Our goal with Skills 101 is to present the practical now of boats that are built for the crucial business of discovery, recalling that every boat length we travel from the dock is exploration. Yes, we look carefully at old classic boats; the evolved construction of vessels that prevailed against time and storms, competition, and hard use delivers lessons of what works and, just as important, what almost works. An important dictum in boats, tools, and all design is form follows function. The goal, purpose, time, and circumstance of a boat shapes its design.
In other words, we have a reverence for old tools, and particularly how they inform and ease modern work. You might have noticed, in previous installments of Skills 101, that we explore the beginnings of things: Egyptian deckhands using sounding poles on the Nile riverbed, Roman carpenters using bronze planes, Chinese craftsmen striking an ink line, medieval builders establishing anthropomorphic measures. We similarly adore cable-ties, plywood, and epoxy. We’re eager to tell you how best to use new “tech,” and we like combining the functional old with the helpful new.
Often, we stumble onto old tools that may be outdated but never lose their juju, never stop doing champion jobs. We find these heritage tools worth a second look. In this Skills 101, we’ll present a gallery of tools that work too well to stay in a museum case. You probably have a list of such tools too. Tell us about them, and we’ll fill another Skills 101 with more tool heritage.
The hedgerow is an ancient pasturing pattern still worked by shepherds and farmers. Unseeded barriers between cultivated and grazed fields quickly grew boundary lines of hazel, blackthorn, hawthorne, chokeberry, ash, elder, and other quick-growth greenwood. A hedge worker with a bill hook (see next page) could weave a robust fence stronger than sheep or cow invasions. The hedgelayer slashed about half the width of the greenwood near its root and bent it to a slant, weaving the tops of the still-growing bushes to left and right of the vertical posts. Most of these bushes had thorns; thick gloves, aprons, and puttees were necessary. Green branches, which are thin, were bunched, twisted, and woven horizontally to tie the verticals together. You’ll see this bucolic pattern all over Britain and Europe. Many hedgerows are centuries old; some bear delicious fruit each year. Barbed wire is convenient and quick to install but charmless.
The bill hook is not just ancient, it’s paleolithic. The earliest examples of this tool had flint edges but the familiar curved profile—meant to cut down across stalks, twigs, and green branches—is recognizable. Cutting edges made of copper, bronze, and steel supplanted those of flint, but the form was persistent: it worked. With a sharp bill hook you could prune trees, shape patterns of climbing vines, and harvest a range of fruits and vegetables. Bill hooks still work: the venerable Woodsman’s Pal (A) still has lively sales with campers; the commercial leather-handled bill hook (B) would be familiar to an ancient Egyptian farmer; the larger version, sometimes called a brush hook (C), has a powerful swinging handle and enough weight to “hog” tangled undergrowth.
The axe’s evolution is clear in the subtle changes of design for differing uses (left to right). The little hand hatchet is a light, relatively thin, and facile tool for sculpting wood. (We see it later in the shaping of the froe maul on the opposite page.) The usual size and shape of the standard hatchet is widely useful for working up kindling, pruning, and camp chores. This is Fiskar’s modern version: excellent high-tech steel and a synthetic handle, but the form is plain. The cruising axe is uncommon, light and compact but long enough to swing with authority; it was the standby of canoe campers who needed to work up firewood and campground poles. The felling axe is thick and heavy, with a long swing handle to bite hard. The double-bitted axe may be an anachronism: professional timber cutters saved time by having two sharpened cutting edges, but in amateur hands this two-edge sword is a danger to cutter and observer. The splitting axe is thickest and heaviest, really a long-swing wedge with a mild edge. You don’t need a Pulaski axe, a combination of cutter and digger shaped to the needs of forest-fire professionals, but it points out that there are doubtless another two dozen patterns and variations of the axe. The discrete needs of particular tasks demand design shift.
The digging bar belongs in a discussion of axes. This is truly an ancient tool familiar to farmers, carpenters, landscapers, and workmen of all persuasions. It has half a hundred uses and is certainly a shop’s go-to heavy lever. But in our context the digging bar is nearly magic. Yes, it loosens the soil you’re shoveling, and it pries out the stubborn stone that stymies you. But its flat end with a chisel profile is a righteous cutting blade with the bar’s weight (more than 40 lbs) behind it to use like an in-line hatchet to defeat the inevitable roots beneath our feet.
