Engineering in early America was nothing like what you think of today it's not high
technology it isn't making cell phones it's simple tools making the tools that you need
every day to do your job. Engineering here on the frontier was a complete reset it was going
back to very primitive techniques compared to something you're going to see in New York or
Philadelphia or Boston or Charleston. Today we'll be making a draw knife a very simple
woodworking tool for shaping wood something that you need every day here on the frontier.
The draw knife has a long horizontal blade, two tangs that come off of either side for handles so
that you can shave wood by pulling it toward you. Brandon and Simeon are going to be working on the
forge and I'll be working on the handles. We got our fire going and Simeon out here
he's going to give us some help on this project because we're going
to do a technique called a double strike. And what a double strike is is a two-person
job you have two hammers going at the same time on something like this today and even
historically most blacksmith shops had at least one person to double strike. What that did was
that allowed the other person to hold a bigger hammer with two hands and get a lot more metal
moving at one time it it made the process quicker. We've chosen some old files to use and we're going
to try that I wanted to show you this draw knife my Grandpa died in 1981 when I was about 6 years
old and I found this in my dad's wood shop and I said what is this? and he showed me what it was
for and I don't know if you can see it but I could feel my grandpa's thumb prints in these handles
you know when somebody says how long have you been doing this I say since about six cuz I remember
using Grandpa's draw knife so Dad put a a 2x6 up in the vise and I whittled the soup out of it.
That's an amazing story I love history sticking with you like that
yeah yep so for this double
strike what method are you wanting to use? Well there's two the first method is the
double Striker would hit in the center of the Anvil regardless of where I hit
mhm and the second one
is the double Striker hits wherever uh the first Striker is hitting and that's the one I prefer
all right got it what I'm going to
do is I'm going to use the hot cut we're going to come in and cut that we need to make a little bit
more handle material so I'm going to cut that and that's going to be the new handle we'll draw out
this is a fantastic little Forge especially like on a frontier setting like this but what I found
is this being a new Forge that I'm not working on when I try to put the file in there uh it's not
getting far enough Into the Fire and I've got a knockout part of this mud backing that they've got
here so I can stick the file back further through so I asked Brandon if this was okay
for this to happen and uh I got just a tool for you
oh look at that yeah sure enough Let's give it a shot here
this is a big Improvement I can already see I can stick the the the work through further
and get the heat concentrated where I want it so this is really going to work out well
well we've got our one side of the tang drawn out and finished I've got to let
that normalize which is uh basically an air cool because if I were to quench that
this file has enough carbon in it it would turn it brittle and that would
be very susceptible to breaking so we're waiting for it to to soften up
Brandon and I have got the tangs drawn out I've got the center part the blade part the
angle feathered out to where it needs to be got it forged to finish now and uh what's next is
Jon and Brandon and work their magic and then we'll have a completed draw knife to show you.
We have our rough forged draw knife here that Simeon has done for us it's only air cooled
though so it's still very hard and very brittle but we want to get it to a point to where we
can use a file and shape it and do that final finishing to do that though we have to soften
it and to soften it it's called annealing the process is we're going to heat this up cherry
red and we're going to stick it into a bucket of ashes that have already been pre-warmed they will
slowly slowly cool this down and that's what will soften it it'll take overnight once we get that
done then we'll have to Reharden it by heating it up and quenching it in oil and then a little
tempering heat on the bottom will bring that soften up just a little bit to give it strength
I'm going to be working on the handles for this draw knife today and we've got a piece of Ash
here that we're going to turn the handles out of. The handles on this are going to be fairly short
about two or 2 and 1 half in long and you can see from this draw knife here they need to be
kind of pear-shaped a little wider at the base then they will be close to the neck of the draw
knife but our handles are going to be a good bit shorter we'll get both of the handles out of this
one stick once the shapes are in there we'll cut this off and uh do a little hand shaping.
The wood here is a challenge we're using a very dried piece of Ash that makes it
harder to work. If it was Green Ash it' be very easy to do this turning but then
it'll dry and shrink and probably crack and break so we have to do the harder
turning on the already dried wood and um using this pull lathe it's a very
primitive lathe so it takes a long time to get the skills to make a nice smooth turn.
Using this lathe is definitely a challenge compared to using a modern lathe because of
this oscillating back and forth motion you you only want to cut when you're
on the downstroke so you only want to kind of push in when your foot is going down if
you're pushing in too hard the whole time like you would with a a modern lathe well
it stops the piece and and ruins your Rhythm and rhythm is really important
when you're doing this sort of Lathe work it's all the more really important to have
your tools very very sharp or else you're working really hard at a job like this.
I'm really getting close on this second one you kind of get that first one you
get the feel for the shape and then you just echo that shape in the second one it
doesn't really matter whether they're perfectly exactly the same on either
side you're just using this tool you're not worried about it being exactly symmetrical
so we have our final filing all done it's all nice and sharp and smooth the next step
before we harden it is to fit the handles and Jon already has the handles made here
he's going to drill them out then we're going to heat these up and heat form them
right in there so that the hole is perfect to the tank makes a really good solid fit
So we heated the tangs up for the handles 'cause we wanted to do that before we harden it and
that's the step we're at now the final hardening we have our oil here already so we're going to
stick this in the fire and we're going to get it up to, 1500° and that's the optimum temperature
for this hard steel and then we're going to quench it in the oil and that'll give a nice hard steel.
It's great to hold in my hands a tool that we've made here on the homestead and we'll be
able to use on the homestead for future projects special thank you to Brandon here who worked on
this project also Simeon England thank you for traveling all this way bringing this project
to the table if you've enjoyed this Engineering America episode tell us about it in the comment
section and if you have an idea for a project we'd love to hear it thanks for watching.