Wonderful in His Work with Penknife.
E. G. van Zandt, of North Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, Mo., exponent of the penknife in art, has just completed his latest work, a complete model of a fourteen-room residence, which is a remarkable demonstration of what can be accomplished with an ordinary penknife.
In October, Van Zandt, who is sixty-two years old and a retired mechanical engineer, was confined to his home with bronchitis. Work with his pocketknife has been his[Pg 59] hobby since boyhood, and when he found that he was to be shut in for the winter, he made a workshop of his sick room.
His workshop requires little space. It is composed of a biscuit board, which he uses as his bench; a sharp pocketknife, and a pot of glue. Cigar boxes are his material.
The model of the home is four inches tall, four inches wide, and six and one-half inches long, and weighs, exclusive of the base, exactly three ounces. It required one hundred and fifteen days’ labor, and seven cigar boxes were used in its construction.
The model also includes a garage and shelter shed used in the rear and a private playground. The “estate” is surrounded by a fence, made to represent cobblestones embedded in cement.
The model is complete in every detail, even to doorknobs and hinges. There are eight thousand separate pieces of wood used in its construction. There are thirty-two windows and nine doors in the house. In the windows each sash is separate and each is fitted with glass. The upper sashes have shades. The doors are paneled.
There is an outside breakfast room with a tile floor. Tile also is shown in the vestibule at the front entrance, and the front door is fitted with decorative hinges and a fancy lock. In the rear are doors leading to the cellar, and there is a coal chute to the furnace room. The garage, which adjoins the playground in the rear, also is complete, and there is a shelter shed adjoining it. A brick ash pit is near the garage.
A gravel road leads from the garage outside the grounds, and the garage may only be entered through an ornamental iron gate. The fence surrounding the grounds is a work of art. There is a base of white wood, representing a cut-stone base, with cement and cobblestones above. It is surmounted with a cut-stone coping, and at short intervals there are decorative cut-stone posts with fancy caps.
One of the most intricate pieces of work on the entire model are the ornamental iron gates. There are seven of these, and each required more than a day’s labor. Each picket is a separate piece of wood, and there are ornamental hinges and locks.
Van Zandt says the most difficult work on the whole model was the fitting of the small gratings in the basement windows. The pieces composing the gratings are so small that it was almost impossible to get them glued into position. The glue set before the pieces could be put in place.
Van Zandt solved this problem by specially prepared glue to be used in this work so that it would not set so quickly. It required more than a day’s time for each of the four gratings.
The first part of the house completed, he says, was one of the small windows which project from the roof above the second story, and the last thing completed was the knob on one of the gates.
Van Zandt is emphatic in his statement that the only tool used in the entire work was his penknife. Even the rounded pillars in the porches, he says, were made with the knife and were smoothed with a piece of sandpaper.
In 1913 he completed a model of the Centenary Church, Sixteenth and Pine Streets, on which he worked at odd times for twenty-one years. He says this model was made from observation, without the aid of a picture or[Pg 60] drawing of any kind. He says he visited the church so many times while the work was in progress that people in the neighborhood commented on his presence.
Van Zandt also has a model of a beer wagon, which is similar to those he made for a brewery exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. A complete model of the brewery was shown at the fair, and Van Zandt says he undertook the work of making the wagon after numerous other men had attempted their manufacture and failed.
His work on the brewery exhibit required an entire winter. He made eighteen brewery wagons, thirty-four freight cars, and six trolley cars and trailers.