Vindolanda planes

[Sheffield Tony]

Watching Alice Roberts on Digging for Britain the other night, they showed two Roman woodworking planes being unearthed at Vindolanda, in fairly good preservation in anaerobic conditions under a floor.

Another job for rxh, perhaps?

Can't find any photos on line yet unfortunately, but they were only unearthed this year.

 

[D_W]

You know I can't resist....I expect that we're going to find one with a double iron soon. Maybe there will be one where the double iron is loose, but a double iron nonetheless. It works too well to have been figured out only in the last 250-275 years, or whatever the recent time period is.

 

[D_W]

That brings another thought to mind. We, as a civilization, always state that "we know that" ....fill in the blank about what follows. We "know that" planes started as early as the romans, or whoever the earliest plane is attributed to. They are exceedingly scarce because wood and metal doesn't generally hold up over thousands of years unless it has been free of oxidation. Either stored in a dry area, or landed in mud somewhere that had no anaerobic exposure (or however you could put it).

How do we know for sure that there weren't people using steel planes, iron planes or whatever 20,000 years ago? Eventually someone finds something that predates the earliest prior iteration known, and then "we know" again with a start date, until it's revised.

I don't think we know as much as we think we do about the past, but I sure do like when we *find* things and find out that we're not quite as special as we think we are.

 

[Geordie Joe]

Can't find any photos on line yet unfortunately, but they were only unearthed this year.

When the photos do appear they will have the caption "The Romans introduced wood planes to Britain".

I love the way archaeologists make up what they don't know and then repeat it as facts.

If I posted the photo online it would have the caption "The Romans invaded Britain to get there hands on our superior woodworking tools."

 

[D_W]

I'd make it the native americans. And say the English stole it while wearing armor developed by a continental european.

 

[woodbrains]

That brings another thought to mind. We, as a civilization, always state that "we know that" ....fill in the blank about what follows. We "know that" planes started as early as the romans, or whoever the earliest plane is attributed to. They are exceedingly scarce because wood and metal doesn't generally hold up over thousands of years unless it has been free of oxidation. Either stored in a dry area, or landed in mud somewhere that had no anaerobic exposure (or however you could put it).

How do we know for sure that there weren't people using steel planes, iron planes or whatever 20,000 years ago? Eventually someone finds something that predates the earliest prior iteration known, and then "we know" again with a start date, until it's revised.

I don't think we know as much as we think we do about the past, but I sure do like when we *find* things and find out that we're not quite as special as we think we are.

Hello,

Perhaps because the iron age was no longer ago than 2500-3000 years ago. 20 000 is palaeolithic, predating neolithic and bronze ages. We will always find surprising artifacts that predate what we knew before, but certainly no iron or bronze tools 20 000 years ago. I would doubt anyone would find double irons in Roman planes TBH.

Mike.

Mike.

 

[D_W]

I'd doubt we'd find any, either. What I'm saying is that it doesn't mean they didn't exist then or before (be it in bronze or something else). I'm saying that we seem to be sure of a lot of things, but then we find something that doesn't fit, so then we're "sure" of something else, to the point that people will argue that they're right about something they can't prove.

I always find that curious.

I prefer, I don't really know for sure, but I can't wait to see something new. It's always interesting.

I can't tell you for sure that there aren't various levels of the universe existing in the same place as we are at the same time (as in, the multiverse), so I sure can't say there were never any double iron planes. There's a chance there weren't, but what percentage of Roman age planes have we seen to begin with?

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Has anyone found a flint with a cap-iron?

 

[Cheshirechappie]

There's a (little) bit more about the Vindolanda wooden finds and what's going to happen to them here - http://www.vindolanda.com/_blog/press-r ... den_world/

The wooden finds were, it seems, quite extensive, and include the earliest known Roman wooden toilet seat, and wooden water pipes that, when excavated, were still working!

