Factory made chair devil?

[AndyT]

Just a thought - maybe we are looking at the wrong trade? I think I've read that handy little scrapers like this were used in trades other than chairmaking. Maybe it was aimed at gunsmiths - or made by a gunsmith for himself in a shop which had casting facilities? Or a coachmaker?

Nice find though. Any provenance clues from where you bought it?

 

[bugbear]

Just a thought - maybe we are looking at the wrong trade? I think I've read that handy little scrapers like this were used in trades other than chairmaking. Maybe it was aimed at gunsmiths - or made by a gunsmith for himself in a shop which had casting facilities? Or a coachmaker?

Nice find though. Any provenance clues from where you bought it?

Indeed - Alf's site shows a similar tool, called a gunstockers scraper. These are quite well known (Mr Lamond appears to have hundreds).

But the design is different to the chair devil (although it has similarities). At one stage I became VERY convinced this was a gunsmith's too, made by a gunsmith. If anyone can make a perfectly finished item from stock metal, using a forge, hacksaw and files, it is (of course) a gunsmith.

But the choice of material doesn't fit this. There's no cast iron in a 12 bore.

One final observation; careful inspection of the tool reveals that the inner faces (normally hidden) were made by draw filing. In a one off tool, I would expect the maker to spend the neccessary 2 minutes to make these surfaces as good as the outer faces. It doesn't take long to SiC a tiny area.

I have also cleaned up the wood a little, using 0000 wire wool to remove the crud.

Identifying small pieces of timber is very hard, especially when they're old and dirty. However, I am confident of some timber's that they're NOT.

They're not:

* box
* rosewood (any of the dalbergiae), kingwood, black wood etc.
* lignum vitae

I think it's a mahogany, which again is an odd choice. if this (rather elaborate) tool were a one off, with all the effort implied by that, I would expect the maker to scrounge up a scrap of offcut of "fancy" timber to finish it off. The wood scales are so small that there's no real cost involved.

So, putting all this together (highly evolved design, cast iron, unfinished inner surfaces), I believe it to be a tool, made in moderate numbers (say 10-100) by a tool making company. I am not fully sure of the purpose of the tool; by far the closest tool is the gun stocker's scraper, but these were of a slightly different design, and always had upturned (gull wing) handles to allow their use on flat-ish surfaces.

BugBear

 

[GazPal]

If shop made by a gunsmith I'd tend to expect the timber to be walnut or similar gunstocking material.

 

[bugbear]

If shop made by a gunsmith I'd tend to expect the timber to be walnut or similar gunstocking material.

Agreed - and I sure (as heck) wouldn't expect cast iron. I'd expect it to be cut/filed out of metal stock.

BugBear

 

[bugbear]

I've recently been making another axe handle

post1040865.html?hilit=%20last%20thing%20you%20made%20#p1040865

and used this chair devil in anger.

It was superb; beautifully controlled shallow cuts, leaving a nigh ready to finish surface.

The only issue is frequent sharpening. All scraper edges wear quickly, due to the nature of the cutting action; in a normal hand held cabinet scraper, the forces are quite low, and you can sharpen the two (one per face) burrs on each edge of the scraper, and you can sharpen the top and bottom edges - 4 burrs in all, each around 4" long, so 16" of cutting surface. This is effectively quite a large "batch" of sharpening.

In my chair devil, the handles allow you to apply more force, increasing wear rate. The edge is prepared with a 45 degree bevel, with a (very lightly dressed) burr, so there only one "face". For safety, I choose not to sharpen the upper edge of the blade. So there's only 2" of working edge, leading to rather frequent sharpening.

The next time my workshop is in metalworking mode, I'll made a few more blades (they're just bits of old saw), so I can reduce the overhead of sharpening.

I assume all this also applies to traditional wooden chair devils, and the Lee Valley metal versions.

BugBear

 

[AndyT]

Re-reading this thread and thinking again about the tool... I'm surprised nobody suggested that it could have been made by a patternmaker for his own use.

Patternmakers, naturally, had access to casting facilities, even for "uneconomic" one-offs. (There are plenty of copies of commercial planes about as evidence of this.)
Hand finishing of the casting by filing would be the natural way to go. And a pattern maker would have had a use for a tool which would take a minimal amount of wood off a curve, while leaving a fair surface.

If it had been a commercial tool, the chances are that someone would have seen another.

Overall, it's a very gloatable find, whoever made it!

 

[bugbear]

Re-reading this thread and thinking again about the tool... I'm surprised nobody suggested that it could have been made by a patternmaker for his own use.

Patternmakers, naturally, had access to casting facilities, even for "uneconomic" one-offs. (There are plenty of copies of commercial planes about as evidence of this.)
Hand finishing of the casting by filing would be the natural way to go. And a pattern maker would have had a use for a tool which would take a minimal amount of wood off a curve, while leaving a fair surface.

If it had been a commercial tool, the chances are that someone would have seen another.

Overall, it's a very gloatable find, whoever made it!

I did consider pattern makers, but rejected it.

A pattern maker's tool would have been (IME) more likely to be brass/bronze, and more beautiful/fancy.

BugBear (gloating)