OldTools Archive

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264153 scott grandstaff <scottg@s...> 2017‑12‑07 Yew carving and weird email
Did you ever carve yew wood? Pacific yew?
Its weird. Its not so hard but its ridiculously tough. A drawknife cuts, 
but then it wants to
blow out. The only reliable way to spokeshave it is to cut practically 
sideways. A super heavy skew angle in other words.
  But a scraper? A scraper feels really weird like you are carving some 
kind of plastic. But it cuts a treat.
  I was actually sculpting yew with a hand scraper.
  http://users.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/images/hometools/handlec
arving.jpg">http://users.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/images/hometools/handle
carving.jpg

Here is what I was making. Has anyone ever seen this tool head? It has a 
patent marking.
No idea what the inventor was thinking, maybe a fire tool? I am planning 
to use it for close quarter but heavy gardening tasks.
http://users.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/images/hometools/handlecarving2.jpg

And weird email problems.
  Did you ever get a "stuck" piece of email? I had an ordinary auction 
listing notice from ebay, that got stuck on my incoming mail server. It 
would resend every few minutes and nothing else!?!?? I woke up to 377 
copies of the thing.
  Meanwhile any new email that came was sitting my snowcrest's server, 
and wouldn't download to my computer.
   When I finally found the "bad" piece of email on the server, and 
deleted it, mail service returned to normal.... just like that.
   But why did it happen?  Anybody?
           yours Scott

-- 
*******************************
    Scott Grandstaff
    Box 409 Happy Camp, Ca  96039
    scottg@s...
    http://www.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/
    http://www.snowcrest.net/kitty/hpages/index.html
264155 Andrew Heybey <ath@h...> 2017‑12‑08 Re: Yew carving and weird email
> On Dec 7, 2017, at 6:12 PM, scott grandstaff  wrote:
> 
> And weird email problems.
>  Did you ever get a "stuck" piece of email? I had an ordinary auction listing
notice from ebay, that got stuck on my incoming mail server. It would resend
every few minutes and nothing else!?!?? I woke up to 377 copies of the thing.
>  Meanwhile any new email that came was sitting my snowcrest's server, and
wouldn't download to my computer.
>   When I finally found the "bad" piece of email on the server, and deleted it,
mail service returned to normal.... just like that.
>   But why did it happen?  Anybody?

Mail servers try very hard not to lose mail.  When sending it onward, the
sending mail server will not delete it until the receiver has said “yep, I got
it”.  If there was something about that problem email that made the receiving
mail process throw an error *after* it had received it but *before* it told the
sender that it had received it, you can get behavior like this.  The mail server
will try again after so often (in your case 377 times) and each time the same
thing happens.  And since that mail was first in the queue, all the other mail
piled up behind it.

andrew
264160 Thomas Conroy 2017‑12‑09 Re: Yew carving and weird email
Scott Grandstaff wrote: "Did you ever carve yew wood? Pacific yew?
Its weird. Its not so hard but its ridiculously tough. A drawknife cuts, 
but then it wants to
blow out. The only reliable way to spokeshave it is to cut practically 
sideways. A super heavy skew angle in other words.
 ?But a scraper? A scraper feels really weird like you are carving some 
kind of plastic. But it cuts a treat."

Scott, do you use Pacific yew much for tool handles? Do you take precautions
about sapwood/heartwood or grain orientation?
I ask because, according to books on the English yew longbow, the advantage of
yew was that the sapwood had tremendous tension resistance while the heartwood
had tremendous compression resistance, so making a bow with 1/2" thickness of
sapwood in the back and an inch of heartwood in the belly gave you a natural
composite bow (the Turks achieved the same result by laying sinew in glue along
the back, and plates of horn along the belly, with a neutral wood core to carry
the horn and sinew). However, if you strung a bow backwards and tried to use it,
it would snap in half on the first pull, because the sapwood had no compression
resistance and the heartwood had no tension resistance.
Yew bows were always made fro.m relatively young trees for this reason. They
would be split into maybe six staves, so the diameter must have been only four
or five inches, with the staves arranged belly-out around the circumfrence

I remember when I was a kid, the local public library had an English book from
the 19th century on making archery equipment. It may have been published as late
as the 1890s, but the mental set was all the archery revival of the 1860s, with
young ladies being instructed in shooting by young gentlemen (who got to wrap
their arms around them for didactic purposes), and bowyers making no changes
from what they had been taught in a tradition that really was unbroken since the
late middle ages. All very different from the wilderness-and-wild-indians
archery that developed in America at the end of that century, with its emphasis
on experimentation and new methods. It's many decades since I saw that book in
the library, and I never tried to make a bow, but I still remember a surprising
amount of what was in it, like leaving extra wood around pinhole knots and other
flaws, instead of trying to smooth them out. I wish I had a copy.

I gather, again only from reading, that there is a similar effect with hickory.
The favored wood for impact tool handles is always sapwood, which has about
three times the bending strength of any other known wood. But hickory heartwood,
one of the favored woods for Conestoga wagon axles, gains compression strength,
weight, and hardness while losing springiness and impact strength; hickory
heartwood is no good at all for axe handles. Or so I've read.
I'm asking to enlarge my understanding. All I know about this stuff is what I
read in books.

Tom Conroy
Berkeley
264163 Michael Blair <branson2@s...> 2017‑12‑10 Re: Yew carving and weird email
I hadn't thought deeply about yew and sapwood until you mentioned it,
Tom.  But I happen to have a yew-wood bow from the '30s.  I've seen a
few others, too.  All I have seen are sap wood. These have been
relatively light bows, target bows, and I see no signs of any heart
wood.  With the old English long bows, your mileage may differ -- with
roughly 100 pound draws, they're much heftier. 

