Toolemera Blog

Note By Note - The Making of Steinway L1037

It's been a formative week. Or deconstructionist week depending on how you look at it. James Krenov passed on. Although I never made a Krenov plane or followed his particular design ideals, his approach to wood and furniture has always suited my global outlook. Wood is supposed to look like wood, not plastic, not stone and not a manufactured conglomerate of materials. I want grain, texture, tone, shadows and spaces, not flat panels. I want the age that comes with good country antique furniture, the kind made by a local shop and the personality that goes with it.

I also needed to clean house a bit. The LFOD (Live Free or Die) tool auction in Nashua, NH was this past weekend, presenting a good opportunity to dispose of stuff. I selected about a dozen boxes of stuff of all sorts, loaded my trunk, back seat and front seat and headed up on Saturday, getting there around 8:30. Parked opposite Sandy Moss, figuring that proximity to a noted dealer would somehow rub of on my Camry. Unloaded the boxes and spread out a few things and waited. Nothing was priced, on purpose. When asked, I simply said the stuff is by the piece or by the box. In other words, dealer prices.

What finish should I use on wooden planes?

Ah yes, the adze old question: What finish is proper for wooden planes? This conundrum has kept many a blog, forum and email list going strong for many years. Linseed oil? Boiled Linseed oil? Shellac? Varnish? Painted pictures of wooden bridges? Should I just turn the plane into a lamp?

As part of our continuing reporting on rhykenologic events of note, herewith is an excerpt from an Ohio Tool Company catalog, 1914, which is in the process of being digitized for the website. You will note that these high quality planes of the Ohio Tool Company are finished with 'shellac varnish'.

David Denning, he of The Art and Craft of Cabinetmaking, says: "On purchasing a new plane it is advisable to thoroughly oil the block. This may best be done by immersing it in raw linseed oil and letting it lie in it for a week or so till soaked".

Is this simply an opposing sides of the Atlantic difference of opinion? Was it a sales gimmick on the part of the Ohio Tool Company? Is  the upstart Ohio Tool Company right in their choice of finish for their best quality planes? Are we better off using raw linseed oil instead of boiled linseed oil today? Such questions continue to bedevil us and provoke endless debates amongst the hand tool intelligentsia. Does steeping a wooden plane in raw linseed oil for a week or so improve the workability or life of the plane?

David Denning wrote of what he knew. His worklife dates from at least the final quarter of the 19th Century. We can assume that his fund of knowledge was drawn from his forefathers, who drew from theirs, and so on. Truly, these matters keep us all up late at night as we ponder the pros and cons of how best to finish or conserve wooden planes. The search for the answer will go on as I peruse my library shelves further.

For now, I will leave you with a quote from the final page of Mr. Denning's Opus:

"...and in the meantime, I must take my leave of my readers."

Till next, Gary

Appreciations

Part two of A New Old Website...

A long, long time ago, in a town far, far away, I had this idea of selling books and ephemera to old tools fanatics. Online. Through an email list and through posts to the Oldtools eMail list. The fledgling idea took shape as The Toolemera Press. Email was easy, posting on Flea Market Monday was easier (for the uninitiated, FMM was the first Monday of each month). Jump ahead a bunch of years and the fledgling Toolemera Press website. Version 1.0 was a fairly basic, straightforward content driven site with few bells and whistles. Let's say my web site development skills were less then rudimentary.

Periodically I became dissatisfied with the layout of the website and re-worked it. That became a yearly ritual as I learned a few new things and as the software advanced. Along the way people responded to the Toolemera Press site with words of support and thanks for making the material available. Based upon responses, I tried to steer the site towards what people wanted most, along with my own attempts to educate as well as introduce people to new stuff. Opening the site to contributors (aka: people how have something they'ld like to see shared online but who don't have a site of their own) furthered the goal of the site as public resource. Plus it brought in material that I didn't own... of which there really is quite a bit. So far.

Looking back, some of my education and work in libraries rubbed off on the site. Information Management, Content Management, Knowledge Management or whatever yesterdays buzzword is, the goal always was to organize material in such a way that people can both find what they want and be introduced to stuff they didn't know they wanted.

