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Rare and Interesting Woodworking-related Books and Pamphlets

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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Chris101 » 30 Nov 2020, 18:43

Vann wrote:
Alasdair wrote:...they brought back may memories of having a grumpy old joiner thumping me with his walking stick when I made a mistake...

When I started my apprenticeship (1973) I remember commenting to one of my fellow apprentices about the large number of grumpy old buggers...

And now I am one :mrgreen:

Cheers, Vann.


I remember driving round London in the van with my old leading hand/gang hand many years ago. He'd been in the window cleaning forever and he was saying, 'Used to do that one, and that one, and that one over there, and that green mirrored building, and that one....'
I distinctly remember thinking 'Bore on George! Give it a rest mate!'
A year or two back I was driving with a couple of the youger lads and I was saying 'See that big bank, Used to that one, and that building there used to be the BT HQ, used to do that too. And that Merril Lynch building by the London Wall...'
And I just had this moment of absolute terrible clarity and I realised what I had become. :shock:
Anyway,back on track...
I just recently bought Lost Art Press 'reprint' Doormaking and Windowmaking. Strictly speaking I suppose it doesn't belong in this thread but it's worth including anyway I think. It's fairly comprehensive to my untutored eye at least and being a Lost Art book it's a joy just to pick up, thick creamy pages, the sort of book Winston Smith in 1984 lost his head for. Doesn't make it a better joinery book but its nice nonetheless. It's aimed at a certain modern market I suppose.

I also have Corkhill Dowsett / Richard Greenhalgh's book 'Joinery and Carpentry' which is a proper old book. Mostly on door and window making, it does include some geometry sections that are a little above my paygrade as a hobby shed warrior.
Congratulations to Frank Whittaker for winning it in his fourth year (!) at the Brighouse Technical School as second prize.
https://imgur.com/a/pcNxYM5
An Imgur link till I can work out how to host pics. Told you I was getting old.
I briefly owned a book on ship building but that's a story for another time....
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 30 Nov 2020, 19:16

Chris101 wrote:I briefly owned a book on ship building but that's a story for another time....


What part of Volume 2 did you not understand? :lol:

Someone had the complete 25 volumes of the 1928-1929 Joinery and Carpentry magazines on eBay the other day, I thought they would've gone for more than they did though at £16 inc postage. I was tempted to make a bid but not a couple of weeks earlier I became the proud owner of another full set of Greenhalgh's books :eusa-doh: I'll shift them on to a good home when I get time, along with a few other books as I need to thin the herd a bit!

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Someone recently also had a set of Cassell's Carpentry and Joinery from 1912 in multiple softback books rather than the big brown hardback, I've never seen them before. Again, tempted but having a decentish copy of the hardback I resisted (although I paid more for the hardback than the softbacks sold for, annoyingly)

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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 07 Dec 2020, 16:18

I'd have been tempted by those weekly parts if I'd seen them - but it's hard to justify the space to keep a second copy of a book you already own. ;)

However, I'd like to share this with you all - it needs very little room on the shelf as it's only 32 pages. The Story of Furniture was number 50 in a long series of Puffin Picture Books. The series ran from 1940 to 1965 and they are delightful things to collect. (No, I don't have all of them!)

storyoffurniturecover.jpg
(288.22 KiB)


Yes, it was that Gordon Russell, fresh from his work for the Board of Trade, sorting out what could be made and sold as Utility Furniture.

Bear in mind that coming out under the Puffin imprint, these were aimed at primary school children, but there was no dumbing down. Take a look at this delightful centre spread illustration.

storyoffurniturecentre.jpg
(449.75 KiB)


How many nine or ten year olds looked at that image and thought "one day I can have an electric morticer of my own, and a tenoner and a surfacer and a router and all the rest?"

Trevanion, were you that child? :)
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Tiresias » 07 Dec 2020, 18:35

AndyT wrote:

Trevanion, were you that child? :)


Trevanion was never a child. He sprang fully formed from a spindle moulder.

[other creationist myths are available].
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 07 Dec 2020, 18:40

:lol: :eusa-clap: :lol:
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Chris101 » 07 Dec 2020, 19:29

Is that you top left Andy? Plenty of tools out ready for the camera and wip.
Never said your basement shop had windows! :D
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 07 Dec 2020, 20:54

Chris101 wrote:Is that you top left Andy? Plenty of tools out ready for the camera and wip.
Never said your basement shop had windows! :D


That's certainly closer to my shop than the bigger picture is!
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 07 Dec 2020, 20:59

AndyT wrote:Take a look at this delightful centre spread illustration.


