wonder any Work Was Done

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Boy-sent-out-by-his-workmates-to-fetch-beer.-Date-circa-1890

The following are fines paid by cabinetmakers in Irish shops in 1839. Typically, the fines were paid in drink for fellow shopmates.

1. Entering a shop as an apprentice: 1 pound, 1 shilling.
2. Failure to keep the glue warm: 6 pence.
3. Forgetting to extinguish the fire or candles at night: 2 shillings, 6 pence.
4. When an apprentice “takes the apron” to do man’s work: 1 shilling.
5. When an apprenticeship expires, called “washing him out:” 10 shilling, 6 pence.
6. Getting married: 10 shilling.
7. Having a child: a quart of whisky.
8. Being taught any new task: 1 shilling.
9. Tool not put away: 3 pence.
10. Long beard or dirty shirt: 6 pence.
11. Obtaining a favored workbench near a window: quart of whisky.
12. Gluing someone’s pockets shut: 2 pence.
13. Leaving the rubstone hollow: 1 pence.

“It is wonderful that there are any sober men in the mechanic class at all, when such perpetual drinking tyranny dominates over them… . Boys at first are shy of taking drink, and seem to dislike it, but before they are half out of their time they generally acquire the usual relish for stimulation, and are eager to subject new comers to the same exercise which was so disagreeable to themselves. Thus cruelty and drunkenness are perpetuated, and the foundation of all evil habits laid in the very social constitution.”

Excerpted from “The Philosophy of Artificial and Compulsory Drinking Usage in Great Britain and Ireland: Containing the Characteristic, and Exclusively National, Convivial Laws of British Society” by John Dunlop – 6th Edition 1839.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to Jeff Burks for pointing me to this book. Or perhaps it was an intervention?

Another Way to Tame Tear-out

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Deneb Puchalski of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks uses a toothing iron to deal with materials that are difficult to plane. He first tooths the surface and then removes the toothing with a fine-set plane, usually a low-angle jack plane.

A few years ago he asked me if there was anything in the literature that supported this method. And this entry is a long-overdue reply.

From “The Panorama of Science and Art” (Caxton Press) by James Smith, 1825.

Though the double iron is an excellent invention, and the use of it is, in fact, the best general remedy known against the curling or cross-grained stuff of ordinary quality; yet, without some other assistance, the planing of many of the finest specimens of mahogany, and many other woods, among which fustic may be particularly mentioned, would be to the last degree a difficult and perplexing operation to the workman.

Hence a plane, the stock of which is usually made of the shape and size of the smoothing-plane, is fitted up so as to act by scratching or scraping. The blade, or iron, on the steel side of it, is covered with rakes or small grooves close to each other, and all of them in the direction of its length: when therefore it is ground, and the basil formed, its edge presents a series of teeth like those of a fine saw; the bed of the stock intended to receive it is inclined only about six degrees, and consequently when the iron is fixed it is almost perpendicular. On account of these teeth in the iron, the plane obtains the name of the tooth-plane.

With this kind of a plane, however hard the stuff may be, or however cross and twisted its grain, the surface may be made every-where alike, and will not be rougher than if it had been rubbed with a piece of new fish-skin. This roughness may be effectually removed with the scraper, which is a thin plate of steel, like part of a common case-knife, the back of it being let into a piece of wood, as a handle.

So there you go. Thanks to Jeff Burks for turning me onto the Panorama book several years ago. Lots of good stuff in there on joinery that isn’t in Peter Nicholson’s book.

— Christopher Schwarz

Tinkering with Tools

Posted on by fitz

hammacher_schlemmer_1911

Years ago I found it necessary to warn people of certain fallacies and misconceptions. There is less need of warnings to-day, yet there are dangers. Some people still think that manual labor is manual training, just as they probably think that the boy who fetches and carries books in a library is becoming a literary man.

Others think a manual training school should be a factory, and should put its goods on the market. Still others think that the chief product of manual training is found in bits of furniture and knick-nacks which pupils carry home. It is constantly necessary for us to explain that ordinary manual labor is not manual training at all. There is training in mastering the theory and the use of a tool or a machine under the guidance of an expert; but when the mastery is gained, and gained thoroughly, there is no training in its continued use, which is not for education but is for commercial ends.

My usual reply to people who betray such misconceptions is already gray with age, but it may be allowed a positively last appearance here—the more a school becomes a factory the less is it a school. The school should put one article upon the market and that is, boys; and if all the shop exercises of the year were at its close put into a furnace and burned, all the manual training would remain.
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