The Tool Chest
There have been amateur mechanics in all ages, and among the household curios are many old tools suggestive of having been made when the carpenter had plenty of time on his hands to decorate his tools with carvings, and frequently to make up his own kit. Thus old planes and braces were evidently the work of men who possessed some humour and skill, too, for some of the carved decoration is quite grotesque. There is a fine collection of old tools made and used in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on view in one of our museums. There is a carpenter’s plough, dated 1750, moulding planes and skew-mouthed fillisters of beechwood, and a router plane of carved hornbeam. The modern hand brace becomes more realistic, and its origin understood at a glance when we examine the old hand brace of turned and carved boxwood, dated 1642, in that collection. The part where the bit is fitted is literally a hand, carved out of solid wood, and the curious crank indicates an imaginary twist in the arm, perhaps suggested by some carpenter who was able to manipulate his tools in a way not commonly understood, thus giving to future carpenters a most useful tool.