Toolmaking

Found a good "Toolmaking" link? Let Us Know!

See also: Smithing; Metalworking; Arms, Armor & Armour

Tool Making Neat stuff from the FAO for developing countries.

Flour Mill HOME FLOUR MILL by WALTER B. BOOHER. This grain mill, except for the burrs (which are stone), shaft, bolts, screws, and glue, is built of wood. Plywood is specified, but plain boards can be used. The mill can be powered with a 1/4 Horse Power electric motor, wind power, or by hand. Although the machine shown here is intended for single family use, the designer feels the machine could be enlarged easily by increasing all dimensions.

HAND OPERATED CLOTHES WASHER Two simple clothes washers are outlined in this Technical Bulletin. The first, designed by VITA Volunteer Dale Fritz, consists of a covered galvanized metal tub, in which a long-handled agitator is plunged vigorously through the clothes. It was used successfully in Afghanistan. The other washer is a more complicated wooden washing machine made and tested by the United States Department of Agriculture's Home Economics Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. Both washers are easy to construct with readily available materials, and should help simplify washday chores. See also: Washing Machine

The Necessity of a Drill Think about all the things in your life that have holes drilled through them. Making a hand pump drill will take time, but think about all the fun.

WASTE OIL-FIRED OVEN This simple, low-cost bakery oven is fueled by waste, automotive crankcase oil. The design has undergone extensive testing. It is designed to be built from locally available materials. This oven is capable of maintaining a 160 degrees C to 190 degrees C baking temperature on .946 to 1.4 liters of waste oil per hour depending upon chimney draft.

How to Make Your Own Steel Knives by Dick Baugh (May 23, 2000): The shade tree auto mechanic was a good ol' boy with a box full of old tools who rejuvenated beat up cars with a minimum of fuss. I'm trying to take the same approach to knife making. I'd like to tell you how to transform a piece of appropriately chosen scrap steel into an excellent cutting tool without using a lot of expensive power tools. Even if you never use this information to make your own knife, I hope that it will give you a greater awareness of what constitutes a good knife. See also: Knife Sharpening Jig and Folding Pocket Saw

Grain Milling GRAIN MILL FOR HOME USE by Walter B. Booher. The grinder detailed here is made almost entirely of 1" lumber and can be constructed easily by someone used to working with wood. It
will grind corn, wheat and other grains to coarse or fine texture.

Chain Link Fence Making Machine This bulletin contains step-by-step procedures for parts manufacture and assembly of a hand-operated machine for making chain link fencing. The machine here is designed to produce fencing up to 244 cm (96") but can be used to produce fencing of any height. The size of the openings in the fencing is controlled by the size of the "bending-head." The machine described here requires #12 or #14 wire, but the machine could be modified to take larger wire.

Hand Looms (Weaving) HANDLOOM CONSTRUCTION A Practical Guide for the Non-Expert By Joan Koster

SAVONIUS ROTOR CONSTRUCTION Vertical Axis Wind Machines From Oil Drums by Jozef A. Kozlowski. Jozef Kozlowski has built two Savonius rotors -- one in Wales and the other in rural Zambia. This manual details the construction of these machines. For those who decide to build rotors, step-by-step construction details are provided. The manual includes a two-stage rotor for pumping water and a three-stage rotor designed to charge automobile batteries (the latter can be constructed using only hand tools). Both rotors depend upon use of discarded oil drums.

Low-cost Windmill for Developing Nations [multi-vane fan type] Construction details for a low cost windmill are presented. The windmill produces one horsepower in a wind of 6.4 miles/sec (14.3 mph), or two horsepower in a wind of 8.1 miles/sec (18.0 mph). The windmill uses the rear axle and differential of a small car. Other parts are made from sheetmetal, pipe, steel ribbon, rod, angle iron, or channel, welded or bolted together, and wood. No precision work or machining is required, and the design can be adapted to fit different materials or construction skills. The rotor blades feather automatically in high winds to prevent damage. A full-scale prototype has been built and tested successfully.

