Edwin W. Foster

“ After some searching, they found part of a pine board, about a foot long and an inch thick. Ralph chopped out a piece with a hatchet and deftly split it to about an inch and a half wide. His skill was a revelation to Harry, who saw that even a hatchet could be used with precision.
"Now," said Ralph, "I want you to cut this piece of rough pine to a smooth, straight piece, just an inch square."
"Oh, that's easy," replied Harry eagerly. "Just watch me."
"Take care," said Ralph. "I said an inch square; anything less than an inch will be wrong. ”

“ The houses we live in, the chairs we sit on,—in fact, most of our furniture, even to the frames of our pictures, the cars we ride in, and the very pencils we write with, are of wood which was once part of the living forest. ”

“ To make a wooden box sounds like a simple proposition; but in making the drawing, the questions of size, proportion, joints, hinges, etc., immediately come up.
The size of course depends on the purpose of the box. If it is for ladies' gloves, it should be long and narrow; if for collars or handkerchiefs, square or nearly so. The height is nearly always made too great. In fact, the whole question of proportion is one which can hardly be taught; it must be felt, and different people have different ideas as to what constitutes good proportion. ”

“ When we construct anything in wood we must always consider how the object will be affected by warping and shrinkage, remembering that the shrinkage is only across the grain.
Let us consider the problem of constructing a drawing board to see how warping and shrinkage may be overcome.
If we make it of one piece, like A (Fig. 77) , the board will soon change its shape to that shown in B, which would make it useless for mechanical drawing, as a perfectly flat surface is necessary. ”

“ A bevel on the outside or inside, or both, is about all the young woodworker should attempt in the way of ornamentation. Depend on the natural beauty of the wood, as a fancy frame draws the attention from the picture, which after all is the main thing. We should admire the man, not his clothes, the picture not its frame, although the latter should be neat and well made. ”

“ The Ash-Leaved Maple. The ash-leaved maple is a leaf very common in our parks. It has no resemblance to other maple leaves, yet it bears the unmistakable maple key,—“By their fruits ye shall know them.” It is therefore a maple.
The box elder, or ash-leaved maple, is interesting because it is our only maple having a compound leaf; that is, a leaf stem with several distinct leaflets. Compound leaves are very common (notice the hickory leaf and the horse-chestnut) , but not on maples, and our ash-leaved maple is a curiosity. It delights in swampy places, but grows almost anywhere. ”

“ The lumber furnished by the tulip tree, commonly called whitewood, is less liable to warp than gum wood, and is somewhat harder. Just why it should be called whitewood is not clear, as it is much darker than white pine and of a greenish-yellow color. The leaf of the tulip tree is very peculiar, having only four points, without any small teeth, and with an outline so odd that one often wonders if nature did not use a pair of scissors in cutting it out. ”

“ There is a definite end to the supply of coal, iron, gold, and silver, but by proper care the forest may be made to yield a continuous crop of lumber.
Forestry does not mean the fencing in of the woods, but the handling of them in such a way that no more is cut than the annual growth. This has been practised in Germany on scientific principles with such success that the production has been increased 300 per cent., and where seventy-five years ago they obtained twenty cubic feet from each acre a year, they now cut sixty, and the forest continues to grow luxuriantly. ”

“ The names buttonwood, buttonball, sycamore, and plane tree, as the same tree is called in different parts of the country, all apply to that fine American tree which sheds its bark as well as its leaves, leaving a ghostly monarch of tree life, which produces an enormous crop of buttonballs so well known to country boys and girls. ”

“ The labour of building a lumber rack was much heavier than anything the boys had done before, but it brought the larger muscles into play, seemed like real carpenter work, and was an excellent preparation for the finer tool work to follow. A boy who has never carried out a piece of large work [154] successfully cannot realize the satisfaction of looking at a really good piece of construction and being able to say, "I made that all myself!" ”

“ The Sycamore Maple. In the rows on rows of maples so common in our towns and cities one will [81] often find a leaf larger, heavier, and coarser than any of the others. This variety, like the Norway, is an importation from Europe, known as the sycamore maple because of its resemblance to the sycamore leaf. It is easily identified by its large size, coarseness, the very long, thick red stem, and by the fact that its entire edge is finely toothed,—in which point it differs from all the foregoing varieties. ”

