To be sure your furniture wouldn’t be very highly finished but it would be awfully artistic and while in a civilized community it might be looked upon as a rare exhibit of savage workmanship, it would serve you nobly and well in your island home.
But you don’t have to be marooned on a lonely isle or limited to the use of a jack-knife to show your prowess as a worker in wood. All you need to do is to get some out of the way room where there is plenty of light for a workshop and buy a few good tools to work with and you’ll take as keen a pleasure in making useful things with your own hands as Robinson Crusoe did.
The Tools You Need.
—It is a great mistake to go out and buy a cheap chest of tools of whatever size for while there is always a large number of tools in it they are usually of a very poor quality.
If you can afford to buy a chest of good tools and will get them of a regular tool supply house you can then buy a chest of tools safely. Now to make any ordinary piece of woodwork you don’t need many tools but each one should be the very best, for therein half the pleasure lies.
The Kind of Tools.
—The tools used for cabinet making, as the finer kinds of joinery are called, are exactly the same as those used for carpentry though they are usually kept a little sharper and there should be a few more of them.
All the tools you will need at first are shown in [Figs. 1] and [2] and these are (1) a cast-steel, adze-eye, bell-faced hammer[1] weighing about 9 ounces, which is a regular carpenter’s hammer. (2) A mallet, made of hickory, with a 2¹⁄₂ inch face and try to get one in which the handle goes clear through the head and is wedged in.
[1] The Ohio Tool Company makes good hammers.
(3) Four saws,[2] namely (a) a 16 inch crosscut saw—usually called a handsaw—which is used for sawing off boards across the grain, (b) a 20 inch rip-saw, for sawing with the grain so that a board can be sawed lengthwise, (c) a back saw or miter saw as it is sometimes called; it is about 12 inches long and has about 20 teeth to the inch so that it makes a very fine and smooth cut. (d) A compass saw; it has a narrow, tapering blade about 10 inches long and is used to cut out holes in boards, and to cut disks, or wheels of wood. The blade of a keyhole saw is thinner and narrower than a compass saw and, hence, smaller holes and shorter curves can be cut with it than with a compass saw.