A common question from visitors to the museum woodworking shop is "what did they do for a router?", the router being the electric tool with a spinning arbour and round cutter that shapes mouldings along the edge of a board, as well as cutting grooves for shelves, and the like. The answer is that they had moulding planes, like the little beading plane we will be discussing here. The moulding plane, like its cousins the bench planes, takes off…

The well known difficulty with solar and wind power is that they are intermittent. At night the sun does not shine, and photovoltaic panels generate no electricity. When the wind dies wind turbines do not generate electricity. in fact these devices, which are the primary sources of "alternative" energy, produce on average only about 15% of the their rated maximum capacity. In other words a 100 megawatt installation of solar or wind generation will only produce an average of…

The strop is not just for the razor. On this site, in the post on shaving, there is a discussion of using a leather strop to put a real razor edge on a straight razor. Anything less than a razor edge is torture to shave with. The same principle applies to woodworking edge tools. They too can and should be stropped to a true razor edge. Natural leather (sorry vegans) is unmatched I think as a sharpening tool for…

A wood bodied smoothing plane Another question that might come up in the historic woodworking shop is "What did they do for a belt sander? "The practice of sanding wood with various kinds of abrasives, both by hand and with powered tools is so pervasive now that many people would find it hard to imagine how craftsmen of the pre-industrial period, for example those that made museum quality furniture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would have obtained…

Kitchen Window One of the common uses to which moulding planes were put was in making window sash. The picture above is of some sash I made myself, using some of the tools illustrated in this article. A traditional window is composed of an upper and lower sash, the outer one running in a track toward the outside of the building and the lower in a track toward the inside. When the window is closed the outer sash is…

With the inevitable decline over the next century in global energy supplies and the decline in industrial society which must folllow will also come a decline in the availability of synthetic drugs. The great pharmaceutical companies of the present day will shrink and possibly disappear. However the end of the industrial age does not mean the end of science, nor the end of effective responses to health problems. The human race has long turned for medical help to herbs,…

Our culture has long placed great value on hard work, and yet the modern industrial economy does everything possible to replace human physical effort with machine work. Recognizing a neeed for exercise in their lives people drive to a gym and pay to work out, and then park as close to the gym as they can to avoid walking. 

The year eighteen fifty is commonly taken as the date when mechanised production overtook craft work in the manufacture of goods in the western world. The middle of the nineteenth century marked, not the beginning of the industrial revolution, but the point that industrial production began to dominate manufacturing. At this point in history artisan production has almost, though not quite, been annihilated in most of the world. For some time I have thought that it would be an interesting…