The froe is a kind of sideways hatchet, a tool for taking advantage of wood grain. The froe’s blade section is in line with the handle, so swinging it like a hatchet is not effectual. It’s driven with a heavy maul, a wooden hammer tool. Wood is not a casual material choice for this purpose, for safety reasons: striking a tempered-steel bar with a tempered-steel hammer can, occasionally, stress striker and stricken in compression, a millisecond deformation that can shear through a microscopic flaw in the steel’s makeup and emit a sharp splinter of steel at an impressively dangerous velocity. The odds are against this. But playing the odds is not worth your eye. Consequently, the froe should be struck with a wooden device. Your common shop mallet is well-designed to absorb stress parallel to its strong end grain, but striking a thinnish steel bar with an end-grain mallet will chew it to bits quickly. Ideally the froe is struck with side grain. Some sculptors’ mauls are turned from dense wood to present side grain, but they’re expensive artists’ tools, and the work of the froe maul is pedestrian: to drive the broad froe blade into the end grain of wood. When the froe handle turns the blade, wood splits along its grain. The froe is repositioned farther into the wood, perhaps driven down by the maul again, following the grain deeper, widening the split. The traditional purview of the froe is splitting out cedar shingles, a Yankee carpenter’s joy. But the froe is a premier tool for following any grain. Archery bowyers use the froe to split out yew or osage-orange bow staves. Splitting rather than sawing doesn’t cut across growth planes. You may not be making bows or shingles, but the froe is a handy tool for splitting kindling out of bigger firewood.
The froe maul is a bit of sculpture; making one requires a light hatchet and extreme thumb-and-finger caution. This is not meant to be a parlor item; don’t court perfection or finish from this utilitarian tool. We must, however, add that the Old Fellahs wielded a hand hatchet with aplomb and precision to a remarkable degree. We’re told that old Russian carpenters, called plotniks, were suspicious of sawn wood “opening the grain to Russian winter” and created their winter-tight izba homes and even entire onion domes with axes. You are trying for a heavy head and a longish handle that will fit your hand. The important caution here is to keep your thumb and fingers on the side opposite your hewing.
The cant hook is another heritage tool that could save you strain and swearing if you work up firewood, clear brush, or horse heavy timber balks around the boatyard. It’s essentially a double lever: The in-line point drives into timber, and the hinged cant catches the timber’s side, giving you a wide grip to rotate the timber by turning with the long handle. This tool gave timber men authority over butt logs, particularly when workers were floating lumber to the sea and logs worked up into “jams” on the oxbows and shallows of rivers. Once you’ve used a cant hook a few times, listen to the Yankee work-song “The Jam on Jerry’s Rocks” and think of yourself clearing it. That’s heritage.
The bootjack is a heritage tool your grandfather used. If you don’t have a bootjack, you should. It’s simple and utilitarian: you could run one up in half an hour, and every time you use it to pry off your deck boots you will bless you.
The bench hook has been mentioned before in our discussions, but it’s so simple and useful that we’re always surprised when we don’t see two or three sizes of bench hook in someone’s shop. Light downward and forward pressure securely holds the wood you’re sawing and holds the bench hook firmly to the edge of your counter or workbench. The end of the backstop is a good guide to a vertical cut. This is another half-hour project that will serve for years.
The shaving horse is not a half-hour project, but the time you’d spend in making one is a good investment. This ancient device invites you to sit at a convenient height (make your seat wide to comfort your backside) and use your foot pressure to clamp a chunk of wood toward you. The height and angle of your workpiece are determined by a moving wedge below the clamp and by a series of vertical pivot points in the clamp arm. This is not the only shaving horse: detailed plans and YouTube videos abound. The convenience of a shaving horse is not just the seat and the angle but also the ease of lightening foot pressure to turn or reposition your workpiece a little or a lot. The shaving horse is a natural partner to the drawknife’s keen edge in creating admirable hand work. 
Jan Adkins is a regular contributor to WoodenBoat. Visit his blog, Dockwolloping (www.dockwalloping.boats), for more insightful illustrated discussion of all sorts of maritime matters.