“ In fastening any of these forms to a plastered wall, considerable care must be taken in placing the nails or screws so that they will engage in a stud instead of just in the plaster. The location of the studs can be found by tapping on the wall with the knuckle or lightly with a hammer. A surer way, however, is to find the nails in the picture moulding or base board and plumb from either of these places with a small weight—such as a nail—on a string.
The designing and making of book racks offer an almost endless field for the imagination. ”

“ Every boy who has owned a rowboat knows that oars are made of wood from the ash. This is because the oar must be elastic as well as strong, and the timber of the ash tree supplies these two qualities. The ash is one of our tallest and noblest forest trees. It is rather slim in build, with beautiful clean shiny green foliage. The members of this group seem to be fond of colors, and we have the white ash, red ash, green ash, blue ash, and black ash. ”

“ In the machine shop, we find the angle of the cutting edge large—often 80 degrees—while a razor has a cutting edge of about 5 degrees. All cutting tools are wedges, whether saws, chisels, planes, axes, or knives, and the angle depends on the hardness of the material in which it is to work. The action of the tool may be a chisel action, a knife action, or both. In the rip saw, the teeth are really a series of chisel edges cut in one piece of steel, while in a cross cut saw we have a knife action for cutting the fibres, followed by a chisel action for removing the wood. ”

“ It must always be kept in mind that a surface which has been sandpapered has become “gritty,” i.e. the fine sand has come off and is more or less imbedded in the wood. Consequently sandpapering must not be done until all tool work has been finished, as the grit will take the edge off the best tool, and the finer the edge the more quickly will it be ruined.
Fig. 48. An Exercise involving the Use of Sandpaper
Again, a sandpapered surface is always a scratched surface, and the finest of scratched surfaces cannot compare with the perfectly smooth, satiny surface produced by a sharp plane. ”

“ The designing of fancy figure kites is a fascinating occupation, but unless certain fixed principles are kept in mind may end in much experimenting and many disappointments. The question of steadiness or stability seems to be summed up in the mathematical expression—"dihedral angle."
A kite having a stiff, flat surface presented to the wind will often cut up queer antics, while the same frame covered with a more flexible covering will fly beautifully. The reason is that the flexible covering will be bowed back by the wind, forming an approximate "dihedral angle." ”

“ A mechanical, or working, drawing is quite different from a pictorial drawing such as an artist produces. The artist’s drawing represents objects as they appear, while the mechanical drawing represents them as they really are. Things in nature do not look as they are. ”

“ A measurement is a comparison. We measure the length of a lot by comparing it with the standard of length, the yard or foot. We measure a farm by comparing its area with the standard unit of surface measure, the acre, square rod, or square yard.
In every measurement we must first have an accepted standard unit. The history of units of measurement is a very interesting one, and its difficulty arises from the fact that no two things in nature are the same. ”

“ The redwood is the only lumber that can take the place of the white pine, answer as a satisfactory substitute for mahogany and black walnut, displace oak for railroad ties, cypress and cedar for shingles, and surpass all other woods for durability when in contact with the earth or when exposed to moisture. ”

“ Why they are the most interesting things that grow. Just think how many things we get from them besides wood; maple sugar, rubber, turpentine, wood alcohol, tannin for making leather, shellac, Canada balsam, spruce gum, and nuts! All of our nuts except peanuts come from trees—hickory, walnuts, butternuts, beechnuts, chestnuts, pecans, almonds, etc."
Ralph noticed that as Harry's interest in the trees grew he became less wasteful of his wood in the shop. The fact that a tree had to be cut, and in most cases killed, in order to furnish him with lumber, seemed to worry him. ”

“ White pine needles grow in groups of five and are from three to four inches long. The cones which contain the seeds are about five inches long. The tree grows tall and straight, and formerly grew in great forests covering thousands of square miles; the wood is so free from pitch and is so easily worked with tools that these great forests have been almost annihilated by the lumberman’s ax, and white-pine timber has become quite expensive. It takes many years for a tree to grow large enough for timber, and unless we are more economical in the future white pine will be only a memory. ”

