ANÁLISIS DE LA SOLVENCIA

people represented a high marriage of artisanry to industry, a re­

fined manual approach to a repetitive specialized task not unlike the job context of a senior journeyman in a pre-industrial shop.

Certainly, early industrial America did not develop a sudden inde­

pendence from hand skill, and within certain workplaces, the uses of machinery added to the skill vocabulary rather than depleted it.

The elliptical lathes have been difficult to document. There are no casting numbers nor maker's stamps, and research into their past has shown only that there is no record of a patent for their design or manufacture in this country. As elliptical turning technology is known to have existed in Europe at the time, the Schwambs or others quite likely brought the knowledge of it with them and re-created the machinery here. Whatever their origin, the lathes are best understood as a means of transforming circular motion into elliptical motion. How this is done is ex­

plained in a simplified way on the facing page.

An oval form may be turned from a tool rest just as a circular one would be. While this is a distinct, Singular capacity to have at one's disposal, for those imagining the glory of cutting into fine stock on venerable machinery, wonder not. The work is all scrap­

ing, lathe speeds are low, work must proceed in a rigidly or­

dered sequence to be effective or profitable at all, and often the turner is faced with the necessity to simply force the cut.

The lathes, though worn, permit the Old Schwamb Mill to sat­

isfy demands that no production shop could. Orders now come in from around the continental United States, Hawaii, and from abroad, complementing and extending the body of work pre­

viously produced, which is included in the collections of The White House, the Vatican, Buckingham Palace, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among others.

A typical order might be: one gold-leafed oval mirror frame, turned with profile number 558 (from the Schwamb production collection) and having a 1 6-in. by 20-in. inside dimension.

The first task is to develop a template for one quadrant of the ellipse. Schwamb ellipses (and circles) are constructed of regular quadrants of kiln-dried lumber, bandsawn and finger-joined. One template serves for the whole job, and is gotten from the quietest corner of the main floor, where a trammel board rests on an oak cask. The surrounding walls are an orderly fish-scale jam of the cardboard quadrant arcs that the Schwambs cut over the years.

If a pre- made template can't be found in the array, the trammel is set to size and a new template is cut, then traced on the stock.

The four sections of the frame are bandsawn, jointed flat, and cut to length on a sliding-table circular saw.

The finger joint is made on a gang saw, a set of blades with teeth protruding through a wooden plate and between two fixed parallel wooden fences. Each quadrant is gripped like a pistol and pushed through the blades.

Frame blanks are taken upstairs to the glue room as soon as the joints are cut. Here, amid the iron heat pipes and old hide­

glue pots, quadrants are ganged up face to face, Titebond is brushed on the joints, and the frame is loosely pieced together on a steel-topped assembly table. A steel band clamp at one of several stations is placed around the frame blank and drawn up quickly with a handwheel, which winds in the slack. The quad­

rants align, the shoulders draw up, and beads of glue bloom at the joints as the strap comes to full tension.

After overnight curing, glue-squeeze is chiseled away from the back of the blank, which is then jointed flat so it can be mounted on the lathe faceplate. Frame blanks are fixed to the lathe with four screws positioned so they will neither come through a fin­

ger joint nor be exposed during turning. The lathe differential,

The first step in making an oval is to make a pattern. This old trammel board, above, is adjustable to draw ovals (and circles) from a few inches wide up to 4 ft. long. The four identical seg­

ments that make up an o val frame are finger-jointed on the vener­

able gangsaw shown below, but today's blades are carbide-tipped.

which governs the proportions of the oval, is set by moving the headstock ring plate to the proper calibration. After a liberal oil­

ing of the mechanism bearing surfaces, the blank is rotated, test­

marked and the setting checked for accuracy.

The lathes all run considerably under 1 ,000

RPM.

Low speeds are easy on the equipment, but dictate several turning challenges.

The action of worn ellipse mechanisms can become exaggerated, tools grab more easily, and scraping smooth surfaces is more diffi­

cult than at higher speeds. Nevertheless, turning circles or moder­

ate ovals is usually a pleasant, direct joy, free of the racy hum and tense power delivery of the typical light modern lathe.

Tools for any order are chosen from the Mill's collection. All May/june 1986

77

The display may be reminiscent of a barn sale, but these tools are in everyday use, turning out oval frames to match patterns that were drawn and cataloged by the Schwambs 150 years ago.

of these were shopmade from tempered bar stock, with plain handles, iron ferrules, and usually with nails banged in around the tang to take up slack caused by generations of turning. Scrap­

ing burrs are turned over without fuss at the nearby grinder, and must be touched up constantly.

