Item Details

The joiner's shop is located behind his house in a large, single storey wooden building. A wide doorway allows for the passage of bulky objects. The interior is well-lit by windows and is divided into two distinct work areas and a storage place for wood. In one corner is the joiner's workbench where he plans a job and makes measurements. Here, too, he stores various hand tools. Hanging to one side of the bench are a selection of templates that he can use to lay out a design, for a rocking chair, for a sleigh or for decorative woodwork on the front of a house, for example. The greatest part of the shop is occupied with his woodworking machines which are powered by gas engine running a system of overhead drive belts.

To make a window sash using traditional methods, the joiner would have used mallets, chisels, saws, and numerous different types of planes to shape the pieces. His machine tools not only reduce the number of steps to be completed, they make the work go considerably faster. In the time that he would have made two sashes by hand, his machines help him to produce ten or more. However, as useful as these machines are, they cannot replace hand tools when it comes to executing some delicate and precise work.