A. Frederick Collins

“ A finishing nail, that is, a nail having a head only a shade larger than the shank, is used for the finer kinds of woodwork. After you have driven in a nail until its head is within, say, 1⁄8 inch of the surface put the small, hollow end of your nail set on it, hold them together with your thumb and forefinger and drive it in by hitting the nail set with your hammer. After the head is sunk below the [11] surface of the wood fill in the hole with a wood filler [7] when neither the nail nor the hole can be seen. ”

“ All metal work becomes easy if you have a set of these screw cutting tools and it is next to impossible to make things if you haven’t got them.
When you are cutting threads in a piece of metal with the tap, the hole in the metal must of course be a trifle smaller than the diameter of the tap; the tap is put into a handle called a stock and as you cut the threads in the metal don’t turn the stock continuously around but give it one complete turn forward and then half-a-turn backward and you will be less apt to break the tap. ”

“ How to Do Metal Work. —Now that you know about tools and the properties of metals there are a few other little things which, if you will bear them in mind, will enable you to make nearly anything you want to. The first has to do with drawing and the others with working the metals themselves.
First Sketch Your Ideas. —To start out and try to make an object which you have in mind without sketching it on paper first so that you can see just what size to cut and shape it, and how it will look when you have finished it, is the first step toward being a disappointed boy. ”

“ For carving out heads, as for example the one shown at C, mark the shape of the object which you intend to carve on the sides of the block as it would look if you cut it down through the middle. Now screw up the block in your vise and cut away the sides with your chisels and gouges, using the mallet to do it with. All you want to do at first is to get the rough shape of the figure.
When you have done this you can go ahead and finish up the work with your chisels and gouges. To give the carving a life-like appearance do not use files or sandpaper on it and do not varnish or polish it. ”

“ It is a great mistake to go out and buy a cheap chest of tools of whatever size for while there is always a large number of tools in it they are usually of a very poor quality.
If you can afford to buy a chest of good tools and will get them of a regular tool supply house you can then buy a chest of tools safely. Now to make any ordinary piece of woodwork you don’t need many tools but each one should be the very best, for therein half the pleasure lies. ”

“ You can make a printing press out of wood but to do a good job you must have a press built of iron and properly machined, that is finished up, for to do good printing a good outfit is needed to begin with.
Small hand inked and self-inking presses are sold in the toy departments of nearly all stores at prices ranging from $1.50 to $5.00 and this will include a font of type. Many of these little presses are made which use type about half the length of regular type and if you get a press of this kind you will never know the real joy of printing. ”

“ Since a smooth plane has no handle lay your right hand over the tail of it and rest your left hand on the nose of it. Make short, quick strokes, pressing down on the plane as it goes forward and letting up on it a little as you draw it back.
A jack-plane has a handle on it something like a saw-handle and it is held like a saw with your right hand. If there is no knob on the nose of it hold it by laying your left hand across it. When using a jack plane give it a long stroke with even pressure and you will take off the same thickness of shaving all the way along.
How to Use Chisels and Gouges. ”

“ A burning brand is useful to mark the handles of tools, boxes or anything made of wood by burning a name or a design into them.
How to Make a Burning Brand. —To make a burning brand, say with your initials on it, make a cardboard box 3⁄4 inch wide, 1 inch high and 3 inches long and without a top.
Mix up some plaster of Paris, fill the box with it and let it set. When it is perfectly hard and dry tear the cardboard box away from it, and on the narrow side of it, that is the one that is 3⁄4 inch wide, mark out your initials, reversing the letters just as they are on type. ”

“ This kind of a soldering fluid is a good flux for tin, iron, steel, brass and copper. It is good for all ordinary work but it must be washed off from iron or steel as it will rust them very quickly. To solder copper sal ammoniac can be used.
The only kind of a flux to solder zinc with is a solution made of 10 per cent. of muriatic acid and 90 per cent. of water. For lead, pewter and any alloy with lead in it use tallow, Gallipoli oil or Venice turpentine. Resin can be used successfully for all metals provided they are scraped bright and clean before they are soldered. ”

“ What a Bunsen Burner Is. —This is a burner in which a jet of ordinary illuminating gas is mixed with air, the amount being regulated by a ring which opens and closes the air holes in the burner.
A Bunsen burner makes a very hot flame because the gas in the tube moves faster than in an ordinary burner and the oxygen in the air aids the gas to burn. A plain Bunsen burner is shown at A, in Fig. 87. If you have no gas in your house you can use an [210] alcohol lamp [100] which you can either buy or make for yourself. ”

“ How to Solder Metals. —The great secret in soldering metals is to have them perfectly clean and then if you use the right kind of flux and the proper solder you will not have any trouble.
Fluxes. —After you have cleaned the surfaces to be soldered you must use a flux to prevent the metal from oxidizing and to make the solder stick. Different metals require fluxes of different kinds.
When soldering bright new tinware use powdered resin for the flux, but if the parts are old then scrape [72] and clean them well and use a flux of zinc chloride solution. ”

“ How to Hold a Hammer. —When you use a hammer, grasp the handle a couple of inches from the free end and hold it so that it will swing freely and easily in your hand and keep your hand and wrist above the level of the nail or whatever it is you are pounding; this takes the jar off of your arm and makes the work of using it surer and less tiresome. Never use a hammer on wood-work of any kind.
When you use a mallet as for driving chisels hold it rather close to its head, and need I tell you never to use a wooden mallet to drive nails with. ”