Then came blogs. At first, I really dis-liked blogs. They seemed to be mostly hollow words thrown out for all to read. Any Harry or Harriet could set up a blog and trumpet their opinions. Then blogs became a standard in the corporate world for disseminating information. I checked out a few options and settled tried Blogger... but scratched that in favor of Typepad (Blogger just didn't have some features I desired). A light bulb went off in my head... very belatedly after the world had already turned to blogs. Blogs could be a real nice way to reach people in ways the classic web site didn't. So I tried it out as the Toolemera Blog and found the pundits to be right. Blogs do work.

Where is the appreciation in all this blabber? If it wasn't for the people (yes, that means You, the reader) who check and read the Toolemera Blog and The Toolemera Press website, neither would exist today. It's one thing to toss a website or blog up on the Net. It's another thing to garner an appreciative audience for what is, shall we say, a topic of very narrow focus.

My thanks to all who read the Toolemera Blog and visit The Toolemera Press website. My thanks to all those who contribute material, leave comments, send emails in lieu of comments and who monitor my musings through RSS readers. Developing the two services has been a gas, and will continue to be one.

With much appreciation,
Gary Roberts

New Old Toolemera Site

Possibly because I have so much time to spare, I rebuilt The Toolemera Press website. Changes in color combinations, some changes in navigation aids and a lot of background stuff that may not be apparent but makes my life easier. The site has a lot of individual pages and a whole lot more display items. I knew that at some point I would have to split the site into sub-domains... and that time came.

This design is the first step in sub-domaining the entire web site. I use Freeway Pro, a Macintosh only WYSIWYG site developer which is great, but has it a few peculiar limitations that I needed to work around. So, goodbye left side vertical navigation bar, hello all purpose horizontal navigation bar. For those of my readers (woohoo doesn't that sound impressive, 'my readers') who are worried about bookmarks or links, the vast majority will stay the same. PDF files must still be downloaded from the site, and not from hot links (sorry but some people got carried away and linked directly to a whole lotta PDF files, thus 'borrowing' bandwidth without taking full responsibility for their actions. Life is too cruel.).

Back to The Toolemera Press version umpteen. I really felt the interface was getting too cluttered with graphics and stuff, so I opted for more text in the side bar. In time I'll be playing around with the layout, adding and subtracting, largely because a static site is too boring. At least it is for me. My tolerance for sameness runs out roughly every 12 months.

As niche sites go (internet buzzword for a site interesting to only the iconoclastic, idiosyncratic few of focused obsessions) the web site pulls around 5500 visits per month and approximately 5 Gb of bandwidth. A number of those visitors are the ubiquitous search bots, but a fair number are real live people. Although, on the internet it may be questionable who is a real live person and who is an avatar of some sort. But I digress. As usual. The Blog pulls around 3000 visits per month. Those are direct visits. There is no way to count people who read from afar through RSS links. Please RSS people, don't just read the excerpt, come visit and let me know my pontificating is both eloquent and oft quoted.

Over at the website, I plan on working in some focused advertising space and finally, yes, finally, getting the eStore running. After my Father-In-Law passed away last fall, things became quite busy around here. Lots of chores and planned work had to be put aside for a number of months. Things are slowing down enough to allow time to get the virtual side of life back in order.

The blog will remain pretty much as it is, with the occasional change in color schemes, layout, content, etc. Which, I guess, is saying that constant change is remaining pretty much what it is.  I have grand plans of bringing the blog and the website into sync with each other such that they will blend into One Great Empire! Sorry, got carried away there for a moment. For now,  please do let me know of your comments, critiques, suggestions and such regarding The Toolemera Press site redesign.

Till next
Gary

The Missing H

After a break to campaign for a local Library Board of Trustees seat (which I did not win... lost by 180 votes to the Town Custodian... oh! the pain of it!) I'm back.

For some reason, the derivation of peculiar word-working terms has stuck in my head. While (or whilst, if you are British) reading a book on the history of the English Language, I came across Cannel, a version of Channel. My friendly Online Etymology Dictionary says of Channel:

c.1300, "bed of running water," from O.Fr. chanel, from L. canalis "groove, channel, waterpipe"

Of course I jumped to the conclusion that the notorious In-Cannel and Out-Cannel gouges (sometimes even spelled with one N) should really be called In-Channel or even In-Chanel gouges. At least this would be true if the French had their way. What happened to the H? Were did the extra N come from?

Clearly, this momentous discovery requires a special page devoted to the Weird Words of Word-Working.

Do you have any Weird Words of Wood-Working that come to mind? Send them in and the first 100 entries will receive a free pass to the Toolemera Blog, good on Weekends only.

Till next
Gary