"When any portion of household furniture has to be turned, the wood-turner is sent for; he comes with all his outfit and establishes himself for the occasion at the very door of his employer. He commences by digging two holes in the ground at a distance suitable to the length of the work, and in these he fixes two short wooden posts, securing them as strongly as he can by ramming the earth and driving in wedges and stones around them. The centres, scarcely more than round nails or spikes, are driven through the posts at about eight inches from the ground, and a wooden rod, for the support of the tools, is either nailed to the posts or tied to them by a piece of coir or cocoanut rope. The bar, if long, is additionally supported, as represented, by being tied to one or two vertical sticks driven into the ground. During most of his mechanical operations the Indian workman is seated on the ground, hence the small elevation of the axes of his lathe. The boy who gives motion to the work sits or kneels on the other side of it, holding the ends of the cord wrapped around it in his hands, pulling them alternately; the cutting being restricted to one half of the motion, that of the work towards the tool. The turning tools of the Indian are almost confined to the chisel and gouge, and their handles are long enough to suit his distant position, while he guides their cutting edges by his toes. He grasps the bar or tool-rest with the smaller toes and places the tool between the large toe and its neighbour, generally out of contact with the bar. The Indian and all other turners using the Eastern method attain a high degree of prehensile power with the toes, and when seated at their work not only always use them to guide the tool, but will select indifferently the hand or the foot, whichever may happen to be the nearer, to pick up or replace any small tool or other object. The limited supply of tools the Indian uses for working in wood is also remarkable; they are of the most simple kind and hardly exceed those represented in Fig. 2; the most essential in constructing and setting up his lathe being the small, single-handed adze, the bassōōlăh. With this he shapes his posts and digs the holes; it serves on all occasions as a hammer and also as an anvil when the edge is for a time fixed in a block of wood. The outer side of the cutting edge is perfectly flat, and with it the workman will square or face a beam or board with almost as much precision as if it had been planed; in using the bassōōlăh for this latter purpose the work is generally placed in the forked stem of a tree, driven into the ground as shown in the illustration."
If we are inclined to feel proud of the kind of wood-work turned out by the average wood-worker of this country or England with his great variety of tools and appliances and facilities, we might compare his work with that done by the Orientals without our appliances. Read what Professor Morse tells us of the Japanese carpenter[5]:
"His trade, as well as other trades, has been perpetuated through generations of families. The little children have been brought up amidst the odour of fragrant shavings,—have with childish hands performed the duties of an adjustable vise or clamp; and with the same tools which when children they have handed to their fathers, they have in later days earned their daily rice. When I see one of our carpenters' ponderous tool-chests, made of polished woods, inlaid with brass decorations, and filled to repletion with several hundred dollars' worth of highly polished and elaborate machine-made implements, and contemplate the work often done with them,—with everything binding that should go loose, and everything rattling that should be tight, and much work that has to be done twice over, with an indication everywhere of a poverty of ideas,—and then recall the Japanese carpenter with his ridiculously light and flimsy tool-box containing a meagre assortment of rude and primitive tools,—considering the carpentry of the two people, I am forced to the conviction that civilisation and modern appliances count as nothing unless accompanied with a moiety of brains and some little taste and wit.... After having seen the good and serviceable carpentry, the perfect joints and complex mortises, done by good Japanese workmen, one is astonished to find that they do their work without the aid of certain appliances considered indispensable by similar craftsmen in our country. They have no bench, no vise, no spirit-level, and no bit-stock; and as for labour-saving machinery, they have absolutely nothing. With many places which could be utilised for water-power, the old country sawmill has not occurred to them. Their tools appear to be roughly made and of primitive design, though evidently of the best-tempered steel. The only substitute for the carpenter's bench is a plank on the floor, or on two horses; a square, firm, upright post is the nearest approach to a bench and vise, for to this beam a block of wood to be sawed into pieces is firmly held (Fig. 3). A big wooden wedge is bound firmly to the post with a stout rope, and this driven down with vigorous blows till it pinches the block which is to be cut into the desired proportions.
Fig.3.—A JAPANESE CARPENTER'S VISE.
From Morse's Japanese Homes.
"In using many of the tools, the Japanese carpenter handles them quite differently from our workman; for instance, he draws the plane towards him instead of pushing it from him. The planes are very rude-looking implements. Their bodies, instead of being thick blocks of wood, are quite wide and thin (Fig. 4, D, E), and the blades are inclined at a greater angle than the blade in our plane. In some planes, however, the blade stands vertical; this is used in lieu of the steel scrapers in giving wood a smooth finish, and might be used with advantage by our carpenters as a substitute for the piece of glass or thin plate of steel with which they usually scrape the surface of the wood. A huge plane is often seen, five or six feet long. This plane, however, is fixed in an inclined position, upside down; that is, with the blade uppermost. The board, or piece to be planed, is moved back and forth upon it. Draw-shaves are in common use. The saws are of various kinds, with teeth much longer than those of our saws, and cut in different ways.... Some saws have teeth on the back as well as on the front, one edge being used as a cross-cut saw (Fig. 4, B, C). The hand-saw, instead of having the curious loop-shaped handle made to accommodate only one hand, as with us, has a simple straight cylindrical handle as long as the saw itself, and sometimes longer. Our carpenters engage one hand in holding the stick to be sawed while driving the saw with the other hand; the Japanese carpenter, on the contrary, holds the piece with his foot, and stooping over, with his two hands drives the saw by quick and rapid cuts through the wood. This style of working and doing many other things could never be adopted in this country without an importation of Japanese backs.... The adze is provided with a rough handle bending considerably at the lower end, not unlike a hockey-stick (Fig. 4, A).... For drilling holes a very long-handled awl is used. The carpenter seizing the handle at the end, between the palms of his hands, and moving his hands rapidly back and forth, pushing down at the same time, the awl is made rapidly to rotate back and forth; as his hands gradually slip down on the handle he quickly seizes it at the upper end again, continuing the motion as before. One is astonished to see how rapidly holes are drilled in this simple yet effective way. For large holes, augers similar to ours are used."
Fig. 4.—CARPENTERS' TOOLS IN COMMON USE.
From Morse's Japanese Homes.
When you are obliged to work some day with few and insufficient tools (as most workmen are at times), you will quickly realise how much you can do with very few in case of necessity, and will more fully appreciate the skill of those Eastern people who do so much with so little. We do not need so many hand-tools for wood-work as our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, although we make a greater variety of things, because machinery now does so much of the work for us. Wood-workers of fifty years ago had, for instance, dozens of planes for cutting all sorts of grooves, mouldings, and the like, which are now worked by machine at the nearest mill.