Another report from the local paper - http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/nor ... a-12790205

 

[AndyT]

Great spot Tony, thanks for the tip.

I can't find anything published online about these yet but presumably they are finding so much that there must be quite a delay while all the finds are studied and written up in detail.

Here are some still screengrabs from the programme.

First, as found in the preservative mud:

Then cleaned up:

You can see that they have the through handles fore and aft, like the iron-shod one we all enjoyed in rxh's replica build - the-goodmanham-plane-t107470.html - which was of an unusual survivor with a body made of bone rather than wood.

Roger Ulrich, writing in his "Roman Woodworking" said that the vast majority of Roman planes are assumed to be wooden. Evidence of this is that a reasonable number of blades have survived on their own, where presumably the original surrounding wood has perished. He mentions one other wooden survivor, from the well at Saalburg, which has a beechwood body with an iron sole.

Looking at the two planes as shown on TV, there's no sign of metal fittings or of blades. I can see what looks like a hole for a transverse pin, but no wedges.

Looking at the planes, the lower one seems to have had a cutter which extended all the way to the edge of the body, so I wonder if it was for rebating? My searching for publications about Vindolanda turned up references to a find there of a moulding plane blade - if anyone has access to the journal I'd be interested to know what it looked like. (" Examination of a moulding plane blade from Vindolanda. D.N. Sim and I.M.L. Ridge, Historical Metallurgy vol 34 No 2, 2000) Whatever the answer, it's more evidence that the Romans had a range of special purpose planes, not just bench planes.

So these two look like being very unusual indeed. I hope we can read more about them soon.

 

[lurker]

Maybe someone could send the Vindolanda researcher a link to RXH's excellent thread.

From experience I know Historians tend to live in a narrow world and assume no one else might have a worthwhile input.

Regarding the "joke" about flints : somewhere ( a museum) I have seen a flint with an accompanying drawing that was speculating its use, that looked suspiciously like Sellar's poor mans router plane

 

[custard]

You know I can't resist....I expect that we're going to find one with a double iron soon. Maybe there will be one where the double iron is loose, but a double iron nonetheless. It works too well to have been figured out only in the last 250-275 years, or whatever the recent time period is.

I've heard it speculated that the cap iron was discovered rather than invented That a woodworker had a plane where the wedge wouldn't quite secure the iron, being an ingenious chap he "thickened" the iron by placing another iron on top of it, face to face but set back a whisker. Bingo! He had a cap iron. When he saw the benefits he kept the arrangement and told other woodworkers about it. Because you can't keep a good idea down the practise spread until it became first common and then standard.

Maybe that's true, if so it could have equally been true in the Roman era.

I'm interested in better understanding the process of propagation generally when it comes to woodworking innovations. Take for example jointed chairs. In the 18th century chairs suddenly became much, much more sophisticated. The back legs were slightly curved and then twisted inwards by a couple of degrees. This required a mind bendingly complex arrangement for laying out and cutting the mortice and tenon joints that secured the side seat rails to the back legs. This development spread like wildfire, but not just within the high end cabinet makers in Paris and London, within a few short years you see the same joinery in country workshops all over the world. Indeed I've seen multiple examples of this joint cut with a through tenon, which is even harder to pull off, expertly executed from small rural workshops all across the UK and USA. Even today I've never seen the details of this crucial piece of joinery laid out and explained on the internet, so how did that technique get communicated so fast? One strong possibility is that this type of propogation was a by product of the journeyman system, where ideas from top end workshops would be disseminated out by late stage apprentices on their travels? It's easy to see how developments in tools could also follow the same path. I wonder what the training regime was for woodworkers in the Roman era?

