Tool Talk
What's-It Forum => What's-It Forum => Topic started by: harborrat on December 30, 2012, 08:27:24 PM
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My first job out of high school was at a home weatherization company. We worked on a lot of old houses that dated back to the mid-1800s. These houses were framed with hand hewn beams. In the attic of these homes I invariably found one of these hand carved pulleys. We left them where we found them, but my current home is of the post and beam construction and lo and behold, when I removed the lathe upstairs I found another one. The whole thing is carved by hand, right down to the axle. There is a nail hole toward the end of each of the side brackets. Old square nail holes. They were obviously used for a specific purpose, and were made by the carpenters on site apparently. What would this purpose be?
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Here is another view. Made of local hardwood.
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And here is a view of the timber framing I am talking about. You can see the axe marks on the beams.
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I remember reading a story set in the late 19th century, where a person said they had wires in their walls but not for electricity. Was there any wire found near these pulleys? We think of houses with servants, where there were call bells that rang in the kitchen, but it may have been for the front door too. Or back door, ringing a different bell. I have helped out in a local museum, a large 1905 house, that had a bell system in the kitchen. It actually looks like a wall clock, but the hand on the face points to the room the bell was rung in. Lots of wires in those walls, imagine the pulley system that enabled it to go round corners. Wires or heavy cords, and you found them in several homes? This could be it.
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Purpose? You got me. I've never seen anything like this. It seems like a lot of carving. Square nail holes... Truly square, like hand wrought? Or rectangular as in machine cut nails?
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Purpose? You got me. I've never seen anything like this. It seems like a lot of carving. Square nail holes... Truly square, like hand wrought? Or rectangular as in machine cut nails?
Sorry, they are rectangular machine cut. There are a couple of pairs of holes. This was nailed to something more than once, and presumably used more than once.
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I remember reading a story set in the late 19th century, where a person said they had wires in their walls but not for electricity. Was there any wire found near these pulleys? We think of houses with servants, where there were call bells that rang in the kitchen, but it may have been for the front door too. Or back door, ringing a different bell. I have helped out in a local museum, a large 1905 house, that had a bell system in the kitchen. It actually looks like a wall clock, but the hand on the face points to the room the bell was rung in. Lots of wires in those walls, imagine the pulley system that enabled it to go round corners. Wires or heavy cords, and you found them in several homes? This could be it.
No bells or servants here. This is an old farmhouse with one room up and one room down. And a pit for a cellar. With a field stone foundation gathered up locally. The house was built in the 1850s after the Western Reserve of Ohio was opened up. (The original house has had three modern additions and seems to be an aftetthought when looking at the place now). The pulley was not finished in a manner to be used on a permanent basis. It's just some kind of field expedited jobsite tool.
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a one man operation of getting the beams to the second floor or attic. maybe shingles to the attic for the roof. bob w
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The house is framed by using hand hewn beam construction. The beams are joined by drilling holes and using hand carved wood pegs, driven into the holes. Machine cut nails were brought from New England and are also used in the house. There was nothing here at the time except for a lumber mill and several shops in a village (now the county seat) 5 miles away. The cellar is basically a pit, and the foundation is made of locally gathered field stones. The floor joists are trees, split in half and debarked. There is some cut lumber in the home. The floor planks and the roof planks are rough cut full 1 inch boards, varying in widths but on average about 14 inches. Hardwood maple. Obviously cut locally. The upstairs ceiling is made by crossing 4x4 boards across the ends of the squared timber framework and applying lathe and plaster. The roof is made by the more or less modern cut rafters and the aforementioned planks with a standard pitch. There is a house down the road that was built in the same time frame, built and occupied by John Brown and his family during his time in Ohio. (The John Brown that later led the raid on Harpers Ferry). These were all farmhouses in this area.
During my time in the weatherization program I worked on several of these type homes and I always found one of these pulleys somewhere in the attic area. I more or less knew that if I looked hard enough I would find one here. I removed the old lathe and plaster to expose the beams and there it was. One and one only, always found upstairs in the rafters.
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a one man operation of getting the beams to the second floor or attic. maybe shingles to the attic for the roof. bob w
No, this isn't strong enough for that. The thing is about 9 inches in length. The axle is between 1/4" and 3/8" and would not support any heavy weight. It may support various hand tools if they were brought up by twine, but that doesn't make much sense, going to all that trouble to make one of these for that.
