CHAPTER I: All of Us Can
Use Tools
Never in my boyhood life was I
permitted to touch clean, new wood with
sharp tools. Some one preconceived the
notion that my hands were all thumbs.
I can remember myself so well as a very
little boy standing in a lumber yard,
feeling pieces of spruce and white pine,
looking longingly at a springy plank 2
inches thick and 16 feet long, and wanting
that plank almost more than anything I ever
had seen before or since.
Later there were times when I stood for
hours with my nose pressed against the glass
of the show window of a hardware store,
dreaming of myself at a work bench with all
of the planes, the saws, the rules, the
chisels, the hammers, the screw-drivers that
I could possibly want. But I did not ask for
them because my family was fully convinced
that my hands were all thumbs. I might want
to tinker about with wood and tools but they
made me feel that sweet smelling lumber was
for boys and men who knew how to use it, not
for those who had no "talent."
Resigned but discontented I grew up
believing there was a great mystery, for
instance, about hanging a door. I have seen
carpenters breathe on the hinges which they
were about to screw into position with the
idea that it brought them good luck and that
the doors as a result would hang well. It
isn't true, of course. There is no mystery
about hanging a door. You don't need good
luck. You need only know how to do it,
providing you have tools of good steel, well
sharpened. Today, I believe, I could
guarantee to teach my fifteen-year-old boy
in two lessons how to hang a door.
It wasn't until I became
a husband and a householder that I got
myself a tool chest. Talk about it being my
hope chest! I really believe it has saved my
life time and again—sharp, well designed
tools and good, clean, bright wood and the
joy of working with them. I learned to put
up shelves, hang a door, put new locks on
windows and cupboards and build very
satisfactory pieces of simple furniture.
It's as easy for me to do that kind of thing
as it is for me to humor a furnace fire, fix
electric lights, or grease the chassis on a
car.
Having learned to do those things I
wanted to do more. I learned what a tool can
do, I, who since my childhood had known that
haunting, pungent scent of fresh wood in my
nostrils. Most important, however, is
something else I learned—I learned that any
big job, such as building a kitchen cabinet,
is not a mysterious and wonderfully complex
task. It is not a battle with wood that will
not come to time in your hands. It does not
require a mysterious and occult knowledge.
I discovered that you do not stand over
a pile of lumber with a saw, a plane and a
chisel in your hand and say "hokus-pokus."
On the contrary what you actually do is take
a small board of the proper kind of wood,
make it the right length and the right width
and join it to another small piece which you
have put through the same process. You keep
on doing this, occasionally erecting three
or four of the pieces you have put together.
When you get through with the job, after a
few hours' labor, you have what is called a
kitchen cabinet. It is not a kitchen cabinet
until you have put it all together and
erected it in place. It is a collection of
pieces of board, sawed and planed to fit
together in various ways.
Really it's as simple as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
= 4.
So I learned that making anything out
of wood is like doing any other job; you
need to know a little bit about it, to have
the proper tools to do it and then do it
little by little and bit by bit.
That is all there is to making anything
of wood. You make a little piece of it at a
time.
THINGS MADE BY HAND ARE
MOST BEAUTIFUL
Not very long ago I
made a lucky purchase. It was a little
Jacobean stool, such as they used to have
five hundred years ago in Elizabethan
England for small boys and girls to sit
upon. It is made of oak and it is well worn
from countless childish shoes and trousers.
It is, I believe, more beautiful than any
stool which I could purchase today in a
store. The only reason why this old stool,
which has seen so many centuries pass, is
more beautiful than a stool I could buy in a
furniture store, is because it is well made
by hand, is simple and rugged in design, is
made of most excellent materials, and the
wood has acquired the beautiful color the
years have brought to it.
The fact is that almost anything which
we use can be made stronger, more simple,
more beautiful, by loving hands than it can
by machinery. There is no reason why a
kitchen shelf may not be fundamentally
beautiful. There is no reason why a door
cannot be hung so that it swings at the
touch of a hand and is beautiful because it
is simple and rugged.
If you will learn to make an ordinary
mortise, to form a dovetail joint, a halved
joint, or to plane the edge of a board so
that it is square; if you will learn to
drive a nail straight, to put heavy screws
in oak without splitting the board, and
handles on a drawer so that they are
straight: your work in wood should be
beautiful.
You can go to a store and buy a kitchen
cabinet ready for use, well painted, for
$50.00 or $60.00. You, yourself, can make in
the evenings, that kitchen cabinet for not
over $10.00. You can go to a store and buy a
candle-stick complete ready for use,
varnished and polished, for from 10 cents to
$5.00. You can make that candlestick
yourself with perhaps no saving in money.
But when you have made it and it is standing
on the mantelpiece you have always before
you as you look at it the memory of a sharp
tool cutting into well seasoned wood.
Through your hands, and your hands alone,
the world is richer by the existence of that
object that you can hold in your hand.
That is the satisfaction which the
artisan in paint, the artisan in words, or
the artisan in steel, stone, glass or wood
feels. There is something priceless about
it. You have a value that no man can take
from you. Let the candlestick become
blackened and charred, let it be broken by
careless hands and still the joy of its
creation cannot be taken from you, it is
yours for the length of your life.
CHAPTER II: How to
Become Skillful
Craftsmanship is a combination of knowledge
on how to use tools and of skill with the
hands. An old carpenter has more tricks of
the trade than he could possibly teach and
no two carpenters' tricks are the same in
every instance. These tricks are a part of
the day's work. They come from cut and try
or the trial and error method. You could
start today and in half an hour learn all by
yourself several things about tools and
wood. If you took a plane to a piece of
white pine you would discover shortly that
when you attempt to push the tool against
the grain you would not make a smooth cut,
yet when you push the plane with the grain
you make a smooth cut which, with a sharp
plane, is almost as smooth as though you had
sandpapered it down.
Lesson One. You have learned never to
plane a piece of wood until you have
examined it to see what way the grain runs.
You will learn to plane always with the
grain unless you have a special finishing
job requiring a special type of work. There
is no way of learning such facts except by
trying.
The other factor in craftsmanship is
natural skill with the hands. To become a
skilled workman in wood requires practice
for two reasons—you learn to handle tools
delicately and firmly, as a pianist learns
to strike the notes on his keyboard to
produce precisely the effect he wishes; the
other is to learn by trial and error the
better ways of doing every single little
thing.
There is no real short cut to
craftsmanship and one of the very greatest
advantages of working with wood is that you
learn this fact and are extremely likely to
guide your life in the future according to
these principles. You learn a great deal
about life and business from a kit of tools
and some wood.
WHAT THIS BOOK CAN DO
No book could possibly give you all the
tricks of the carpenter's trade. They have
to be learned at the bench. But there is no
reason why you cannot learn all you need to
know for the home use of a good set of
tools. You can teach yourself while making
things which you wish to use.
It is the purpose of this volume to give
you fundamentals which will enable you to
get the most fun out of tools and to achieve
the most skill.
And most important of all, by using this
book to help you make things at home, you
will be adding to the richness of your own
life.
(If there are particular things which
you wish to make, the publisher of this book
can tell you how to procure working
drawings, which, with the aid of this
volume, will enable you to build almost
anything you would care to undertake.)
From
my perspective -- in the first decade of the 21st century,
80 years after the Stanley Tools manual was published -- I
see a very competent woodworker's manual, but written with
several sets of hands and minds. The photos (above, and rare
for woodworker's manuals of the period, for sure, come out
of corporate headquarters, as Stilgoe correctly notes.)