 

[D_W]

I haven't ever read much beyond the advertisement that was in the paper here in the mid-late 1700s being the first commercial printing that was seen. I have trouble believing that at some point in the history of the earth, someone else didn't figure it out. As you say, maybe because they ran into it. There are a lot of man hours, etc, involved in people planing wood in the past. We have certain things that don't seem to have appeared in massive commonality in the past, like the scientific method, etc, and maybe I'm off target here because the greatest thing about the cap iron is that it's less effort than without (and faster, safer, economically much more sound, which is the principal reason that things take over in time aside from quality improvement - it's that, too).

I'm willing to take in information rather than conclude something. Often, curators are missing that, I guess because they want to have the definitive gimmick on their side. "the earliest we know of thus far" would be my intro if I was talking about the subject to someone and was studied on it. Certainty is, to me (with a background working in analysis and probability) something that is very specific. Likely isn't a substitute for it, and to even say "likely", you have to be certain that you have a reasonable estimate as to what's likely and what's not. The best someone knows is not "likely" just because it's the only thing they know.

I know enough about the cap iron now to say that it's likely that it took over because it was an economic advantage. I think it's unlikely that those who were accustomed to other methods would've dumped those other methods so quickly if it wasn't a matter of money. I don't know for sure, but I can speculate that.

You are one of the few people who doesn't just troll my cap iron gimmick, because you've actually used it to good effect, and your quote of it was perfect when Charlie trolled it "there's many ways to do that", to which you responded, that none of them work as well. We've generally lost the true art of planing over the last hundred and a half years. Does it really matter? Probably not. But when you get to plane to good effect with little to no risk, it's really satisfying. I wonder what else we don't know - if there's something manual that works better than the cap iron. If 250 years of professional woodworkers didn't figure it out, I'm unlikely to.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall on one of the roman shops where people were using those old planes before they oxidized. And every cutting edge shop in between on a 25 year increment.

 

[bugbear]

That brings another thought to mind. We, as a civilization, always state that "we know that" ....fill in the blank about what follows.

Bit of a straw man there. That's the newspaper and man on the street version.

An Academic(*) will substitute "the most accepted interpretation of the currently available evidence is..." for your "we know that..."

BugBear

(*) unless they're a mathematician. They know stuff to a level that even Descartes would have to accept.

 

[D_W]

That brings another thought to mind. We, as a civilization, always state that "we know that" ....fill in the blank about what follows.

Bit of a straw man there. That's the newspaper and man on the street version.

An Academic(*) will substitute "the most accepted interpretation of the currently available evidence is..." for your "we know that..."

BugBear

(*) unless they're a mathematician. They know stuff to a level that even Descartes would have to accept.

I agree, they'll do that in writing (people are a lot more cautious when they write something, especially if they believe it may be widely available later). When you get a drink or two in people, even those who are educated, then they want to win an argument and some of that subtlety or professional caution falls off.

Mathematics excluded, of course (as we know it, at least). I was a math major in college, and appreciate a well-defined problem with a definite answer, or a problem of likelihood with a well-fitted distribution. Such things can be somewhat rare in the real world, though.

 

[MusicMan]

My searching for publications about Vindolanda turned up references to a find there of a moulding plane blade - if anyone has access to the journal I'd be interested to know what it looked like. (" Examination of a moulding plane blade from Vindolanda. D.N. Sim and I.M.L. Ridge, Historical Metallurgy vol 34 No 2, 2000) Whatever the answer, it's more evidence that the Romans had a range of special purpose planes, not just bench planes.

So these two look like being very unusual indeed. I hope we can read more about them soon.

I do have access to most library databases, including Web of Science, but unfortunately Historical Metallurgy isn't included in them. You can get it for £10 a copy here: http://hist-met.org/shop/product/74-his ... -34-2.html. Only the first page of the article is available free, and there's a quote:

"The iron, which is shown in Figure 2, is 122mim long, 20mm wide and 3mm thick. The cutting edge is scalloped (Fig 3a), and there is a clearance angle of 41° which would be sufficient for a blade set at 50-66° as described below. Figure 3b allows comparison of the Roman blade cutting edge with its modem equivalent; the similarities are obvious. Figure 2 shows there is some mushrooming evident at the end opposite the cutting edge, which is in keeping with use of the blade..."

but fig 2 is on the next page!