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Here is another view of the post and beam construction.
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I tried to look up this kind of construction on the internet, and apparently it is called Timber Framing. There is an excellent article on Wikipedia about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQpdkqEgHng There are also a lot of good videos on youtube about timber frame and timber framing and hewing.
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I'm afraid we will never really know for sure.
But since you are finding them frequently and always light construction like this?
I would propose a WAG, for bringing your tools up.
Looks like it would hold a toolbox big enough it would be a pain to haul up the ladder.
I wouldn't leave my tools laying around a job after a day. Now, but especially in 1850! Tools are expensive now, but must have been a real pain to get at any price in 1850, in rural America.
And yet tomorrow I would need them back on the second level until the job was finished.
So a quickly made disposable pulley for that, makes sense to me anyway.
yours Scott
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Curious as if you need to haul something from the ground, a pulley is not necessary, unless the person doing the hauling is on the ground. The small axle size will limit the load to a couple of pounds max - OK for a lunch box or a flask of something to drink???
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Is there any more detail you can provide on exactly where they're being found. Pictures of them as found? I'm understanding you're finding them unexposed (behind some sheathing/wall)? Is there any pattern with the number of floors/stories in the structure?
Are you finding any rope, line, twine, or wire? Are you finding one per house/structure, or many?
Why would one leave them behind if it's some tool to assist in construction ONLY? I've built and then burned drawing/plan tables on the job......but they are very simple to make, big/bulky to carry around and store, and I never really know when I'll need it again.
Curious as if you need to haul something from the ground, a pulley is not necessary, unless the person doing the hauling is on the ground. The small axle size will limit the load to a couple of pounds max - OK for a lunch box or a flask of something to drink???
agreed that pulley is not necessary, but lends a helpful hand if you're trying to lift something as to clear the side of the structure you're lifting from .........e.g. mounted extending out past the structure like so |---o maybe off the end a ridge board.
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I'm afraid we will never really know for sure.
But since you are finding them frequently and always light construction like this?
I would propose a WAG, for bringing your tools up.
Looks like it would hold a toolbox big enough it would be a pain to haul up the ladder.
I wouldn't leave my tools laying around a job after a day. Now, but especially in 1850! Tools are expensive now, but must have been a real pain to get at any price in 1850, in rural America.
And yet tomorrow I would need them back on the second level until the job was finished.
So a quickly made disposable pulley for that, makes sense to me anyway.
yours Scott
Well, when I worked for the weatherization company (I was in the rafters of all of them) I found one and only one of these in each house. Up in the rafters as if it was discarded. They were not removed by me, I just left them there. This house is mine, and so the pulley is now mine. The common denominator in all of these pulley finds was that the house was an early house for the area, before modern construction methods and supplies became available here. The houses were all timber frame construction, with hand hewn beams.
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Is there any more detail you can provide on exactly where they're being found. Pictures of them as found? I'm understanding you're finding them unexposed (behind some sheathing/wall)? Is there any pattern with the number of floors/stories in the structure?
Are you finding any rope, line, twine, or wire? Are you finding one per house/structure, or many?
Why would one leave them behind if it's some tool to assist in construction ONLY? I've built and then burned drawing/plan tables on the job......but they are very simple to make, big/bulky to carry around and store, and I never really know when I'll need it again.
Curious as if you need to haul something from the ground, a pulley is not necessary, unless the person doing the hauling is on the ground. The small axle size will limit the load to a couple of pounds max - OK for a lunch box or a flask of something to drink???
agreed that pulley is not necessary, but lends a helpful hand if you're trying to lift something as to clear the side of the structure you're lifting from .........e.g. mounted extending out past the structure like so |---o maybe off the end a ridge board.
Never found any rope line or wire. I think that if I had looked hard enough I might have. Maybe twine would be the most likely thing, in looking at this. These houses were all one or two rooms down with an upstairs. The pulleys that I found were just above the upstairs living area, in the roof area. Invariably covered in dust. When I blew insulation in up there I usually put the pulley up on the ledge of one of the outer crossbeams. I am fairly certain they were made and used by the carpenter during construction. None of them (as is the case with this one) were finely finished. They were all carved by hand, but in an expeditious manner. This leads me to believe they served a utilitarian purpose but must have been needed by the carpenters when putting the house together. When you think of all of the work that went into cutting and hand hewing the beams, and then hand sawing and carving mortises at the joints and then hand carving the pegs to drive into the holes in the joints (which had to be hand drilled), this little bit of carving work was probably just a minor but tedious chore.