“ As our population doubles, the consumption of lumber quadruples. To-day, five hundred feet of wood is used annually for every man, woman, and child, as compared with the sixty feet used in Europe. Already our many industries are beginning to feel the shortage, and prices constantly go up.
Turpentine, which is made from the Southern yellow pine, requires a new "orchard" of 800,000 acres yearly to keep up the demand; and when we realize that one third of the lumber cut is yellow pine, it is little wonder that the price of turpentine and other naval stores keeps moving upward. ”

“ No better period can be selected in which to study trees, their leaves, bark, wood, etc., than when the student is working with wood, learning by experience its grain, hardness, color, and value in the arts. ”

“ Pyrography, for example, is closely akin to drawing, and in the hands of a careful worker may be made to produce very artistic effects. Like all arts, it also has its limitations. In woods of the pine family, it will not do at all, on account of the pitchy sap. In dark-coloured or very hard woods, it is equally unsatisfactory, so that it is used almost exclusively on basswood, because of the white colour, softness, even grain, and freedom from pitch. ”

“ The Birches. If the black birch with its sweet, aromatic bark is not known to a boy, the white, or canoe, birch is sure to be. It seems to be the fate of this beautiful tree to be disfigured by every wandering youth who has strength enough to tear off a strip of its paper-like bark.
Fig. 105. Leaf of Black Birch
The leaf of the black, or sugar, birch may be distinguished from the elm by its smoothness and thinness. ”

“ BORING TOOLS
"Boring tools are very interesting," said Ralph. The brace and bit for soft woods have practically taken the place of the old fashioned augers, gimlets, etc. The reason is not hard to find. An auger or gimlet could bore but one size of hole, while with a brace and set of bits almost any diameter can be secured. A little later on, I'll tell you about a Yankee invention along this line.
"The brace is a sort of universal tool holder, and any tool designed to fit into it is known as a bit, as for example a countersink bit, or a screw driver bit, and several varieties of drills. ”

“ Growing in the shade of other trees and forming part of the undergrowth of our North woods is a small tree known as the striped maple, from the stripes which run up and down its bark. The New England name for this little mountain tree is moosewood, from the fact that the moose is very fond of the bark and twigs, which form his chief food in winter. ”

“ He needs strengthening in his weak points, otherwise he may become superficial and "scattering" in his work, and fail to stick to a thing until, overcoming all obstacles, he succeeds in doing the one thing he set out to do. He may acquire the bad habit of never finishing anything, though continually starting new schemes.
The ability of the average boy is far beyond the general estimate, but intelligent supervision is needed. The pocket knife is his natural tool, yet not one boy out of a thousand realizes its possibilities. ”

“ The different trees in the white-oak family all have leaves with rounded lobes, and most of those in the red-oak group have pointed ones, yet there is a difference between members of the same family, just as among human beings.
We can tell at a glance whether a man is a negro, a Chinaman, or a white man. If a white man, he may be a Frenchman or an American; and again, if an American, he may belong to the Jones family. But all the members of the Jones family do not look alike and we know one from another.
Fig. 80. Leaf of the Post Oak ”

“ A bird house to be attractive need not be very pretentious, but it must absolutely be cat-proof, or the birds will inspect it carefully from all points of view and leave it severely alone. A nest well hidden in the tree foliage or shrubbery is not nearly so conspicuous as a brightly painted house fastened to the limbs of a tree. ”

“ It should be remembered in all forms of polishing that dust is the great enemy. Wherever possible a piece of furniture after receiving a coat of shellac or varnish should be placed in a room or closet where no dust can settle on it. It should also be kept out of the sun to avoid blistering. The action of some stains like bichromate of potash is affected by the sun and should be either kept out of direct sunlight entirely or so placed that all parts receive the same amount, else the parts in shadow will be of a different shade from the rest of the surface. ”

“ Observe carefully the outline of the leaf and compare it with the sketch of the next form.
The white oak, like all oaks, bears acorns, and its timber is used as a standard when comparing different [66] kinds of wood. If we say that the strength of white pine is one half, we mean one half that of white oak, and in all timber calculations white oak is the standard, just as the yard and mile are standards of length. In work which requires strength, such as carriage making, shipbuilding, and cooperage, white oak is used very extensively. ”

