Handy New Knock Off

Tomas Lipps, director of the Stone Foundation and organizer of this year's Symposium in Ventura California, (and the man responsible for putting together nine other international stone symposiums since 2000, held in various stone-related places throughout North America and also in Spain) holds up a hammer he has just had fabricated by Trow and Holden. It is modeled after the Mallorcan hammer we were introduced to when the symposium workshop students were taught a very different method of shaping stone and walling back in 2007 in Deia Spain. The hammer is a hefty seven pounds in weight with an 18 inch handle and a rounded indentation in the head so that it has an edge on all four striking planes. It seems to do a good job of knocking off edges and making nice faces in the sandstone we have been working with this week. Lluc Mir who is here from Spain teaching one of the Ventura workshops likes this 'knock off' of the type of hammer he is used to working with, but suggests the handle could be even longer.

The sound of hand tools.

We continued building a beehive Clochán Tuesday September 14 at the Marenakos StoneFest near Seattle Washington. Participants worked enthusiastically together adding height and thickness to the dry laid circular structure to the point around 4 pm where there was enough height to begin the corbelling of the roof. Various tasks were shared such as pinning, fitting, building, shaping stones and making hearting. Hear is a short clip of what it looks and sounds like when people get together to build traditional structures of stone in the traditional way - with their hands. "Yeah!"

Okay, you rocks. It's break time.

Yoko is the name of a very large 20 pound sledge hammer we use to break up really really big stones. She can break huge chunks of granite and limestone, and any other type of rock we come across in our day to day work of building dry stone walls. My friend Evan Oxland bought this beauty in Ottawa, at Preston's Hardware ( a great place to buy well-crafted masonry tools) He gave her that name in deference to Yoko Ono who was powerful enough to be able to break up the greatest rock group in history.

Yoko does a good job, but like other smaller sledge hammers she still has to be swung carefully. Accuracy, not just strength, is needed to split a big rock the way you want it to break. If it is done right, a large rock will yield two halves. These halves will usually have flat straight faces running at right angles to the length of the original stone. These split stones can then be laid structurally along a wall, with their faces showing out. Most often (at least with the quarried flattish limestone material we usually break up) a stone will break better if it is hit off to the side of the middle. If hit in the very middle, it will break into several pieces that are often too small or too triangular to be useful as builders.

To get a crisp long break it is best to hit the rock near its edge, (but not so near that it just chips a chunk off the side) When hit properly the break will spread in one long straight line across the stone. By contrast if the rock is hit in the middle, it will often break spreading cracks out from the point of impact along several radiating lines, creating half a dozen, less useful, short triangle pieces.

Scutch on the rocks.

It's curious how often the newer hammer handles break, compared to the older ones. I have swung sledge hammers and clump hammers of all sorts and sizes for years and I am seeing a remarkable difference in the quality of masonry tools being sold today. In the past these tools have lasted well and I have rarely known the handles to break with normal usage. However a new hammer these days doesn't even begin to go the same distance. I have more than once or twice in the last 6 months had a newly purchased hammer (with supposedly 'proper' hickory wood handle) break on the same day that it was bought.

This new scutch hammer, purchased last Thursday, was swung only five times before the handle broke. Now it goes to join a growing pile of recently purchased tools which have sadly ended up 'on the rocks'.

Is the quality of hickory not the same any more. Is it hickory at all?

I don't know.

All I know is I need a good stiff drink and tomorrow Im going to take this new scutch back. The older (aged) stuff is much better.

The Handset

The pitching tool or 'handset' as it is sometimes called, is a great tool for taking off ledges of stone along the face of a rock, even deep into the meat of a stone. It can be very useful in taking off a lot of stone and squaring it up. These are chisels that have a very flat blunt edge to them whereas tracers are chisels that look similar but come to a sharper edge. You can be more precise with a tracer but it is generally not used to take off a lot of stone or used like a point. I however tend to use it that way all the time. But thats not the point. Next to the point, (a pointed chisel) the handset is a the hand tool of choice amongst the stone masons here in Ventura at the Japanese dry stone wall workshop being run by the Stonefoundation. The other hand tool some people like to use on big stones is the 'bull set'. This baby is used for roughing out or shaping large blocks of stone. Using the bull set is a 2-person operation - one person holds the special bull-nosed hammer angled on its edge, set in place along the edge of the area of stone to be removed, angling the blade slightly toward the outside of the stone. The other person then hits it with the heavy striking hammer. The bull set hammer is not meant to be swung at all. But I've seen people do just that. So people break the rules and the stones all the time.
Anyway, like the handset which specifically refers to the hands, all these tools are hand tools. They are for changing the shape of stones by applying some sort of grip and swing action which is what the hands can do very well. Hands can eventually become comfortable even continuously using tools like these.
Power tools by comparison often wear the hands and arms out much faster, with the constant machine-gun impact and the violent vibrations. The hands are continuously subject to jarring torquing motions with various power stone tools and must also watch out for dangerous whirling blades, screaming twirling drills, and gas and electric tools that produce fumes and on-site dust storms which make it hard to see and breath. It is no wonder that 'thinking hands', ( belonging to someone who is a dry stone walling enthusiast ) try to stay away from these not-so-hand-friendly tools as much as possible.