Willow Rake by Dino Labiste: Markus Klek decided to construct an oak leaf bedding to cushion and insulate himself from the cold ground. Gathering up Valley oak leaves with just your hands is a time consuming chore. Markus thought of making a willow rake to sweep up a huge pile of leaves and to use the rake as a scoop to carry his load...

Honey Extraction Centrifugal This Bulletin explains how to build a wooden honey extractor. Honey hives are placed in two containers. These are spun with a pulley mechanism. Thus, the honey is extracted by centrifugal force.

The Three-Stick Roycroft Pack Frame by Dick Baugh: How would you like a pack frame that is comfortable, strong, and can be made from natural materials in less than 1/2 hour? We were introduced to the Roycroft pack by Mors Kochansky at the Rabbitstick Rendezvous a few years ago.

California Knapping [5 page article!] by Paul D. Campbell: Eleven thousand years ago Clovis mammoth hunters ranged over North American and left a record of the knapper's art in beautifully fluted spearheads, not two exactly the same. What followed Clovis and the later bison hunting Folsom tradition was much cruder, yet even these points were often well crafted and certainly functional and a pleasure to view. After the passing of the big game and the Paleo-Indian, distinctive regional cultures took form. In California it was the San Dieguito...

The Hoko Knife - A quick, simple stone tool by Dick Baugh: This is a simple and practical stone bladed tool. The original Hoko knife was found at an archaeological site in western Washington near the Hoko River where a native village was snuffed out by a landslide about 2700 years ago, well before any contact with Europeans. Among the artifacts found there was a very simple knife consisting of a very small, sharp stone flake hafted in a split cedar handle which was tied together with spruce root...

The Stone Saw by Norm Kidder: Most people are familiar with stone axes and Celts for cutting down trees. In central California neither of these tools are found in the archeological record, and most of the houses built were framed with relatively small diameter trees (1 - 3 inches). My experience of trying to cut down springy willows with a stone axe led me to believe there must be a better way... See also: The Scapular Saw

Blacksmiths Bellows & Forge This Technical Bulletin shows an inexpensive way to make bellows,
the air pump traditionally used by blacksmiths to make fires hotter, and also gives general guidelines for building a forge, which is a blacksmith's special furnace. Specific forge construction plans are not included. However, the Bulletin does include instructions for using the forge and bellows.

How To Sharpen Tools Important knowledge, pretty good article. See also: A Guide to Honing and Sharpening Woodworking Tools and Woodworking Guide: How To Sharpen Dull Tools - Popular Mechanics and The Best Way to Sharpen Tool Blades and How to Sharpen Garden Tools

"Amateur Machinists Home Page" Early 20^th century plans for building all kinds of neat machine tools. Lots of fun and great articles.

"The Metal Web News" Whoa! A gold-mine of info on tools and equipment. Great articles. Help me out with some reviews, folks!

"Bone & Antler Working" Excellent article on the history & uses of bone and antler - as well as a few techniques and illustrations.

THE FOLSOM POINT. This document was created to publicly display the various steps of manufacture of a Folsom Point. It is image intensive and, therefore, its value lies in the reader's ability to display color graphics. If the reader only has text capabilities, then instead of this document, the Author recommends the book titled FOLSOM TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY at the Hanson Site, Wyoming by George C. Frison and Bruce A. Bradley.

The Art of Tool Making by Steven O. Smith Copyright © 2005 Originally Published by Stefan's Florilegium Archive There are two properties which distinguish a good tool from a bad one. The tool must have the correct shape for the work which it is to do, and the tool must be hard enough to last a long time. This class will teach you to make tools hard enough to last without being so hard that they are too brittle and break.

Making an Anvil by Jerry Crawford & Modifying a Versa-Vise by Jerry Crawford

David Lucy's website - tools An inevitable consequence of being an amateur engineer is that one spends a considerable amount of time making tools. This is because commercially made tools can be: too expensive, not available for the particular application, or simply unsuitable. Here are a few necessary tools I have made.

