Elegant tools: form from function

Words and photos: Duncan Nisbet

Above: The author’s Stanley plane collection includes tools from the 1870s. It is 150 years since Leonard Bailey granted exclusive manufacturing rights to Henry Stanley, founder of Stanley Rule & Level (1857).

Elegance: the state or quality of being elegant: refined grace or propriety; tasteful correctness; ingenious simplicity; neatness; said of form, movement, style (OED).

Many tools appeal to me as elegant. A number of tools used by woodworkers achieved a pinnacle of form and function in the 18th and 19th centuries and have remained little changed since. The best ones look fine, are comfortable to hold and and are ideal for their intended use. Tasteful, ingenious simplicity. Some tools I don’t evaluate as elegant because they are too ornate, others have their elegance compromised by their manufacture or materials.

Well-made tools remain elegant after decades of use, their tasteful correctness enhanced by signs of wear and attractive patina. Most working sheds and wood shops have good examples that spark delight, if not joy, in their users and owners. They have style; in the words of English novelist, Howard Spring, who appreciated Georgian architecture, ‘There’s sense in style. People think it’s an extra, but it isn’t. It’s the thing.’

There is an elegance in using hand tools to gauge plumb, to mark and measure, to shave and smooth timber, to cut and fix it. They don’t need to be expensive and are better to exhibit a certain frugality. The tools I have chosen appeal to me greatly for these reasons and are all within reach from my workbench.

Folding rule

Based on that other elegant tool, the stick, the rule has marks regularly on it. The oldest measuring rod found may date from 2650 BC (in copper alloy) and many ancient examples are accurate to 0.1mm. From around 1800, folding rules gradually became ubiquitous in aprons, nailbags and toolboxes. By the 1930s, the two-handed operation of the folding rule was largely superseded by the tape measure convenient for single handed measuring.

This example is a Stanley No.66-3/4 late SW fully brass-bound model in boxwood with brass fittings. It was offered between 1902 and 1942. It is a three-feet, arched joint, four-fold rule one inch wide and graduated in 8ths and 16ths of inches.
I shudder to think how much boxwood has been harvested unsustainably around the world for their manufacture since the 1850s. Many rules were made from ivory, yet are hard to consider elegant because of their brutal history.

Spokeshave

This 10-1/4” long boxwood round bottom patternmakers spokeshave with a friction fit steel blade has a refined grace in appearance and a comfortable correctness of form in its use. Perhaps 100 years ago, this tool was made in a workshop, probably in Britain, in a batch of up to a dozen. Each wooden handle was individually fitted with its own cutter and both marked with the same roman numeral, in this case VIII. The boxwood is very resilient, and the cutter usually needs little more than a hone; this shave is unlikely to be made redundant by a better tool and will serve elegantly for another century.

Patternmakers created, in wood, an accurate shape of an object to be cast in metal. The delicacy of this tool promotes the kind of precise work required; just to pick it up makes the user think in terms of thin shavings and small increments.

Hammers

Can a hammer be considered elegant? They can be brutes, can be ugly and may be used inelegantly. However; I say yes and offer these two tack, patternmakers, saddlers, trimmers or card hammers (as they may be) as proof.

The larger is 9-1/2”, strapped and sweet. The smaller is 4-1/2” long and as cute as an insect’s ear. It could be a jeweller’s hammer. The hammer is another tool that developed from the stick; dating from the day someone tied a rock to one.

Almost every trade has its own hammer and they take on their own elegance in use when swung by someone experienced in that trade. The sight of one well cocked, arcing perfectly and striking its target with explosive force is a delight to behold. Here’s to hammers, one of the few tools to have its own emoji on your phone.

Marking gauge

A simple tool for scribing a line parallel with the edge of a workpiece, the marking gauge can be used with a pushing or pulling motion. This oval stem example, made of rosewood with a boxwood captive wedge, is likely user made a good number of decades ago.

Add another pin on a slide and you have a double marking or mortise gauge, then triples, gauges for ovals and circles and so on. They get quite ornate; ebony and brass anyone? Stanley made quite a number, from the simple No.0 Marking Gauge in beech with a boxwood screw, to the No.90 Williams Patent Combination Gauge, a rosewood, steel and brass combined mortise, marking and cutting gauge with four steel tips. For elegance, I favour such a simple model such as shown, often one of the first tools a joiner’s apprentice makes for themselves, along with a bench hook and mallet.

