flattening chisel backs with lapping film

[Jacob]

yes very expensively made with great skill but a design dead end IMHO
These spectacular bits of early modernism were being built same century.

They'd hardly register with the A&C crowd. (Though the contents of the great exhibition did). Too industrial for the gentry. Smoke, noise, the working clarse, oh dear no!

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Using a road roller is a pretty drastic way of trying to flatten a chisel back. Might not work, either; unless you coat the rollers with emery powder.

Not sure where the Crystal Palace and Pontcysyllte Aqueduct come into it, though.

 

[Jacob]

Using a road roller is a pretty drastic way of trying to flatten a chisel back. Might not work, either; unless you coat the rollers with emery powder.

Not sure where the Crystal Palace and Pontcysyllte Aqueduct come into it, though.

Design history and influence on the future. Bauhaus very aware of industry and trying to integrate arts, crafts, trades, under one roof (behind one glass wall you might say), which they did astonishingly well.
NB I'm just in the middle of several books abt the Bauhaus in case anybody is wondering why I'm going on about it!

 

[marcus]

design dead end IMHO

So what? They're lovely. More lovely than anything being made now, and that was the point of them. To be wonderful things, to be the best that could be made. Wander round the British Museum or the V & A — almost everything there is ultimately a design dead end, but they are wonderful in themselves, which is why we love them. To value something simply because it led to something else is a bit arbitrary.

As for the Arts and Crafts crowd 'not having time for the working class', that's a travesty. The entire movement was based around concern for working people and the appalling conditions in industry at the time, and most of the leading lights of the movement were socialists of one stripe or another. Morris himself struggled a great deal with the conflict between the reality-in-practice of his craft businesses and his socialism and gave up his craft work for a long period of time to dedicate himself to class struggle. Of course with hindsight you can't escape the fact that they were from the ruling classes, but by the standards of the time they were very progressive and were anything but snobs.

Ultimately they wanted a world filled with beautiful things, where everyone had enjoyable and fulfilling work; not a bad aim, notwithstanding the fact it was utopian dream that could never happen in the way they envisaged. But the world had less experience of what happens when you try to put utopian dreams into practice back then....

 

[Jacob]

.....
As for the Arts and Crafts crowd 'not having time for the working class', that's a travesty. The entire movement was based around concern for working people and the appalling conditions in industry at the time, and most of the leading lights of the movement were socialists of one stripe or another...........

Yes but their products were only for the wealthy and they had a very romantic backward looking view of craft work. Other UK social reformers of the time were far more significant, Engels, Booth, Rowntree, the new town builders, Dickens, Marx himself and many others.
A&C were blind to two things particularly - one being industry (they hated it) the other being the vernacular tradition which they simply couldn't see - they thought it had finished somehow.
And there were some terrible old tories involved as well!

 

[marcus]

Yes but their products were only for the wealthy and they had a very romantic backward looking view of craft work. Other UK social reformers of the time were far more significant, Engels, Booth, Rowntree, the new town builders, Dickens, Marx himself and many others.

Agreed, but they were not snobs.

 

[Jacob]

Yes but their products were only for the wealthy and they had a very romantic backward looking view of craft work. Other UK social reformers of the time were far more significant, Engels, Booth, Rowntree, the new town builders, Dickens, Marx himself and many others.

Agreed, but they were not snobs.

Not knowingly perhaps. Their intentions were for the best. But the English class system locked them into a certain strata which they'd find hard to break away from, and modernism unsettled them.
Unlike their raving, radical, revolutionary European counterparts who picked up where they left off.

 

[marcus]

Their intentions were for the best. But the English class system locked them into a certain strata which they'd find hard to break away from

Of course.

and modernism unsettled them. Unlike their raving, radical, revolutionary European counterparts who picked up where they left off

Looking at how it is turning out they may have been right to have been unsettled..... Time will tell.

 

[David C]

OP ???????

 

[Jacob]

I think we sorted the OP - told madge not to carry on flattening but to just sharpen and go woodworking! I think that was the consensus.
How are you getting on madge?

 

[Cheshirechappie]

I wonder whether the Bauhaus, revolutionary European counterparts and terrible old tories flattened the backs of their chisels, and if so, what grade of lapping film they used?

 

[Jacob]

I wonder whether the Bauhaus, revolutionary European counterparts and terrible old tories flattened the backs of their chisels, and if so, what grade of lapping film they used?

I think they had more important things on their minds!
There might be a clue in the Bauhaus wood work shop, have a gander around:-

I see they had continental style workbenches. Well they couldn't be right about everything!

 

[marcus]

OP ???????

There was an OP?

I thought that the first reply from fluffflinger pretty much covered it....

 

[Noel]

I wonder whether the Bauhaus, revolutionary European counterparts and terrible old tories flattened the backs of their chisels, and if so, what grade of lapping film they used?

I think they had more important things on their minds!
There might be a clue in the Bauhaus wood work shop, have a gander around:-

I see they had continental style workbenches. Well they couldn't be right about everything!

Untidy bunch, that lot... Good natural light, a real greenhouse of a workshop.

 

[CHJ]

Photograph of the interior of Sidney Barnsley's Sapperton House, 1904

The house is about a mile from me, one or two local houses have bits of their work but none of it in anything other than wealthy establishments at the time.

 

[János]

Hello,

You could flatten the backs of chisels and plane blades in a few seconds on a flatstone grinder, like the Shinko system http://www.mehr-als-werkzeug.de/product ... -stone.htm, or a similar one.

Have a nice day,

János

 

[Phil Pascoe]

.....but that would spoil hours of fun!

 

[Jacob]

.....but that would spoil hours of fun!

They could find another hobby; woodwork perhaps?

 

[bugbear]

Jacob - is it not the case that when paring, the flat face of the chisel is indeed used as a reference surface to allow accurate paring?

In the case of paring guides (the obvious one is the sash mitre template), they'd be useless if the chisel couldn't sit flat on a surface and still cut.

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

Do you mean one of these?

I've always understood these were for drawing a line around a moulding , not for cutting.
But if you did use it as a cutting guide the blade wouldn't need to be flat at all. Even two rounded bevels (carving chisel) would do it.
It's a bit mythical this flat chisel thing (within reason). No doubt there is a job or two where a dead flat face would help, but until you get one I'd forget all abt this flattening nonsense.