Doug's Sword-Making Tools Page

MSN Encarta - Multimedia - Stone Toolmaking Humans first made tools of stone at least 2.5 million years ago, initiating the so-called Stone Age. The Stone Age advanced through three stages over time—the Paleolithic (which is subdivided into Lower, Middle, and Upper periods), Mesolithic, and Neolithic. Blade toolmaking, as demonstrated in this video, was a development of the Upper Paleolithic, which began about 40,000 years ago. This technique produced a far greater variety and higher quality of tools than did earlier methods of toolmaking.

Living like a Neanderthal Neanderthals were expert tool-makers. Their basic tool kit comprised of around 6 different types of tool, all more efficient than the tools made by earlier humans.

Handprint : Ancestral Tools

Stone Tool Production In the "Tools" issue of Dragonfly, Nick Toth and Kathy Schick, who are experimental archaeologists, write about how they figured out how our ancient ancestors made tools by doing it themselves. They study the early Stone Age in a place called Koobi Fora, which is in Kenya, Africa. By making thousands of stone tools using many different methods, they figured out how early humans crafted their tools. For each method, they compared the tools they made with the ancient tools to see which kinds matched.

Making a Chasing or forming tool - Copyright © Charles Lewton-Brain 2002 We are assuming you are using W1 water hardening square stock drill rod, W1 tool steel. Many suppliers will sell W1 tool steel. It is often called drill rod (In England 'silver steel'). It should be square for less work in tool making, but round drill rod can be filed or forged to square. You should not use key stock, which some hardware suppliers will try and sell to you: it cannot be hardened as described

Bladesmith's Forum Board -> Tools and Tool Making

How to make a hand axe They may be 1.5 million years old, but ... [Shockwave Flash]

New England Projectile Point Catalogue. Interesting articles on various stone flaked projectile points.

SPECIAL TECHNIQUES for Knapping edges from stone. Excellent text & graphics.

Stone Knapping Techniques. The best site found on the net yet. Excellent instruction and graphics.

RAW MATERIAL for Stone Knapping, & Tool Making the prehistoric way. This could be lifesaving information for anyone caught in a survival situation without even the simplest of tools.

" The Stokes Flintknapping Tool" Article on flintnapping tool by Mark Condron, with schematic illustration for making your own hardwood flintnapping tool. Tool designed by Jim Stokes, of Florida.

"Pressure Flaking Tools " Article on flintknapping tools by Niko Sylvester.

"Finding & Making (flintknapping) Tools" Short article with illustrations from Wyatt Knapp’s History & Primitive Techn

Pedal Powered Thresher This thresher was built in 1978 and this report was written in 1979. VITA of USA kindly published it. Recently I see that some current designs of man powered equipment for use in 3rd world locations are not any better than what I was doing 20 years ago. And opportunities and media (e.g. the Internet) for dissemination of information have bettered by leaps and bounds during those 20 years. Regrettably also many 3rd world economies for a variety of reasons have stagnated or gone backwards during the last 20 years. So this kind of stuff may still be valid. So I take the liberty of reissuing the VITA report with a few very minor changes, with the addition of some photos, and with a little summary (immediately below) of some of the options for design of this kind of stuff, and some tips and tricks.

Pedal Power Devices This report is 68 technical drawings plus 27 photographs of pedal powered equipment (threshers, water pumps, winnowers, grain mills and maize shellers), a tractor PTO thresher, and a wind powered grain mill which I worked on in Uganda 1972 and in Tanzania 1973 through 1978. See also: UNDERSTANDING PEDAL POWER By David Gordon Wilson

Pedal Generator Some investigation was done by Alex Weir on suitable automotive (car) generator for use with 4-man pedal system. The Bosch 9 120 690 170 - a 55 amp alternator-generator appears suitable. Driving speed would have to be approx 3500 rpm, which is attainable by using 60 rpm drive through bicycle sprockets to a 200 rpm payshaft with a 600 mm diameter driver pulley and 'eaton vee belting' hollow flexible plastic belt drive to a 35mm wooden or similar pulley.

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