To dimension the blank accurately, the face is trued flat and to final frame thickness. A slightly dome-shaped scraper is the first tool used. It bangs the glue off the joint shoulders and takes away "fat" areas of the face, caused by the lathe's deflection from vertical as the old mechanism spins. The worn devices often yield frames with pleasing, subtle inconsistencies such as varying thickness or imprecise elliptical orbits.

A spear-point tool is then used to make planing cuts across the face until final thickness is reached. None of these cuts can be heavy, else the drive belt will slip (leather and wood have no easy time driving the lathes) . Watching the tool at work has often reminded me of a phonograph needle moving across a record.

After the face is cut, the inside or "sight" edge is made square to it and sized to the ordered dimensions, again with the spear­

point tool. Tool position and angle are critical. There is only one small zone in the entire path of the turning blank when the stock is moving straight down in relation to the toolrest. Within this zone, which is as wide as the toolrest and perhaps an inch in height, the work can be cut as if it were a circular turning. Out­

side the zone the work also moves sideways, which makes cut­

ting impossible. The turner must choose a particular angle to use from the toolrest to the work in penciling layout lines and mak­

ing cuts. This angle, once chosen, must be maintained through­

out the job. If the tool angle is changed, different cuts wil l have changing relationships to each other, making the molding ele­

ments appear to be in slightly different orbits.

Now, with the sight edge haVing been cut, the final frame

78

Fine Woodworking

width is marked on the stock and the outside edge is cut the same way, with the same attention being paid to square ness and to the tool angle.

Next, the rabbet is cut with a special right-angle scraping tool.

The developing rabbet quickly fills with centrifugally held scrap­

ings, giving the illusion that making the final depth will take but a moment. In reality, the cutter wil l lose some length to the grinder before the job is done.

With the rabbet cut, the dimensioned oval blank awaits a pro­

file. Full-size section drawings either come to the machine room with each order, or are specified by catalog number from the Schwamb collection. Most profiles are begun as step cuts, which are made square and parallel to the faceplate with the spear-point tool. The final coves, ogees, beads and other shapes are cut into the steps using the ful l kit of Schwimb tools. (It is a pleasure to turn an obscure molding for the first time and in the process final­

ly discover the true purpose of a particular odd, neglected tool.) The tools encounter endgrain and glue four times per revolu­

tion on an average cut. Some tea rout is inevitable, but can be minimized by touching up the burr frequently. A dull ing tool wil l soon begin to bounce around in the cut, and will remove material unevenly, causing the same off-kilter appearance as a change in the tool angle. The goal is to do all shaping with the cut, not with subsequent abrasives. Sanding the work on the lathe is a rocky necessity that one strives to keep to a minimum­

in the best of worlds, sanding would not be necessary to make beads round or to fair coves, but some frames require it.

When the frame is done, it is unscrewed from the faceplate and brought upstairs for finishing. The floor is swept, the tools put in their places, then the cycle begins again.

The mill's workday used to begin around dawn, when the first workers arrived to ready the day's supply of glue. In pre-electric times, work hours and shop layout were controlled by the sun . But I find myself working a t a time o f day when no 1 9th-century woodworker would have thought of being in the room . On this winter evening, the Schwamb machines seem l ike darkened props on a stage out of context. Wire-caged lightbulbs hang from their cords over each machine, and are switched on and off as the work proceeds from one station to the next. The sounds of the structure shift as if under sail, conjuring thoughts of the thirty­

at-once who filled these buildings, whose hands wore the flat­

ness and edges from every surface. Tidal cold drafts break in through the clapboards and window frames, rattle the qUOit-like collection of failed turnings hanging from the beams, flutter the faded girlie poster and help erode the years of milestones and messages chalked on planks and timbers throughout the frame­

work: first snows, machine safety, company policy.

The upper atmosphere of the room is charged with pulley movement as the whole mill becomes the machine. The slap­

ping belts cadence the work; the 60-watt baskets swing. Sweeps and lands of an emerging profile glance in and out of moving shadow as they spin, and oval pencil l ines seem to hula into bar­

ely confluent duplicates. The deepening chill of the wind from the faceplate has matched that of the drafts. Working at the old machines for any length of time gives a bone-felt glimpse into the age that begat the works. I rebreathe the breath, regrip the

tool, engage the blur. ⁰

William Tandy Young makes furniture in Arlington, Mass. The Old Schwamb Mill, open weekdays from ¹⁰

A.M.

to ⁴

P.M.,

is at ^{1 7} Mill Lane in A rlington, Mass., near ¹²¹⁵ Massachusetts A venue.

For group tours, call (61 7) 643-0554.

In document Diagnóstico de Maisons du Monde España, S.L. (página 36-41)