Читать книгу Wood-working for Beginners: A Manual for Amateurs - Charles G. Wheeler - Страница 6

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When one has made up his mind to make something, he usually wants to begin work at once; so, as I wish you to read this chapter, I will make it quite short. There is a great deal in getting started right, and there are some things to bear in mind if you wish to do good work, as of course you do.

One thing is not to be in too much of a hurry to begin the actual sawing and pounding. The old Latin phrase, "Festina lente" (make haste slowly), is a capital motto for the beginner. Do not wait until your enthusiasm has oozed away, of course, but do stop long enough to think how you are going to make a thing before you begin to saw.

The workman who thinks first and acts afterwards is the one who usually turns out good work, while the one who begins to work without any reflection (as boys, and even men, have been known to do) is apt to spend much of his time in undoing his work, and usually does not get through till after the one who laid it out properly in the first place.[2]

If Homer, in the quotation at the head of this chapter, had been writing about the way boys' work is sometimes done, he might, perhaps, have reversed the positions of some of the words and made "swiftness" and "numerous strokes" the subjects of his emphasis. He has expressed well enough, however, the way that your work should be done, and it is one aim of this book to give you useful hints to that end.

Do not spend your time in working out a lot of set exercises, like joints and odd pieces that do not belong to anything in particular, merely for practice. You will be much more apt to put the right spirit into your work when you make complete and useful articles, and you will get the same practice and experience in the end. There is no need, however, to go through a deal of toilsome experience just to learn a number of simple little things that you might just as well be told in the first place. Begin the process of learning by experience after you have learned what you can from the experience of others. Begin, so far as you can, where others have left off.

Before you begin work it may be interesting to look for a moment at the way boys did their work from fifty to one hundred years ago. Have you read the books by Elijah Kellogg? The reason for speaking of these old-fashioned books is because of the picture they give of the time, not so very long ago, when boys and their elders made all sorts of things which they buy to-day, and also because of the good idea they give of how boys got along generally when they had to shift more for themselves than they do nowadays.

The majority of the boys of that time, not merely on Casco Bay, where Mr. Kellogg places the scenes of his stories, but in hundreds of other places, had to make many things themselves or go without. Of course there was a smaller number in the cities and larger towns who had no good opportunity to make things and were obliged to buy what they could afford (out of what we should call a quite limited variety), or to get the carpenter or other mechanic to make what they needed. But the majority of the boys of that time made things well and had a good time making them. The life they led made them capital "all-round" boys. They could turn their hands, and their heads too, to almost any kind of work, and do it pretty well.

Boys did a good deal of whittling then. This habit, as you doubtless know, still clung to them after they grew up, and opening a jack-knife and beginning to whittle was a common diversion whenever the men rested, whether at the country-store or in the barn or dooryard or at their own firesides. You can see the same habit to-day in some places. The boys whittled splint-brooms of birch in Colonial days in almost every household.[3] Among some of the minor articles made by boys and young men were axe-helves and handles of all sorts, wooden rakes, wooden troughs for bread and for pigs, trays, trenchers, flails, rounds for ladders, bobbins, reels, cheese-boxes, butter-spats or-paddles, wooden traps, and dozens of other articles, not to speak of their handiwork in other materials than wood.

For that matter much of the same life can be found to-day in the remoter regions, and I have known young men brought up to this kind of life, who (within my recollection) have, as a matter of course, done all the farm work of good-sized cultivated farms with live stock, cut and hauled wood from their wood-lots, done a good deal of sea-fishing and salting down and drying of fish, tended and mended their fish-nets, weirs, and lobster-traps, and sailed or rowed twenty-five miles to market with their produce and back again with their supplies. They also built their sheds, barns, and houses, and part of their furniture, their dories, big scows, and capital sailboats; made their own oars and rigged their boats; made many of their farm tools and implements; built their waggons and "ironed" them, their ox-sleds and small sleds, and shod them; made some of their tools; did their own blacksmithing, mason-work, brick-laying, and painting; made their own shoes, and did I do not know how many other odd jobs—all with but a limited supply of common hand-tools. This work did not interfere with their going to school through the winter months until they were twenty-one years old, and they still found time for the usual recreations of the period.