Saw handle

The Disston handsaw is found in different types in many sheds and woodshops, its elegance apparent with a look and confirmed with a grip and action.

This 8” 14tpi No.5 brass backed backsaw has the 13/16” ‘Disston Phila.’ medallion which dates it to the early C20th. The deep V in the hand hole rather than the later subtle dip (just below mid-point, in front of the fingers) dates it prior to the c.1918 shape change. The apple was changed to beech in the 1930s and the brass backs (popular in the UK and Australia) disappeared in the domestic material shortages of WW2.

The feel of the apple and the graceful shape of the handle embody hand saw elegance. Just pick it up and your fingers fall into comfortable place. Fingers curl through the handhole, the top tip points back between the thumb and forefinger and the latter settles comfortably on the top step. A delight to be have and behold.

Turnscrews

Made to turn screws fixing wood to wood or steel hardware, the turnscrew (latterly screwdriver) has a functional elegance in its nomenclature alone. These four are wooden handled flat and round cabinetmakers turnscrews, perhaps dating to the late C19th, early C20th, before alternatives to slot screws appeared.

The tools themselves, with one or two turned lines for decoration, have a simple elegance; so too does the slot screw. For many purposes, a Phillips head screw (invented early 1930s) just looks wrong whereas a snug, well-fitting slot screw is perfect. When the driver’s tip fills the screw slot and engages the screw and drives it home a feeling of tasteful correctness is achieved. Woodworkers fall into two camps for the final turn of the screw: those who ‘clock’ their screws (align the slot with the grain) and those who do not, just allowing the slot to align wherever it sits at its most firm final point.

The Bailey plane

May 19, 2019 was the 150th anniversary of the day Leonard Bailey granted the Stanley Rule & Level Company the rights to manufacture iron and wood bench planes under four patents granted to him between 1858 and 1867. Each patent is an elegant solution to iron plane problems that American toolmakers and inventors had been wrestling with since Hazard Knowles’ (arguably) first cast iron plane stock patent of 1827.

Leonard Bailey’s patents were for: device for adjusting plane irons (1958), cammed levercaps (1858), vertical post cutter adjustment – which turned horizontal immediately on production (1867), plane lever caps (1867).

Each feature added up to one of the most elegant tools used by woodworkers over the 150 years since: the Bailey plane. The pivoted forked lever cutter adjusts the cutter by turning a grooved brass nut. The thin cap iron, curved at the lower end and held by a screw, provides even pressure to the thin cutter which prevents chatter. Bailey was the first to use a separable frog and rosewood handles and knobs.

Wood chisels

The chisel for working wood is a very old tool and, compared to the plane and the saw, quite primitive; a tool again derived from the stick.

Many chisels are elegant, but for me, Japanese chisels (nomi) have a particular grace in form and function. Modern Japanese chisels are a cross between socket and tang chisels and the top end of the handle is often surrounded by a steel hoop, called a saagirawa (slide-down ring). This hoop is tapered on the inside, so it tightens as it slides down; it prevents the wood handle from splitting when struck and is surprisingly comfortable when pushed by hand. Traditionally, differently handled chisels were used for striking and hand pushing (paring chisels without the ring).

The blade is perhaps the most elegant part of a Japanese chisel; even such inexpensive Tokyo flea market examples such as these can remind one of the katan-kaji, the samurai swordsmiths. Characteristically, the back of the blade is hollowed for faster sharpening and to maintain flatness.

Bevel

A bevel is a wooden and/or metal tool used to transfer an angle from workpiece to workpiece or, say, from a drawing or model. Many are user-made. Most bevels use a wingnut or equivalent to allow the bevel to be adjusted quickly and locked into position. This one does not; I like to think it pre-dates the invention of the wingnut. It has a 5" rosewood body and a 3-3/8" beaten (?) brass blade which folds completely into the body. The blade is held by a steel pin peened over and the adjustment is a firm friction fit. Two brass plates of the same appearance as the blade hold the joint fast.

I still have the two Silex bevels I started my apprenticeship with in Sydney in 1977 and use them often. I have others, including Stanley, but consider this one to be the most elegant. I hope you like it too.

Duncan Nisbet is a lapsed carpenter and joiner in his late 50s who lives on the NSW South Coast. He is self-employed in education and training and enjoys woodwork and building in his spare time. He is a tool user and collector with an acquisitive nature and enjoys researching tools and their history. His friends have been known to call him ‘Five Sheds’. This story came about through a combination of gazing at tools as well as actually using them.