My Shave Horse Project - Part 1

It looks like we'll take a hand at Civil War Reenacting as civilians this year. I've been reenacting as a soldier since I was 14. Now with health problems and a prevailing desire to be near my wife at most all times, the civilian option looks like the right option, and if I'm going to miss out on the glories of soldiering then I'm going to try to do a right good job at being a civilian.

But every civilian man needs a trade or occupation of some sort. I've perhaps naively am going for a traveling Cooper impression. Reaching cooperage of the mid to late 19th century has been difficult. Seems most Coopers are 18th century, or modern. So I am doing my best taking the "timeless" tools from the 18th century, and the craft and technology of the 19th century in an attempt to guess as accurately as possible what to do, what to have, and how.

Probably the most important tool at least initially is the shave horse. For those of you mercilessly trapped in the 21st century, a shave horse is a sort of bench that you sit on, lengthwise, and by depressing a pedal with your foot, a claw depresses on the bench making a fast clamp. By this means you can hold, in my case staves of wood, tight for fashioning into barrel staves. Shaving Horses have many other uses by Wheelwrights, Furniture Builders, and Carpenters in general.

Using Google Sketchup I began designing my own shaving horse. To assist me, I imported a model from the Warehouse to compare to. You can see the imported model in the background, and my incomplete model in the foreground. The almost-level shelf on the bench is an idea taken from the shave horses at the Cooperage at Colonial Williamsburg. I'm not sure why they chose that design, but my suspicion is it allows you to put more weight on top of whatever you are working on. That is only my guess, but in the case of stave making, it makes sense.

The next problem was that of where to find the wood. I didn't want to use common limber from the lumber yard because it is cut to demensional lumber measurement, rather than true measurement. The December snow storm solved that problem for me. A very tall Pacific Madrone fell over, and a fine straight section from the trunk made a perfect potential for my saw horse.

I cut a section 66" long. Wet Madrone is said to weigh 60lb a cubic foot. This log was insanely heavy. Pacific Madrone is a rare-ish wood, a hardwood, but one that is shockingly pliable by machienery. My sissy chainsaw cut right through it, yet a branch is diccult to break by hand. Esentially it is a hardwood that cuts like a soft wood. Looks like it will work for my shave horse.

Then I faced the perplexing question of how to cut a plank out? I pondered many ideas. I have a friend that has a bandsaw mill, but I don't really want to bother him with this. I didn't want to split it like you would to split a log in half, or for rails, for fear the split would be terribly jagged and ruin the log for my purposes. The only other way they did it in the old days was a two-man hand saw, but I don't have one, and they tend to be expensive, not to mention the work involved once I got my hands on such a saw!

I came upon my solution by accedent. Today I dragged (with great effort) the log out and set it on a cradle. I thought I should cut it with the chainsaw. You realy aren't supposed to cut along the grain, but I figured how much worse could that be than doing the same with a two-man hand saw?

As a background to this story, yesterday I was reading in a book about how advanced the ancient cultures were: the ones that built Babel, the Pyrmids of Giza, the Stonehenge, etc. With such imspiration behind me, we now return to the story.

My next though was to simulate a mill by clamping the chainsaw to something, and rolling the log through it, via wheels of some sort. I am horribly limited on tools, so I didn't have anything like a shop cart to roll, and I don't have any clamps. Then I considered the opposite, making a jig to guide the chainsaw obver the log and cradle. I ran with this idea.

Using my pocket knife, a square, and a long piece of wood as a straightedge, I made my measurements for taking a 3" board right from the middle. Then I laid 6' steel "T" posts on the arms of the cradle to serve as my guides. Finally using boards and shims I elevated and rotated the log until my scribed measurements matched the "T" post jig.

Then, carefully, I started the chainsaw through the log, carefully maintaining about 1/2" above my jig at all times. The result is very satisfying!

One third of the way through each cut I stopped and made a top-down cut so that the weight of the top pice wouldn't cause it to sag and pinch my chainsaw bar. Even those little 1/3 sections are heavy! On the final third, I pounded a wedge into the open end to keep it from sagging at the end of the cut. It worked perfectly.

The other side was easier. I added more boards to the cradle to elevate the now-thinner log to align with my jig. I repeated the same process, and now I have a 3" x 11" x 66" plank that I can dry and eventually smooth and use as the bench for my shave horse.