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I spoke to an old carpenter once about them and he told me that in those days carpentry was an altogether different kind of work than what it is today. He said that all sorts of wood joints and mortising and carving all had to be done by hand, even the individual sashes in the windows had to be made from scratch and so on. He told me that he was not too familiar with timber framing and hand hewing timbers and all of that, but his guess was that it was a signature of sorts. He claimed that all of the carpenters in that era had to prove that they were competent, and if you could hand-carve a working pulley from a piece of wood then it was proof that you were capable. He said that it may have been the mark of a certain guild to make a working pulley. Another guild or union or whatever may make something else.
I think he was full of it. This was obviously used for something because it was nailed to something. More that once. And then to be left up in the rafters as if it was discarded means to me that it was actually meant to be used up there. For drawing something up and down. And it was not needed after the construction was finished. So it has to be specific to this type of framing or some other type of work that was going on up there.
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I suspect the wheel itself was brought in.
Hand carving a pulley wheel would take 50 times longer than making it on a lathe. Especially since you can gang up as many shieves as will fit between your lathe centers, and turn them all at once.
It kind of looks this way as the side sticks and axles are quickly slapped together but the wheel itself appears pretty round.
Doors and window sash was usually a separate occupation. Going back to the dark ages.
Building carpenters had enough to do.
In the cities they made them to order, and in the country they usually ordered in advance and had them shipped in.
Hanging the doors and windows in their specialized trim were on site jobs, and often local specialists were called in just for this job too.
In Europe different jobs were segregated into strict guilds and it was illegal to take on a job you didn't have the credentials for.
In America it was looser. You could take on any job you could convince the client you could do.
But if a guy took 5 times as long to make window sash he didn't get a lot of work.
The guy who made them fast and accurate, because it was his only job, got the contract.
yours Scott
PS Showing your tools was often a way to get work. This is partly why you see such beautiful tools still around.
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The pulley wheel iteself is definitely hand carved. You can see the carving marks all over it. The detail does not show up well in my photo. The spacers on either side are the only things that are debatable. These may have been made of round stock and were obviously drilled through for the spindle. But even those I suspect were carved and perhaps smoothed with an abrasive.
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After more thought on this, back then a few guys worked on their own, but with the beams there was likely a crew to lift and set. Then there was a *boy* a helper, gofer sometimes called, this sounds small enough the gofer on the ground could hoist up another box of nails or pegs via a cord thru the pulley. Or a water jug. How about the outside circumference, any marks? Was thinking in those days before tape measures or even many rulers, the pulley could have been used like a Wheelwrights travelers, as a measuring tool. Could be so if there are marks, or even a single mark, roll it along and count the turns.
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I was told that building one of these early Western Reserve homes was definitely the work of a whole crew. Some jobs were specialized and some were not. If nothing else, you definitely needed a lot of muscle.
My grandfather was a carpenter who emigrated from Sweden in the 1890s and I used to have his old hand made tool chest and wagon. He built them after arriving here so as to carry on his trade. I was told that to be called a "carpenter" you were to be familiar with all of the basic techniques used in the making of these necessary items. A lot of carpenters' chests are still around, but most of the wagons used to haul them around with did not survive. I have photo of these items, and may post them. Standard hardware was used on the wagon. By the 1890's the houses around here were all of modern construction and all hardware and milled lumber were available in this area by then. I worked in a lot of these later houses too. Never found one of these pulleys in one of them.
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How about hoisting up an oil lamp or lantern? Would need to lower it for lighting & fuel several times, not a great amount of weight. Just questioning why you would leave it behind.
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Curious as if you need to haul something from the ground, a pulley is not necessary, unless the person doing the hauling is on the ground. The small axle size will limit the load to a couple of pounds max - OK for a lunch box or a flask of something to drink???
I still have no idea about the pulley, but "a flask of something to drink" reminded me of an archeological tid-bit I ran across a number of years ago. Working on an Elizabethan timber frame building, they found a series of blackened rings on the tops of the old, oak beams. What were these?
Digging the trash pits, a number of broken steins were found. The bottoms of the steins were a match for the rings on the beams. So the original carpenters were bringing up steins of beer to drink while they worked.