Now a young man must have been pretty well developed after going through all that, even if he did not know much about Greek or calculus or was lacking in superficial polish. And it is only the truth to say that quite a number used to tackle the higher branches of study too, with success made all the more assured by their development in other ways, and many, in addition to all this, paid their way through college by teaching or other work. How did they do so much? Partly, I suppose, because their life was so much simpler and less complex than ours. They did not have so many wants and there were not so many interests to distract their minds. Partly because when they wanted something they knew they must make it or go without. They did not draw so much as we do now, but they did a great deal of observing. They examined things like what they were to make and asked questions, and, knowing that where they had so much to do they could not afford to keep trying things again and again, they learned from their relatives and neighbours what was considered the best way to do their work, and having thought it out carefully they went at it with great energy.

To-day we have only to go to a large factory to see a man standing before some machine and doing some simple piece of work, requiring but little thought—the same thing over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, until he seems to become almost a part of the machine itself, and is not fitted for doing much else. That is the other extreme. Of course we get things cheaper (even if they do not last so long) because of the factory; but how about the workman? Which of these two types is the better-developed man? First you want to be well-developed all-round boys, so that you will not become machines or badly one-sided men. After that—each to his special bent, of course.

Now because we no longer cut down trees ourselves, haul them to the mill to be sawed, or rive or saw or hew them ourselves, leave the wood to season, and then laboriously work it up into whatever we have to make—because we no longer do that, but go instead to a lumber-yard and a mill and have a large part of the work done for us—it is a good thing for us to pause a moment before we begin our work to take in the fact that all the advantage is not with us now, and to think what a capital gymnasium that former life was for strengthening a boy's muscle and mind, not to speak of his morals.

You could not go back to those days now if you wished to, of course (except, perhaps, when you go to some of the remoter regions in vacation), and you are doubtless better off for all the advantages you have now and for all our time-saving contrivances, but the advantage depends partly on how you use the time saved from their laborious tasks, does it not? You can, however, get inspiration from the example of those older boys and from some of their methods, and can put their self-reliant, manly zeal, grit, and perseverance into your work, and have a capital time making the things and more sport and satisfaction afterwards for having made them.

This book does not try to show you a royal road or a short cut to proficiency in architecture, carpentry, cabinet-making, boat-building, toy-making, or any other art or science. It does not aim to cram you with facts, but merely to start you in the right way. It is for those of you who want to take off your coats, roll up your sleeves, and really make things, rather than sit down in the house and be amused and perhaps deluded by reading enthusiastic accounts of all the wonders you can easily do—or which somebody thinks you would like to be told that you can do. It is for those of you who do not wish to have your ardour dampened by finding that things will not come out as the book said they would, or that the very things you do not know and cannot be expected to know are left out.

It does not aim to stir up your enthusiasm at first and then perhaps leave you in the lurch at the most important points. I take it for granted that if you have any mechanical bent or interest in making things, as most boys have, and are any kind of a real live boy, you have the enthusiasm to start with without stirring up. In fact, I have even known boys, and possibly you may have, who, strange as it may seem, have had so much enthusiasm to make something or other that they have actually had to be held back lest they should spoil all the lumber within reach in the effort to get started!

What you want is to be told how to go to work in the right way—how to make things successfully and like a workman—is it not? Then, if you mean business, as I feel sure you do, and really want to make things, read the whole book through carefully, even if it is not bristling with interesting yarns and paragraphs of no practical application to your work. You will not find everything in it, but you cannot help learning something, and I hope you will find that it attends strictly to the business in hand and will give you a start in the right direction—which is half the battle.

"Man is a Tool-using Animal. … He can use Tools, can devise Tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing—with Tools he is all."—Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.