Mike in Woodland
264171 Mike Lynd 2017‑12‑10 Re: Yew carving and weird email
From
*http://www.theenglishwarbowsociety.com/warbow_EN.html
<http://www.theenglishwarbowsociety.com/warbow_EN.html>*

"The power of these medieval War bows was breathtaking.  Detailed analysis
of the War bows recovered from the Tudor warship Mary Rose, which sank in
battle in 1545 with an almost complete inventory including hundreds of bows
and thousands of arrows, show the draw weights ranging from 80lbs to 180lbs
with the most prolific being in the 140lb range.  The draw weight is
defined as the amount of force, expressed as a weight, which needs to be
applied to the string in order to bend the strung bow to its full extent.
When speaking of war bows the full draw length is usually taken to be 32”,
which does not mean that the archer will draw it to that length; it may
vary by a few inches.   As a comparison a modern target longbow of the type
promoted by the British Longbow Society will have a draw weight in the
region of 35lbs to 60lbs measured at 28” draw. These Victorian style bows
are also different in their profile, cross-section and tillering. It is
important to distinguish between the two - an English War bow is a Longbow,
but a longbow is rarely a war bow!"

best wishes,

Mike Lynd
264177 "Adam R. Maxwell" <amaxwell@m...> 2017‑12‑11 Re: Yew carving and weird email
> On Dec 7, 2017, at 15:12 , scott grandstaff  wrote:
> 
> Did you ever carve yew wood? Pacific yew?
> Its weird. Its not so hard but its ridiculously tough. A drawknife cuts, but
then it wants to
> blow out.

Yeah, and I hated it. I'm no handle-carving master like you,
but I made a decent mallet handle from some kiln-dried 
Pacific yew, and then it finally cracked and broke. My
bow saw (also Pacific yew) has been holding up pretty well,
but the stuff was like working OLD rock-hard Doug fir.

I'd be scared to make a bow out of the stock I had, but it
had a lot of crappy short grain and shakes.

Adam
264180 Cliff <rohrabacher@e...> 2017‑12‑11 Re: Yew carving and weird email
mattock
264191 Ken Shepard <waruba@c...> 2017‑12‑11 Re: Yew carving and weird email
That tool head is a "pick mattock"  as opposed to a "cutter mattock" which
has a cutting edge similar to a blunt ax.

Examples of both can be viewed on the A.M. Leonard horticultural supply
site:

https://www.amleo.com/

Ken Shepard

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:12 PM, scott grandstaff 
wrote:
264192 "John M Johnston (jmjhnstn)" <jmjhnstn@m...> 2017‑12‑11 Re: Yew carving and weird email
I became acquainted with the cutter mattock before I was ten. On ours the eye
was tapered in one direction and the handle in the opposite direction--head was
not coming off. Ours was a heavy tool that could cut through roots with ease.

John


“P.S. If you do not receive this, of course it must have been miscarried;
therefore I beg you to write and let me know.” - Sir Boyle Roche, M.P.

On Dec 11, 2017, at 4:56 PM, Ken Shepard mailto:waruba@c...">mailto:waruba@c...>> wrote:

That tool head is a "pick mattock"  as opposed to a "cutter mattock" which
has a cutting edge similar to a blunt ax.

Examples of both can be viewed on the A.M. Leonard horticultural supply
site:

https://www.amleo.com/

Ken Shepard

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:12 PM, scott grandstaff mailto:scottg@s...">mailto:scottg@s...>>
wrote:

Did you ever carve yew wood? Pacific yew?
Its weird. Its not so hard but its ridiculously tough. A drawknife cuts,
but then it wants to
blow out. The only reliable way to spokeshave it is to cut practically
sideways. A super heavy skew angle in other words.
But a scraper? A scraper feels really weird like you are carving some
kind of plastic. But it cuts a treat.
I was actually sculpting yew with a hand scraper.
http://users.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/images/hometoo
ls/handlecarving.jpg

Here is what I was making. Has anyone ever seen this tool head? It has a
patent marking.
No idea what the inventor was thinking, maybe a fire tool? I am planning
to use it for close quarter but heavy gardening tasks.
http://users.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/images/hometool
s/handlecarving2.jpg

And weird email problems.
Did you ever get a "stuck" piece of email? I had an ordinary auction
listing notice from ebay, that got stuck on my incoming mail server. It
would resend every few minutes and nothing else!?!?? I woke up to 377
copies of the thing.
Meanwhile any new email that came was sitting my snowcrest's server, and
wouldn't download to my computer.
 When I finally found the "bad" piece of email on the server, and deleted
it, mail service returned to normal.... just like that.
 But why did it happen?  Anybody?
         yours Scott

--
*******************************
  Scott Grandstaff
  Box 409 Happy Camp, Ca  96039
  scottg@s...<mailto:scottg@s...>
  http://www.snowcrest.net/kitty/sgrandstaff/
  http://www.snowcrest.net/kitty/hpages/index.html

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------------------------------------------------------------------------
OldTools is a mailing list catering to the interests of hand tool
aficionados, both collectors and users, to discuss the history, usage,
value, location, availability, collectibility, and restoration of
traditional handtools, especially woodworking tools.

To change your subscription options:
https://oldtools.swingleydev.com/mailman/listinfo/oldtools

To read the FAQ:
https://swingleydev.com/archive/faq.html

OldTools archive: https://swingleydev.com/ot/

OldTools@s...
264201 Ken Shepard <waruba@c...> 2017‑12‑11 Re: Yew carving and weird email
Oh yes, I know it well.  I have spent many hours swinging one of these.

Ken Shepard

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 5:15 PM, John M Johnston (jmjhnstn) <
jmjhnstn@m...> wrote:

Recent Bios FAQ