If you have access to any of the following, the journal is held there:

British Library Printed Information about British Library
Cambridge University Printed Information about Cambridge University
Cardiff University Printed Information about Cardiff University
Durham University Printed Information about Durham University
Exeter University Printed Information about Exeter University
Glasgow University Printed Information about Glasgow University
Leeds University Printed Information about Leeds University
Leicester University Printed Information about Leicester University
Liverpool University Printed Information about Liverpool University
National Library of Scotland Printed Information about National Library of Scotland
National Library of Wales Printed Information about National Library of Wales
Newcastle University Printed Information about Newcastle University
Nottingham University Printed Information about Nottingham University
Oxford University Printed Information about Oxford University
Queen's University Belfast Printed Information about Queen's University Belfast
Sheffield University Printed Information about Sheffield University
Society of Antiquaries of London Printed Information about Society of Antiquaries of London
Trinity College Dublin Printed Information about Trinity College Dublin
University College London Printed Information about University College London
V&A Libraries Printed Information about V&A Libraries
Wallace Collection Printed Information about Wallace Collection
York University Printed Information about York University

This line will enable you to find out precisely where it is in each library: http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_lib ... UI0%29=any

Good hunting!

Keith

 

[AndyT]

Thanks Keith.

It sounds like it might be similar to the one in Bill Goodman's book on the history of woodworking tools. Looking again at this thread work-like-a-roman-t84609.html I found that the single surviving example of the wooden body of a Roman moulding plane is in one of the pictures.

 

[woodbrains]

Has anyone found a flint with a cap-iron?

Hello,

Jacob uses them, anything else is a modern fad and only for hobbyists. (hammer)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most if not all the Roman planes have their irons pitched high, like 60 degrees or something? I shouldn't think this would suggest a motivation to 'invent' or 'develop' a cap iron.

Mike.

 

[D_W]

Has anyone found a flint with a cap-iron?

Hello,

Jacob uses them, anything else is a modern fad and only for hobbyists. (hammer)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most if not all the Roman planes have their irons pitched high, like 60 degrees or something? I shouldn't think this would suggest a motivation to 'invent' or 'develop' a cap iron.

Mike.

Given that we've found two so far, I wonder how much we can conclude the planes were used. Were they used for heavy removal work, or was that done elsewhere? Was the wood worked mostly green (presumably) and then finished after drying? Who knows. If they can tolerate 60 degrees, it would suggest that speed wasn't much of an issue yet, which is what my comment above is about. To come up with something like that that's extra cost, there would need to be economic motivation for it - which is either profit incentive (to be the early users) or just being able to stay in business economically (the later users).

I haven't got any historical reference for productivity and how it was viewed 3000 years ago. In societies where class division is extreme and there is a lot of subsistence labor, there doesn't seem to have been a real great drive for innovation or efficiency. Just add more people.

 

[AndyT]

A friend in the Historical Metallurgy Society has let me have a look at the article on the Vindolanda moulding plane iron. I can't reproduce it all here, but the big interesting thing to learn from it is that it was of laminated construction. The authors established this by microscopic examination of the crystal structure and by measuring the hardness at various points across the surface. They could see a clear boundary between larger and smaller crystals and a greater level of hardness at the tip. They conclude that the maker welded a strip of hard steel around a core of softer iron. The resultant blade was not further hardened by heat treatment but would have been hard enough to work wood while still being sharpenable with a file. It would have been suitable for use at a bedding angle of between 50 and 66 degrees.

It's no surprise really - we know from Pompeii and more recent finds that the Romans had sophisticated frame and panel construction with decorative mouldings, so by deduction they must have had the tools to make them - but it's gratifying to see that the tools were so little different from those familiar to us today.