Tag Archives: historical research

‘Hand-Hewn’ vs. Machine Made: Comparing Historic Tool Finishes To Modern Methods – Part 1

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Creating period wood finishes for film and television scenery always involves a certain amount of subjective and creative interpretation. Usually the wood surfaces are finished to a level having more to do with the time period’s distance from modern times more than how old the set would look in relation to the time of the story. So usually anything set in ancient Roman times looks like it’s been through several hundred sandstorms, attacked with a grinder and sand blasted until the early growth rings are worn away from the late growth rings. There were certainly buildings that were very old at that time but there were plenty that looked much newer than the photo below.

weathered wood showing sunken early growth rings

weathered wood showing sunken early growth rings

I was working on a period film several years ago and I noticed that one of the other designers had called out the wood surfaces of their set to be finished as ‘hand-hewn’. I knew the surfaces would have actually been surfaced to a finer finish than a rough hewn beam and I asked why it needed to be so rough. They answered that being pre-machine age, other than furniture which would have required lots of sandpaper, they wouldn’t have had the ability to give the wood a smooth finish. I said that not only was that not true,  in many ways hand tools gave a superior finish to the tools of the machine age, and they had something better than sandpaper.  They laughed until they realized I wasn’t kidding.

Let’s take timber framing. When most people think of a timber frame building they tend to think of the wood looking like this:

fachwerk3

16th century German timber frame or Fachwerk house.

The wood didn’t look anything like this when it was built. The faces of the wood probably looked more like this (minus the checking or cracks):

restored German Fachwerk building from the mid 1600's.

restored German Fachwerk building from the mid 1600’s.

 

Partly because of this trend toward artistic license, and not understanding period construction which leads to misinterpreting the photographic research available (such as the photo below), wood buildings get designed and built with anachronistic finishes.

 

fachwerk2

The timbers of this fachwerk building were originally as smooth as those in the previous example. Many years later the faces were scored to act as a grip for the
plaster stucco-like finish that was applied at one time to ‘modernize’ it, much like some old interior brick walls were scored to accept plaster.

 

Even the building industry can take some of the blame. Here’s a photo of a popular flooring with a simulated jack plane finish. The plane had a curved blade that was used to quickly take a plank down before being planed smooth to its final thickness. A board with tool marks like this would not likely have been used in a decent dwelling.

fake jack plane tool marks

 

 

Today it’s hard to imagine doing all the work involved in processing wood from logs to a finished form without power machinery. How could a hand tool created a finish smoother than a modern tool, much less sandpaper? first of all, the way the tools work today is much different than the way period tools work. And, because it was  a much more labor-intensive process, they didn’t finish surfaces that wouldn’t be seen.

Let’s start with the big stuff. The process of taking logs from a tree to a piece of framing timber in the European tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries involved a number of types of hatchets.

Here’s a video by Christopher Schwarz on the use of hewing axes by Plimoth Plantation’s master joiner, Peter Follansbee:

 

 

By the 18th century the process involved not only the hewing axes and saws but an adze to square the sides followed by a broadax to smooth the sides, and possibly a drawknife to remove the axe and adze marks.

Here is a great little video by Ken Koons explaining the process:

 

 

Once the mortises and tenons were cut they were cleaned up and smoothed using chisels and slicks, which were basically large chisels meant to be pushed by hand rather than hit with a mallet. The photo below is of the largest slick in my collection. Made in the late 1860’s in Ohio, it has a 3 inch wide blade. This big blade is certainly closer to a chisel than an axe as you can see from the closeup of the blade as it shaves off a sliver of my thumbnail. The blade will leave a very smooth surface.

 

A three inch wide framing slick from the mid 1800's

A three inch wide framing slick from the mid 1800’s

framing slick2

 

Here is a short video by John Neeman of a framing slick in use, you can see how quickly and cleanly it cuts a tenon.

 

 

 

Cut timber surfaces were as smooth as their maker wanted, or needed them to be. Here are two photos of the Daniel Trabue cabin near Lexington, KY. The cabin was restored some years ago and returned to it’s 1797 appearance. The clapboard which had been applied later had protected most of the logs from decay. Notice the tool marks on the exterior logs. Now look at the second picture of an interior wall on the second floor. Here the German maker has signed his name with an 18th century cipher. Notice how clear the signature is. It was made with a traditional crayon made of beeswax and powdered vermillion used for marking out work while building. The crayon was found during the restoration, tucked above the front door lintel. The clarity is only possible because the wood surface is so smooth.

front door of the Daniel Trabue cabin

front door of the Daniel Trabue cabin

18th century cipher of the cabin's builder

18th century cipher of the cabin’s builder

 

Next week, in Part 2 of this post I’ll talk about and show you how traditional hand tools can actually create a finish that’s superior to their modern day counterparts and why our ancestors didn’t use, or need sandpaper to surface wood. Also, you’ll learn why every recreation of Noah’s Ark you’ve ever seen is dead wrong.

The Best Chair You’ve Never Heard Of

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On campaign during the Boer War, 1900. Major-General R. Pole-Carew , right, is seated in a Roorkhee campaign chair. National Army Museum, London

It’s all our fault. America and India, that is. When the British Empire was at it’s height of power it was sending troops to three continents. It would have been an extreme hardship for the officers, gentlemen in a class above that of the common soldier, to have traveled to these far-off places without the comforts and trappings that they were used to at home.

