Читать книгу Making Toys, Revised Edition - Sam Martin - Страница 4

Sam Martin’s reproductions of trucks, vintage cars, locomotives, and earth movers captured my interest as soon as I lay eyes on their scaled details and smooth surfaces of contrasting woods. I was impressed with the craftsmanship because, like Sam, I am a woodworker. It was soon after I met Sam that the collaboration for this book began in his workshop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Sam’s shop consists of a variety of tools for making toys. His cutting tools are a table saw, band saw, and radial arm saw. A jointer is available for truing an edge. He has a lathe for turning wood and a thickness planer for reducing the thickness of a board. He uses a router table for putting curved profiles on wood and dadoes and rabbets into the lumber. His sanding equipment consists of stationary belt and disc sanders and an oscillating drum sander. And his hand tools are varied enough to move a project along quickly.

All of these tools will make your job of reproducing Sam’s designs a pleasure, although you will be able to do without some and you may well have others that are more efficient.

Sam does not choose fancy joinery to lock the components of his toys together. Most of the pieces are butted and glued. Time has taught Sam that his carpenter’s glue is strong and stable and keeps the toys together even when they are played with vigorously. Nails are used only to secure lights, stacks, airhorns, and other cylinders to his cars and trucks.

I was surprised, however, to find that Sam employs no plans or blueprints. Working from photographs, he experiments with proportions until he arrives at a scale with which he is comfortable. When he wants to fabricate more of the same toy, he takes measurements off one previously made.

The toys—which Sam began calling collectibles—described on the following pages were all crafted in oak and walnut. Other woods—cherry, maple, mahogany—can easily be substituted. In fact, Sam often uses cherry to fashion some of his vehicles.

It is our intent to present pictorially the making of a truck and trailer, allowing you to see how to make the parts and put them together. The primary wood is oak; the contrasting wood is walnut. The rest of the book is devoted to plans for a flatbed trailer that can be substituted for the enclosed trailer; a 1932 Buick with running boards, a spare tire, and passenger seats; and a Ford pickup dating to the 1930s.

It was a great pleasure working with Sam for a week in the August of 1996. I was impressed with his speed, his economy of movements, and, of course, the beautiful truck and trailer he produced. I hope you will be as inspired as I was to buy the wood necessary, turn on the power tools, and make toys that, I suspect, will last at least a lifetime and hopefully more.

Roger Schroeder

Amityville, New York