I think that people who enjoy history and restoration share a love of using what we see before us to as a way of opening a window onto a past time. Maybe you get it by running your hands along a stone that once was part of the Parthenon and feeling a connection to the stone cutter. An archeologist sifts through a layer of rubble beneath a downtown street and finds shards of pottery and glass that tells about the lives of the colonials who lived there, and she can almost see them tossing these things out into the trash pile. At the museum here, when we look at Jill's backbone and still see the original builder's pencil marks, we can picture the crew working on her in 1931. Connecting to the past with a physical object in the present can be a profoundly moving experience.
And for those of us who enjoy building things out of wood, we particularly like looking at workshops. It drives us nuts when we see workshops in museums or the media where they got the woodworking evidence wrong. Remember Kevin Costner lazily sanding a frame of the boat he was building in "Message In A Bottle?" Gag me. Nobody sands frames like that. He might as well have been painting the studs of his house before drywalling over them.
But, perhaps you look at a photograph of a shop from the 1800's. There's a piles of coarse shavings, a scorp and spokeshave left out on the bench, a flat chunk of wood and suddenly it's clear... Ah! He was hollowing out the seat of a chair! And look, those must be the legs on the bench, waiting to be attached... by looking closely at the photo and making some reasonable guesses, we now have something more than a static photo, we have a sense of what was going on at the time of the photo. It's like stepping back in time.
Some people think that doing this is fun. I'm one of them.
And, if you're one of those people too, here's a little lesson in wood shaving identification. Ok, so it's not nearly as cool as Sherlock Holmes' ability to identify 50 different types of tobacco ash, but it's a start.
Wood shavings tend to come from planes, and you can tell some things about the planes that were used, and they manner in which they were used by their shavings.
Most people are used to wood shavings looking like this:
They're curly, almost like a ribbon that's been curled by running it across the edge of a scissor blade. You can tell some things about this shaving by feel, but let's assume that all you can do is look. There are a few clues here to tell you about the plane that produced it, and how it was used.
First, the edges are clean cut, not ragged. That tells you that the plane probably had a flat iron (I'll show you a curved one in a minute), or that what was being planed was exactly the width of the shaving. Second, the curl is pretty much straight, like the way hair would curl coming out of a hair roller. That tells us that the plane travelled straight down the wood, without being angled to one side or the other. The shaving came from a plane like this
being pushed straight along the board you see.
Now, some shavings have a long, winding curl like this:
This isn't a tight curl like the previous shaving, but the edges are still crisp. This tells us that the shaving came from the same type of plane, and probably working on a board as wide as the shaving, but the plane was being pushed along the board at an angle.
The direction of travel was straight down the board, but the plane was skewed as it went, almost like a car sliding a little sideways as it goes in a straight line down the ice. Angling the plane to the work helps the blade slice the wood as it goes, and it produces this distinctive, long shaving. A woodworker might skew his plane to help cut cleanly through a section of wood that had some tricky grain that could tear out if he just planed it with straight stroke.
Now you may see a shaving that has somewhat crisp edges, but has some evidence of tearing along the side as well. These shavings may be very wide, indicating that the whole plane blade was being used.
Here you get a little tearing at the edge of the shaving as the plane blade lifts the shaving from the surface of the wood. Sometimes these shavings don't curl, but run out in long, wavy ribbons. If you see wide, flat shavings like this, the worker was planing a board that was wider than the plane blade. Chances are, he was flattening a board.
I mentioned straight and curved blades before, and here's what I meant. Let's look at the bottom of a scrub plane.
You're looking at the mouth (the opening on the underside) of the plane with the blade protruding out toward the left side. You can see how the blade of a scrub plane is slightly curved. The blades of most planes are straight across. The curved blade of a scrub plane allows it to dig a little trench in the wood as it goes. This comes in handy when you need to remove a lot of wood quickly, and the purpose of the scrub plane is to do exactly that: take down thickness fast. The scrub plane blade produces a unique type of shaving:
These shavings curl like the first ones we saw, indicating that the plane travelled straight down the wood, but the edges are very ragged. These curved blades are cutting deep into the wood in the center, and cutting shallower and shallower along the sides as the blades curve up and away from the surface of the wood. The shaving is fat in the middle. Near the edges, the cut is so thin that the shaving is essentially torn from the board, giving it that ragged appearance.
If you see shavings like this, you can guess that the worker wanted to remove a lot of wood in a hurry. You would normally use a scrub plane as the first step in shaping or flattening a board. Once you got close to the shape you wanted, you'd switch to a plane that would produce a thinner, more delicate shaving.
Another type of shaving comes from a very special type of plane, called a scraper. A scraper is just a flat piece of steel with a slight burr burnished onto the edge. Here's a diagram of what I'm talking about. If you had a piece of steel that was just cut flat, with a square edge, you'd see this if you looked at it from the side with a magnifying glass.
Just a flat, square edge. Now, if you put a burr on this edge by pressing down on it with a hard steel rod, you'd mushroom out the steel a little to each side. These edges are quite sharp, but they're really too small to see with the naked eye. They cut a very fine shaving that curls a bit as it runs up into the body of the scraper. Looking at it from the side again, here's an idea of what you'd see as the scraper cuts a shaving:
Here's a real scraper and the type of shavings it produces:
The burnished edge is along the right side, but the burr is way too small to see with the naked eye. If you run your finger across it, you can barely feel it. The shavings from a scraper are exceptionally feathery and thin. You can often see light through them. They tend to have slightly ragged edges as the scraper is usually bent just a little as it's pulled or pushed across the wood. The effect is like having a curved blade cut into the wood. However, these shavings are so thin that the effect is to create soft, overlapping areas of smooth wood. It's like the smoothing effect you'd get by blending in hard charcoal lines in a drawing by dragging your thumb across them. Your thumb would create a smooth transition between the lines by making a thinner layer of charcoal between the thicker, darker ones.
In the days before sandpaper (essentially pre-1833), all furniture was smoothed with planes and scrapers. Those perfect Chippendale cabinets weren't sandpapered smooth, they were scraped and rasped.
Lastly, you may run into piles of shavings that don't look like any of these. Instead, they're small and broken up, like this:
Yep, you guessed it. Those come from a power planer. Sure, it's operated by hand,
but it's a power tool. These shavings are created by a thin blade that rotates across the wood at high speed.
So, there you go. Next time you stop by a woodworking shop, take a look at the shavings and see what you can figure out. If you're lucky, you'll see the tools that go with the shavings too!