That meant that the campaign tents that were pitched in the American wilderness and the jungles of India had to be filled with proper furniture. Soon the best furniture makers in London, including Thomas Chippendale were turning out pieces which were designed specifically for, well, camping. To maintain the prestige of the British Army the furniture they brought with them had to be practical, portable and stylish.

A suite of Victorian walnut campaign furniture from 1863. From the book British Campaign Furniture by Nicholas Brawer

These were more than just a few choice pieces which were tossed into a cart. Some officers, when ordering their camp furnishings at the British Crown’s expense, selected nearly 50 pieces including beds, chests, writing tables,  bookcases and chamber pot holders. The size of some of the tents they inhabited while on campaign would have rivaled the size of the average room in a fine country estate. Not to mention the caravan of wagons and horses necessary to carry it all from place to place.

I first learned about campaign furniture while I was working on The Patriot in 1999. We reproduced some Georgian campaign chairs like the one below and I was struck by the ingenuity of the design. Some of the comfort may have been compromised but not the style. Sure the stretchers were flat and mostly featureless but the overall lines were there.

George III caned mahogany folding chair, 18th century. Christopher Clark Antiques, Ltd., Glos., England

Three years later I came across Nicholas Brawer’s book, British Campaign Furniture 1740 – 1914. It still remains, amazingly, the only book on the subject. Brawer explains that the real explosion in campaign furniture came after the Napoleonic Wars, when a brisk increase in travel both on the continent and abroad created a huge market for portable and functional furniture.

In 1899, the British Army experienced an entirely new type of war. The Boer War in South Africa changed the way people thought about modern conflict and the idea of a ‘Gentleman’s War’ was gone. The over-designed and over-stuffed campaign furniture of the Victorian Era was unpractical for the new hit-and-run tactics which demanded something lighter and more austere. The Roorkhee Chair came out of this need for a chair that was both simple and still robust enough to stand rough treatment. Weighing between 11 and 13 pounds, the chair was usually covered in canvas with leather straps for arms and easily broke down for travel. The design also had the advantage of allowing the chair to sit with all four feet level no matter how uneven the ground was. The name of the designer is lost to history, but the chair was named in honor of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers in Roorkhee, India.

Roorkhee chair fitted with canvas seat and back. From British Campaign Furniture by Nicholas Brawer.

Chair disassembled for travel

another style of leg

Victorian Mahogany campaign chair from the 1870’s. The ancestor of the Rorrkhee chair, it wasn’t as robust even though it could break-down as well. The pieces were carefully numbered to match their corresponding pieces to make assembly easy for anyone.

Unfortunately Brawer’s book has been out of print for years, so if you find a copy you should grab it. There are reproductions being made including some very nice ones by Lewis Drake & Associates.

If you’re handy with tools, you can try making your own. Christopher Schwarz, contributing editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine, and living patron saint to hand tool woodworkers everywhere, has done an article on making a Roorkhee you can find here. And you can download his Sketchup model of the chair here.

A “Sweet” and Cheap Architectural Detail Resource

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Yes, I thought it was time for a bad pun. The “sweet” resource I’m talking about is the Sweet’s Indexed Catalogue of Building Construction. Not the modern version, mind you, but the earlier volumes. In particular I’m talking about the first one ever printed, in 1906.

Reprint copy of the first edition of Sweet’s

I found my copy in a used bookstore about 25 years ago, back when 3rd Street in Santa Monica was still a sleepy street lined with great used bookstores instead of chain outlets. It was a 1970’s reprint of the original, in great condition. But the most striking thing about it was how different it was from it’s modern relatives. This book was printed for people who actually drew details, and both wanted and needed to know how things were built.

Most of the products pictured throughout the book had either detailed drawings or photographs of the items, with dimensions and cutaways showing how they operated and how they were integrated into the architecture of the building. This was a far cry from the ‘updated’ version, void of details, which was meant only to be a means of calling out the correct ‘part number’ on a drawing rather than giving the architect a full understanding of the specifics.

The original volume, if you can find a copy, has a green cover. The reprints will have a tan cover. The most useful ones for our work run from 1906 to the 1930’s. They aren’t easy to find but Google has solved that problem. Among the millions of books they have digitized for their ebook site are the 1906 and 1907 editions of Sweet’s. The digital editions aren’t as crisp as a printed copy, but the details you’ll glean from them are priceless. You can download it as a pdf and have it on your computer whenever you want to refer to it. Here is some of what you’ll find:

A sample of a typical advert featuring both photos and detailed sections

details of furnace and ducting showing how the duct and registers are attached to the wall framing

One of hundreds of photos showing details such as trim, ironwork and tile.

Detail of large furnace for an office or apartment building

An early central vacuum system

And here’s proof that people had MUCH bigger heads 100 years ago

Another good source in Google Books is a magazine from about the same time period called The American Builder which has some good articles with details. This ad for a drafting course is great. Considering an average draftsman would have made about 35 to 40 cents an hour at that time, $100 a week would have been top dollar.