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It has been said that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” This is an axiom and does not need demonstration to prove the truth of it, but we may go a little further and say, that when applied to shops and mills that it is necessary to prosperity, for wherever you may go, or whatever mill, or yard, or shop you may go into and find everything at loose ends, and tools laying around promiscuously and many of them hung up on the floor or shied away under the benches, or if you go through the lumber yard and find piles of boards or plank or nice timber uncovered, and piles of boards left with part of them thrown down where they ought to be piled up nicely and covered, I say that where these conditions exist, you can take your note book out and write down. “This concern will eventually go to the bad, unless it becomes converted to the gospel cleanliness and order.” “Order is Heaven’s first law ” and unless we obey that law to the letter, we shall surely have to suffer the penalty for disobedience to its demands. Order and cleanliness about any place of business, is just as necessary as sunlight to the growth of vegetation.

The loss of time spent in hunting for mislaid tools amounts in the course of a year to hundreds of dollars in shops where everything is left to take care of itself which somebody has got to pay for, and in lumber manufacturing places it comes on the owners because all the work is done at the owners expense unless you are sawing or turning or planing for your customer by the hour which happens only once in a while, and then if your bill amounts to more than he thinks it ought to, next time he will go some where else with his work and indirectly you are a loser because you do not have the work to do.
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While up in the Boston area last week, Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation, commented on the lack of images of shavehorses from the 17th century.

That kind of question mark interests me.

Earlier I had stumbled on some engravings of people whose body parts were the tools and materials they worked with. The print, Habit de Menuisier Ebeniste, showed a cabinetmaker made from his tools.

Jeff Burks (naturally) turned up the plate shown above and several more that were similar. This one shows a cooper with a shavehorse at his feet. Here’s what Burks says about the artist and what is known about the plate:

These were by Nicolas de Larmessin II (printmaker; French; c.1645 – 1725). Engraver; brother of Nicolas de Larmessin I. Father of Nicolas III. Worked most of his career for his elder brother, and later his widow. Seems to have published little himself.

The dates attributed to these engravings vary from 1690-1700 and beyond. I don’t think anybody really has a concrete date for them. It also appears that they also don’t agree about how many were in the original set. Some say 77, some say 97, and there were copycat artists who came after, plus reprints of the originals, sometimes hand-colored.

The image is from Gallica. And we will keep looking.

— Christopher Schwarz

This saying was evidently born in a blacksmith’s shop. It has done service in every kind of shop, and has passed into one of those proverbs which are as often false as true. Indeed, this is the character of the greatest number of proverbs. True in a limited and special range, they are used as of universal application. Now, though a man may have “too many irons in the fire,” it is just as true that he may have not enough irons in the fire. It is foolish to take on more work than one can do well. It is wicked to work so excessively as to exhaust the strength, weaken digestion, impair sleep, and shatter the nervous system. When these results are produced by an inordinate use of the passions, they are called dissipations. But they are none the less dissipations when they spring from an inordinate addiction to business.

But it is not in this direction that men are said to have too many irons in the fire. When a man is carrying on so many separate enterprises that he must neglect some of them wholly, and can attend to none of them thoroughly, he is properly said to have too many irons in the fire. But the same phrase is applied to a man who turns his hands to many different kinds of trade. It is the serious belief of many that a man can not be a good workman in more than one art; that, if a workman means to be skillful, he must devote his life to a single trade, and in confirmation of such notions proverbs fly thick—”Jack of all trades and good at none,” being a specimen!
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It is a wonder that the file, rather than the hammer, has not been recognized as the sign of the manufacturing industry. Its range, powers, and usefulness are far beyond those of the hammer, and it can assume the functions and perform the work of a number of auxiliary tools to which the hammer holds no analogy.

Whatever cannot be done by the set and power-driven machines in the shops where the metals are worked is sent to the file. The file reduces protuberances, smooths roughnesses, changes inclinations of surfaces, cuts scores, forms levels between parallel drill holes, prepares surfaces for the scraper, evens the roughness and inequalities of lathe work, cleans out the suggestion of the rib-like projections of the planer, shapes the tool where the most delicate grinding apparatus fails, makes a better finish to the eye than any scraping or stoning, is a saw at times, may be used as a chisel, takes the place of a plane, smooths the roughnesses of castings and forgings, reduces their proportions to size, and finishes them to fit. Except for drilling holes through solid metal the file can take the place of any tool used for any other purpose on the metals.

In England, Scotland, and Wales the filer is a man by himself; he has little to do with the lathe man or the floor man. He is the prince among machinists. Here we think all the work of the machinist may be done by one man, and the lathe man, planer man, floor man, and vise man may be compromised in one. But this general ensemble is getting out of date here.
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