That's quite something! I know it's really geeky but I really want that swan-necked tenoner in the background :lol: . It kind of reminds me of a staged photo Wallace has of an early twentieth-century workshop that Wadkin took for the advertisement of their machines, I'm sure he won't mind me reposting the picture:

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I'm not sure whether you'd read "Honest Labour" by Lost Art Press at all but at the beginning there is an interview with Charles Hayward about his apprenticeship in cabinetmaking with the "Old Times Furnishing Company" which is a thoroughly interesting read and insight into early twentieth-century woodworking. LAP has the whole interview as an excerpt on their site:

https://lostartpress.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/honestlabour_excerpt.pdf

Tiresias wrote:
AndyT wrote:

Trevanion, were you that child? :)


Trevanion was never a child. He sprang fully formed from a spindle moulder.

[other creationist myths are available].


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Note to self, they know too much...
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 08 Dec 2020, 16:35

Great photo. Proper natty dressers too.

And thanks for the link to the Hayward interview. I'd read it before but forgotten it. Well worth following the link and reflecting on how times have changed.

My only working encounter with skilled woodworkers was at a summer job just after I left school. Among other life-affirming experiences there, I spent several weeks hammer in hand, assembling packing crates on a big, steel-covered workbench. The wire nails were bashed through so they turned back when they hit the steel and clenched the pieces together. There was a knack to it, but it was definitely not Skilled Work.

Quite the other way in the pattern makers' shop next door. They really did come to work with collars and ties on (this was in the 70s; I was wearing my new flared jeans). Other than that, their world was a mystery - it was made abundantly clear that their shop was the one bit of the whole factory that oiks like me were not allowed in!
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 11 Feb 2021, 21:32

Anyone interested in this thread might like to have a look in the WoodHaven2 Dropbox.
Today, I have scanned most of Volume II of the 8 volume set "The Modern Carpenter Joiner and Cabinet Maker" edited by G Lister Sutcliffe in about 1906, so well out of copyright. It's the section that covers hand and power tools. To be honest, the hand tool section is perfunctory at best - there had to be something there to make the book complete, but it's nothing new or special. I reckon the fashionable Edwardian joiners were more into their big old cast iron machines, with steam engines attached. This sort of thing:

SutcliffeV_0016.bg.jpg
(169.84 KiB)


Or this

SutcliffeV_0051.bg.jpg
(339.46 KiB)


Ideal for any workshop...

So head on over to the DropBox and find the 23 Mb pdf now!
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 11 Feb 2021, 23:43

Wow Andy, that must've taken you ages to do!

How have you scanned it so cleanly? I would be scared to put some of my books in a scanner for fear of breaking them.

It's funny, you look at those machines and while they are very old, they're still the same basic machines we're using today although we've got a bit more guarding and white paint these days.

I recently picked up a set of these, Cabinetwork and Joinery, Paul N Hasluck 1910:

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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 11 Feb 2021, 23:54

Glad you like it!
It took a couple of hours with the radio on this afternoon when it was too cold to go out again. The books lie flat nicely and I have an A3 flatbed scanner. The rest of the magic is from Homer and ScanTailor - happy to chat about scanning / digitising but let's not derail this thread too far.

I could scan any requested bits from the rest, in the volumes that aren't available online, but whole books do take a while!
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby TrimTheKing » 12 Feb 2021, 09:26

If you want to scan things without lying them on a scanner you can use either Office Lens or OneDrive apps on an iPhone or other smartphones. You just photograph the pages with the phone cam and the app will save the resulting image in any format you want, including multi page PDF’s, into your OneDrive account or locally on your device.

Don’t know if that’s of any help?
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 13 Feb 2021, 11:59

Trevanion, re your Cassell's, that's another lovely example of how marketing ideas we think of as modern often aren't. I think quite a lot of Cassell's publications, and Gresham's too, came out first as weekly parts, aimed at the working man who could afford 3d a week, and then later on as commercially bound volumes. Sets of the original instalments will always be rarer as they were so fragile. (Victorian popular novels often appeared this way- with authors such as Dickens or Wilkie Collins able to react to the reception the first issues got and adjust the plot accordingly. And let's not forget that Moxon's Mechanic Exercises was a part-work back in the seventeenth century.)

And Mark, thanks for the reminder - whatever gets more people preserving old texts is welcome!

