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Excerpt from Book of Trades, Algrove Publishing Classic
Reprint Series, 1999. (Originally published in 1866.)
The Carpenter
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The
carpenter's shop.
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In modern houses the labours of the Builder, the Mason, and
the Plasterer, would be of little use unless they were accompanied
by that of the Carpenter, since a very large proportion of every
building consists of the woodwork of which its interior structure
is greatly composed.
As it is one of the most useful, so the Carpenter's may be considered
the most ancient of trades, for nearly all other handicrafts
require the preparation or manufacture of the materials, but
the Carpenter originally found his materials in the forest,
and at once set to work to construct various articles from the
trunks and stems of the trees best suited for the purpose. We
can only imagine one trade older than that of the Carpenter,
and that is the Tool Maker, and as the earliest tools, or at
all events some portion of them, were probably made of hard
wood, the Tool Maker may in some sense be said to have been
a Carpenter also.
Strictly speaking, the business of the Carpenter is only with
the larger portions of buildings and the rough timber frameworks
which support them, and his principal tools are the axe and
the adze, for chopping and roughly smoothing timbers; the saw,
for sawing beams and planks; the chisel, for making mortise
holes for joining beams together, and for cutting and preparing
wood; the chalk line, a line rubbed with chalk, and used to
make a straight line upon a board or beam, to mark the direction
in which it is to be sawn; the plumb rule, already described
amongst the Builder's tools; the level; the square; the compasses;
all of which have been described in previous trades; the hammer;
the mallet, and various sorts of nails. |
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