“ How to Make a Copygraph Pad. —A copygraph pad, or hectograph, as it is often called—from the Greek hekaton which means 100, and graph to write, hence to write a hundred—is a gelatine pad for duplicating a letter or a drawing.
To use a copygraph pad you must write your original letter with an aniline ink; then you lay it on the pad and rub it down with your fingers. When you remove the sheet an impression will be left on the face of the pad and if now you lay a sheet of clean paper on the pad, rub it and pull it off you will have a copy almost as bright and clear as the original. ”

“ In using twist drills, and these are the only satisfactory kind for metal work, be mighty careful not to press too hard on the drill stock and don’t try to crowd the drill into cutting faster than it will cut at the speed with which it is turning. In drilling iron keep plenty of oil on the drill point.
(7) You can measure much more accurately with a steel rule than you can with a wood rule and whereas measurements in cabinet work down to 1⁄16 inch are close enough, for metal work it should not be more than 1⁄32nd of an inch, and for machine work make your measurements to 1⁄64th of an inch. ”

“ It is not an easy wood to work and tools when used on it soon lose their cutting edges. But after you have made a piece of furniture you can depend on it that it will last to the end of time, nearly.
Birch. —This wood belongs to the oak family but different from oak it is quite easy to work. It is light in color, fine grained, so tough and elastic it cannot be easily broken, and it takes a fine polish. For these reasons it makes nice furniture and it is a very good wood for turning. ”

“ But in shading a drawing there must be no sharp lines to show where the light leaves off and the shadow begins, but you must make them merge gradually one into the other, as shown at A in Fig. 45.
Working Drawings
And now we come to drawings of another kind and these are not intended to please the eye but to work from, hence they are called working drawings.
When most boys, and many men, want to make anything of wood or metal they get busy with their [112] tools forthwith and whack it out willy-nilly and of course a punk job results. ”

“ How to Make a Reflectoscope. —A reflectoscope is a kind of magic lantern but instead of using transparent glass slides you can use any picture or opaque object such as the works of a watch, your hand, etc, and throw an image of it on the screen.
Fig. 59 a cheaply made reflectoscope
A. The projector.
B. The illuminator.
If you have a folding camera [58] you can convert it into a dandy reflectoscope, so get busy with your tools. Make a box—it is really two boxes fastened together—of the peculiar shape shown in Fig. 59, and it can be of wood or of metal as you wish. ”

“ When a chisel or a plane-bit gets a nick in it it must be ground out on a grind stone; if you haven’t one get a carpenter to do it for you, and when you get it back hone it, that is, sharpen it on your oil stone as before.
Get a Washita slip stone for the touching up gouges and instead of rubbing the edge of the gouge on the stone you rub the stone on the gouge. Never try to grind a woodworking tool on an emery wheel.
About Sharpening Auger Bits. —An ordinary auger-bit seldom needs sharpening but when it does the cutter of it must be sharpened on the inside. ”

“ You will find it quite hard to drill a hole less than 1⁄16 inch in diameter through ordinary glass because the drills will break and when you drill a hole over 1⁄8 inch in diameter you will find it a slow job because of its size, but you can drill a hole up to 1⁄4 inch in diameter if you go slow and are careful. ”

“ This is the most useful metal we have. When it is pure it has a silvery color, is very tenacious, which means that it is tough; it is malleable, that is it can be hammered without cracking, and it is ductile in that it can be drawn out into wire without breaking.
It is hard to get pure iron for nearly all of it contains a small percent of carbon, silica, phosphorus, sulphur or other elements. These substances in iron give it different properties. For instance cast-iron has a large amount of carbon in it ”

“ Carving is by all odds the hardest of all woodworking processes to learn and yet there are some simple forms of it that are at once easy to do and pretty to look at. While carving is an art in itself it can be used with fine effect in combination with some kinds of scroll sawed and turned work.
Your Set of Carving Tools. —To begin with you can get along very well with a set of six carving tools. ”

“ Lead was one of the earliest metals known and if you will read the Book of Job you will find it mentioned there. It has been used from time immemorial in making water-pipes, utensils, etc., and the ancient Romans made weights of it. Since it is so soft it can be easily hammered into any shape or it can be rolled or drawn.
It is also largely used in forming alloys with other metals, thus solder is made of 50 parts of lead and 50 parts of tin; type-metal is made of 80 parts of lead and 20 parts of antimony; and pewter is made of 25 parts of lead and 75 parts of tin. ”

“ Tinner’s snips are simply large powerful shears and you can cut sheet metal up to 3⁄32 of an inch thick with an ordinary pair. When you cut a sheet of heavy metal with them let the lower blade and handle rest on your bench and you can get a better leverage on it. Metals that are thicker than 3⁄32 inch must be sawed.
(4) While metals can be sawed by using a special saw blade in a scroll saw frame you should use a jeweler’s saw frame with jeweler’s saws for metal—I prefer the Fish Brand for fine work. (5) For heavier work use a machinist’s hack saw ”

“ How to Drill Holes in Glass. —To drill a hole through a sheet of glass make a layer of putty 1⁄2 an inch thick and as large as the sheet you are going to drill and lay the glass on it.
The idea of using the bed of putty is to allow the glass to bend a little should you press down on the drill too hard. Take a Morse twist drill and, if you know how, grind it on a grindstone to a sharper point than it has when you get it; the next best thing to do is to sharpen it on your oilstone.
The best kind of a drill stock to use is an archimedian, or a reciprocating one, as shown at B in Fig. ”

“ When you get an abstract idea for a design or a [69] machine that you want to put in concrete form take a rule and compasses, pencil and paper and draw it out to scale, that is, make a drawing of it and mark the sizes, or dimensions, of each part just as it should be when the thing is done. ”