Wish I could remember where I found the article.
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"a flask of something to drink" reminded me of an archeological tid-bit I ran across a number of years ago.
2 or 3 years ago some people in Maryland (or Jersey maybe) were working on their old fireplace.
The house was from the 1820's
Inside the wall next to it, they found a flask. It wasn't broken, or chipped or stained
Norm Heckler sold that flask at auction a few months later. $86,000
that's eighty six t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d dollars!
A very rare flask in a previously unknown color.
Color makes --all-- the difference in antique bottles. Age and rarity will only take you so far. Color throws it into a whole 'nother category altogether.
yours Scott
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It looks too big, but maybe a sash weight pulley that never got installed for some reason.
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H Rat, Do your windows have sash weights? That is the best WAG I have heard so far. If not by weights, how do your windows stay open?
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In our old farm house, from the 1870s, the sash had two steel pins with springs that would fit into pre-drilled holes in the sash frame to hold it up. Another thought on this pulley is, could it have been used to protect the string on a snap-line? Or used in conjunction with a plumb bob?
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In our old farm house, from the 1870s, the sash had two steel pins with springs that would fit into pre-drilled holes in the sash frame to hold it up. Another thought on this pulley is, could it have been used to protect the string on a snap-line? Or used in conjunction with a plumb bob?
That sounds like a spring balance.
http://woodwindowssashbalance.com/
I wouldn't think those were original to an 1870's house. I hate them. They're a pain to install, and they don't work as well as the old pulley systems.
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Lantern or oil lamp pulley.
If it was above the door it was for a lantern, man came in from work carrying his lantern, turne it down, hooked it up and hoisted it.
There was less chance of the lantern tipping & burning the house.
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H Rat, Do your windows have sash weights? That is the best WAG I have heard so far. If not by weights, how do your windows stay open?
My windows are all replacements, and I don't know what kind of set-up the original windows had. In my job at the weatherization company I also worked on a large number of Victorian era homes that had window weights and pulleys in the walls just outside of the window frames. The homes in that particular period (1870-1910) all had ornate factory made hardware, two or six pane sashes in the windows, slate roofs and clay brick or cut stone foundations. They were all conventionally framed as well. These homes are of a later period than my timber framed home.
The timber framed homes around here all were very primitive and this pulley doesn't have anything to do with window weights. The timber framed homes that I found these pulleys in are all pretty much pre-1860. Everything was very primitive around here then. My foundation is made up of field stones, with a partial basement dug with a team of horses. Hand -hewn post and beam framing, joined together with hand carved pegs and a mallet. My floor joists are whole trees, split in half. The floor boards and roofing are local hardwood maple, a full inch thick and in varying widths, some as much as 24 inches wide. There was a sawmill in the area here at the time, not much else.
I should also mention that this pulley would not be strong enough for window weights. The spindle is a quarter inch, if that. The pillars were made with perhaps a few strokes of a hatchet. The wheel itself is the most intricate piece of work and even that was carved with a carving knife or similar instrument. As far as these being brought in from off site, I would highly doubt it. This and the others were made expeditiously. Perhpas the wheel itself was made in the evening by the fireplace for work the next day. Whoever made it had a hand drill and a saw and a knife. The nails in the ends of the side pillars were square, and brought in from New England. I have spoken to several Western Reserve historians who explained the logistics of this area at the time. I also asked a question about this on the Timber Framers' Guild forum and no one had seen one.
I am thinking that this is the particular work of a particular carpenter. Mine and the other houses I worked on where I found these pulleys were probably built within a twenty year time period, all in the same county, maybe by the same crew. Round about 1840-1860, in Ashtabula County Ohio. Most probably for bringing up light materials such as nails or even a lunch pail when working high up.
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http://www.timberframe-tools.com/reference/woodworking-tools/introduction/
I found the above site dedicated to timber framing tools. I have linked to the webpage which shows an illustration of tools needed for a carpenter to frame a house. In Figure 1, the illustration shows a pulley, listed as number 15. In the illustration, the thing that appears to be the pulley is nailed or otherwise affixed to a plank or a large wooden wedge of some sort.
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Here is a link to another site which turns wood supplies used for timber framing. They make a pulley which is identical to mine, you can see it in the photo on their webpage in the link. Doesn't say what a pulley this small is used for, but I will ask them.
http://www.pegs.us/products.htm