Now, having scanned the machinery section from the Modern Carpenter...etc I have been reading some of it more closely and noticed a couple of things I was unaware of. Here's a bit from page 159, describing fixed planing irons in moulding machines:

"Many modern machines have not the fixed supplementary face-irons. These, however, are of great importance to the machine, in order that, with light moulding and dressing, such as required for door-stops, skirtings, &c., the highest feed can be given without impairing the face of the wood in the slightest degree. With the fixed planing-irons as high a feed as 1000 lineal feet per minute can be given, and the work will be as well finished as with at feed of 10 feet per minute; this fact is of immense moment to the manufacturer. The fixed irons should be located about the middle of the machine. There should be two of these in a sliding box or drawer. These irons are not placed at right angles to the wood which is being operated upon, but obliquely to the extent of some 20°. This position produces a sort of shearing cut, and smoother work is done than if the edges of the irons were placed rectangularly.
Fixed irons (of which there are generally two, one preceding the other) have covers similar to hand-planes. These covers must be placed within 1/16 inch (or nearer) of the active edge, the purpose being, as is the case with hand-planes, to raise the shaving quickly enough to prevent any mangling of the medullary rays or grain of the various woods."

Are there still any woodworking machines that have fixed blades, like the iron of a plane? I've seen videos of the Japanese 'super-surfacer' but if I have understood the passage quoted, these were far more ordinary than that, making dimensioning cuts in sawn timber on the back of an architrave or similar, not for a show surface.

And does this bit from pages 162-3 really mean that machine operators would cope with gnarly grain by running the machine backwards, so they were machining on a climb-cut? I know that's dangerous with small sections and a trim router, but he's describing big old lumps of elm:

"Fig. 165 illustrates a stair-rail design. If this pattern is cut from the square, the side-heads have very heavy cutting to perform. Two concave irons, giving two strokes per revolution, are quite sufficient for the top work, but as many as four irons on each side-head may be required. To bevel the edges of the wood with the circular saw before running it through the moulding machine would considerably aid the cutters. Plain irons only are required on the lower head. This pattern of course is finished at one operation, and, if in hardwood, a faster feed than 20 feet per minute cannot be given with safety. However, if the edges are bevelled with reversed cutters and belts, a feed-speed of 40 feet per minute can be given, producing a finished surface as smooth as that accomplished by a 20-feet feed when the cutters are acting against the grain.
To mould this design in elm-wood may be said to be impossible by the current cutting action of the irons, but with belts and irons reversed, remarkably good work with a comparatively fast speed can be performed."
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 13 Feb 2021, 13:27

AndyT wrote:Are there still any woodworking machines that have fixed blades, like the iron of a plane? I've seen videos of the Japanese 'super-surfacer' but if I have understood the passage quoted, these were far more ordinary than that, making dimensioning cuts in sawn timber on the back of an architrave or similar, not for a show surface.


I've personally never seen a machine with a planing knife fitted (but I did see one of those powerfed super-surfacers for sale ONCE in this country, when an organ building went out of business) but they were obviously a common attachment back in the day as I've seen them in a few catalogues and they've been written about quite a few times in some of my books.

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That being said, it's rare to see the old moulding machines in this country anymore, many were weighed in for scrap when tighter restrictions came along for them requiring complete enclosures, braking units, and non-square cutter blocks.

AndyT wrote:And does this bit from pages 162-3 really mean that machine operators would cope with gnarly grain by running the machine backwards, so they were machining on a climb-cut? I know that's dangerous with small sections and a trim router, but he's describing big old lumps of elm:


I'm not sure if I would attempt it but I imagine since the timber is fairly well held in the machine by all the powerfeed rollers and pressure bars that a very light climbing cut would be alright. These older machinists were made of different mettle though, there wasn't much that scared them, they'd already lost a couple of fingers so what was one or two more?
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 13 Feb 2021, 13:33

:text-thankyouyellow:

I thought you would know! And you've already answered my next question about whether any of these behemoths survive... :)
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 13 Feb 2021, 14:17

AndyT wrote:I thought you would know! And you've already answered my next question about whether any of these behemoths survive... :)


There are quite a few old moulders still left elsewhere in the world though like New Zealand, Australia and North America that you'll see posted up on Instagram, but never any old ones here. I wouldn't be surprised a few of our old machines were exported to developing nations in Africa and South America as well as being scrapped.
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 13 Feb 2021, 14:39

Thanks again.

As it's the weekend, I'll add a couple more samples. This is for anyone who's thinking of upgrading from an Aldi special desktop planer/thicknesses:

SutcliffeV_0057.jpg
(244.54 KiB)


And this is just to reclaim the phrase "Made in Chelsea" as denoting something desirable and useful ;)

SutcliffeV_0076.jpg
(206.92 KiB)
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby 9fingers » 13 Feb 2021, 18:54

Any theories as to why the cutter head on that "mini" thicknesser travels on an angled slide?