“ The cause of the flow of sap is not very clearly understood, but it corresponds to blood in the human body, in that it carries the nourishment that forms the cells. As a new mass or layer of soft new cells forms each season, the layers may be distinctly seen and counted, but the line of separation is not a sharply drawn one, as we find by examining a cross section of wood with the microscope. However, the layers or annual rings are distinct enough to be counted, so that the age of the tree at the time it was cut down may be readily discovered. ”

“ Fig. 36. Indian chief
"We can make any amount of this dolls' furniture," said Ralph. "In fact we could build a doll's house and equip it with chairs, tables, and beds, but what the youngsters really like best is something that works, something that moves, so I move—no pun intended—that we design a toy that has some life to it. We can cut it out with the coping saw and there need not be a great deal of knife work to it. ”

“ It is an easy matter to test your grinding by occasionally placing the blade of a try square on the bevel. If it is not straight, your grinding needs more care. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of this subject of grinding. It is the key-note of success. If you are careless in this particular, your work at the bench cannot be a success. "A good workman is known by his tools."
Fig. 114. The oilstone
A teacher of drawing once said, "I don't care to see your drawing; all I want is to see your pencil. ”

“ If the young woodworker becomes ambitious enough to think of designing a bridge or large building he can find these figures in any engineers' hand-book. There are so many important factors to be considered that the amateur will do well to go ahead with great caution. Knots and other defects reduce the proportionate strength of large beams greatly, so that it would not be safe to assume that a beam 6 inches square would be 36 times as strong as a piece 1 inch square. ”

“ Several of the coniferous trees drop their leaves or needles in the fall, like the larch or tamarack, and some woods from evergreens are harder than some woods from broad-leaved trees. Yellow pine is harder than basswood, which, according to the rule, should be a hard wood. As a matter of fact, it is softer than the majority of woods cut from evergreens. The only way to gain a comprehensive knowledge of this interesting subject is by experience and study. Making a collection of woods, leaves, and seeds is one of the most fascinating studies a [533] boy can take up. ”

“ This mistake is sometimes made in using the oilstone, by rubbing the tool on both sides instead of on one only. All the grinding and sharpening must be done on the bevelled side. As the plane iron is only a thin chisel, the sharpening of the latter tool is performed as in the case of the plane iron, and the same care should be taken to keep the bevel clean cut.
A good grindstone is a shop necessity, and, one might add, a household necessity, because every household uses knives, and the dull knife is an altogether too common nuisance. ”

“ The block for supporting the house on the pole was larger, being 8 × 5 × 11⁄4 inches, and called for six 11⁄2-inch No. 10 screws, to secure it to the under side of the floor. Harry wanted to make it more complete by adding a small wind vane, but Ralph said it might frighten the birds, so it was omitted.
Of course larger and more ornamental houses may be built, but where there are too many families in such close proximity there is apt to be trouble, while houses that are too conspicuous do not appeal to the beautiful American wild birds that we want to attract. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the saw has gone through a process of evolution the same as the electric motor, automobile, and aeroplane. New methods of its manufacture are constantly being invented and improvements made in its construction. Some of the steps in the process of making a hand saw are: rolling the steel plate of which the body is made, hardening, tempering, hammering or smithing, grinding, polishing, filing, setting, etching, handling, and blocking. ”

“ Nothing is so necessary to the saving of time and energy as an orderly shop. Our boys had bought a quantity of white pine to begin operations and it was lying in a pile on the floor where it was always in the way.
To cut a piece of stock from one of these 12-foot boards it was necessary to use two kitchen chairs for trestles, so it was decided to construct two saw horses, and as soon as they were finished, to build a lumber rack against the wall where their little supply could be stored out of the way.
"We will carry out our regular practice by first making a drawing," said Ralph. ”

“ He went into the house and came out with a pamphlet on lumbering, which he opened at the picture shown in Fig 88. It represents the old style of sawing out planks by hand before the coming of the saw-mill.
The man in the pit is called a pit man, the one on the log, the sawyer. This method of cutting lumber was in vogue up to about fifty years ago.
"This," said Ralph, "is what your line of reasoning would lead us back to, so if I am to be your instructor you must leave these things to my judgment, and my advice is to start work with a good bench having on it a good vise." ”