Allow me to recap the gems posted here so I can keep track, besides Buck’s special insight into millwork and “millwrights” being the timber framers who built the factories, not the guys who worked inside them:
1) A piece of forged, tempered tool-steel with more depth than width in its cross section is in danger of bending or breaking when used to lever out wood chips in quarter-inch or 3/8 mortises. When all it has to do is overcome wood’s relatively weak “shear parallel to grain” strength of between 600 and 1200 psi. When a soft solder joint runs 28,000 psi, a braze or weld above 40,000 psi and a solid steel billet half again stronger than that or more.
2) Beginning in 1840, mortising machines became increasingly common, largely eliminating the need for American-made mortise chisels. Hence there weren’t many except those imported from England. Nor were there apparently any trades that used them except large furniture and millwork factories. Or at least too few trades to justify manufacturing them in America. Forget about shipwrights, boatbuilders, carriage and wagon makers, aircraft manufacturers, house builders, piano and organ makers, every town’s cabinetmaker, and the myriad of repairmen. All the Bucks, Swans, Witherby’s, Gillespies, White’s and New Haven’s displayed here are really something else besides mortise chisels. The last time we had this discussion they were all “framing” chisels. Now they seem to have evolved into “firmer” chisels, too weak to chop mortises.
3) All the many thousands of ships built between 1917 and 1953 except for a few wooden minesweepers were made from steel. So why would any yard need chisels? After all, boats at the rate of five to a dozen per ship were fiberglass, weren’t they? Further, each one of those lifeboats contained a tool kit for repairing the boat or even building a new one if stranded in a remote location. Guess what kind of chisels were in that tool kit? Or in the “carpenter’s tool chests” that accompanied almost every 150-man company of troops in WWI and WWII? That some of the millwright chisels are stamped “US” might be a clue.
4) WWII shipyards routinely moved thousand-pound workpieces back to the shop for more machining after being laminated, surfaced and shipsawn in the shop and moved in place for layout and fitting. After all, crane time was free and this particular ship was probably the only vessel being built in the yard at the time. Right. In 1943.
Last edited by Bob Smalser; 01-28-2012 at 9:38 AM.
““Perhaps then, you will say, ‘But where can one have a boat like that built today?’ And I will tell you that there are still some honest men who can sharpen a saw, plane, or adze...men (who) live and work in out of the way places, but that is lucky, for they can acquire materials for one third of city prices. Best, some of these gentlemen’s boatshops are in places where nothing but the occasional honk of a wild goose will distract them from their work.” -- L Francis Herreshoff