I can't think of one at the moment - maybe my mind will clear after a couple of glasses of vino with dinner :lol:

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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 13 Feb 2021, 22:36

So I asked an Australian who knows more about those old Planer Moulders, and he told me while he'd never seen one in person he knew that that the Swedes did a lot with fixed knives on planers.

So I then asked a Swede who also knows a lot about old Planer Moulders, who told me the Knife Box is a Swedish Patented invention by Bolinder and Jonsered called a "Planbox" in Swedish.

Patent Papers

If you look closely at this image, you'll see a knife box fitted underneath the powerfed rollers in the top right.

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And this image of a Bolinder moulder, you can see the two cutouts in the side of the machine that you slide the knife boxes into.

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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AJB Temple » 14 Feb 2021, 16:56

I see a number of those machines were made by Ransome's. I presume this is the same firm that made mowing machinery? After I did my legal training I needed to get a finance qualification with what is now PwC and Ransome's was a small client of PW. At the time I was junior and I remember visiting (from London office) somewhere near Ipswich as I recall (?) and they had a large collection of antique mowers. I recall seeing other machines but had no idea wha they were at the time. They were a vey old fashioned firm with a wood panelled board room. I had completely forgotten about them until this thread.

Somewhat fitting for my 500th post.
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AJB Temple » 14 Feb 2021, 16:57

And with that I have been transformed from a sapling into a splendid Nordic Pine :lol:
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AndyT » 14 Feb 2021, 17:51

AJB Temple wrote:I see a number of those machines were made by Ransome's. I presume this is the same firm that made mowing machinery? After I did my legal training I needed to get a finance qualification with what is now PwC and Ransome's was a small client of PW. At the time I was junior and I remember visiting (from London office) somewhere near Ipswich as I recall (?) and they had a large collection of antique mowers. I recall seeing other machines but had no idea wha they were at the time. They were a vey old fashioned firm with a wood panelled board room. I had completely forgotten about them until this thread.

Somewhat fitting for my 500th post.


I can answer this one (well, I know where to look it up...)

Both great firms, but not related as far as I can see.

Allen Ransome & Co of Stanley Works, Chelsea, Battersea, and later of Stanley Works, Newark-on-Trent, sawmill engineers and ironfounders, made lathes, bandsaws and other woodworking machinery from 1868 onwards, disappearing in the 1930s - see https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/A._Ransome_and_Co

Ransome and Son of Ipswich and Ransome and Co of Yarmouth were the agricultural engineers, starting around 1800 with cast iron ploughshares and later diversifying into lawnmowers - see https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Ransome_and_Son
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby AJB Temple » 14 Feb 2021, 18:49

Ah, thanks.
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Re: Luring Out a Couple of People with Rare Pamphlets/Books

Postby Trevanion » 14 Feb 2021, 18:52

AndyT wrote:I can answer this one (well, I know where to look it up...)

Both great firms, but not related as far as I can see.

Allen Ransome & Co of Stanley Works, Chelsea, Battersea, and later of Stanley Works, Newark-on-Trent, sawmill engineers and ironfounders, made lathes, bandsaws and other woodworking machinery from 1868 onwards, disappearing in the 1930s - see https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/A._Ransome_and_Co

Ransome and Son of Ipswich and Ransome and Co of Yarmouth were the agricultural engineers, starting around 1800 with cast iron ploughshares and later diversifying into lawnmowers - see https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Ransome_and_Son


Actually, they were very closely related!

Allen Ransome 1833-1913 (The woodworking machinery engineer) was the son of James Allen Ransome 1806-1875 (The agricultural machinery engineer). Allen's son, James Stafford Ransome 1860-1931 wrote the very rare "Modern Wood Working Machinery", "Cutters & Cutter Blocks" (Both of which I own) some other books about his travels around the world as an engineer designing sawmills, as well as articles in "The Engineer" magazine.

James Allen Ransome (agricultural machinery engineer) was the son of James Ransome 1782-1849 (agricultural implement engineer) who was the son of Robert Ransome 1753-1830 who was also an agricultural implement engineer.

It's all rather complicated though as there's been a few companies with "Ransome" in the name that leads back to that family in one way or another but I believe the only technically surviving company is "Ransome and Marles" which made quite complex bearings, who are now owned by NSK bearings in Japan.

I reckon there's enough interesting history about the Ransome family that you could write quite a heavy book if you wanted to.
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