Tools of the Trade, Jeff Taylor
There's a glossy coffee-table shopping book of woodworking tools out; this
isn't it. It has nice pictures of mostly old tools, but the essays are the
body of the book. It suffers a little from a too-constant tone, as volumes
of essays often do, but read separately they're charming: mostly elegies
for the craft and time once condensed into woodworking hand-tools and
hand-habits and rapidly lost to mass production, a fair amount about the
author's family and building things with and for them, some cargo-cult
shopping. Not much of the last, although it gets the pictures.
If you read one essay, I recommend 'Framing Square'. It has a tidy little
moral plot and a tantalizing view of the framing square as a calculating tool:
Given the diameter of a cogwheel and the pitch of its cogs, you
can easily find the number of cogs with a steel square, or determine the
length of a hoop around a wooden tank. Got any pulleys you would like to
replace to make a shaft go faster or slower? A steel square is the answer
to most calculating problems you'd encounter on a small farm in
1909.
So wrote clew in
Technology.