When he took the box of old carpentry planes down from the shelf, ambulance officer and Whanganui Regional Museum volunteer Brian Smith handled them with extreme care and a kind of reverence. “These would be 150 years old, or more,'' he guessed, “and they would have come from England.''
Everything is intact on these old tools: the blade, the frog, the guide and the ancient wood holding it all together. Recently cleaned, but in need of a sharpen, the 26 planes in the box could still perform the work for which they were designed.
“These are incredible tools, they really are,'' says Brian. Each is built to cut to a design; to create bevelled, rounded or angled edges and grooves on wood, jobs done nowadays by machines.
Before Brian joined the ambulance service, he completed a carpentry apprenticeship, starting in 1957. “There was an old guy, he would have been two generations ahead of me, he had a set of these [tools],'' says Brian. “There wouldn't be too many people still alive who would have used tools like these. But to get a full set ...''
The variety and condition of this set is impressive and one can't help but wonder who used them and where. When Brian worked as an apprentice for Ellis and Calkin in Marton, he remembers watching the old carpenter using planes exactly like those in the museum. “When he went through to take a shaving off, it used to whistle, it was so sharp.''
The planes are not very big; they were made to fit snug into the hollow of the hand, the other hand resting on the wooden body, guiding it firmly across the wood's edge, taking it to its final shape in a series of fine shavings. Sliver by measured sliver, the wood would slowly assume its intended form.
“If they could talk,'' muses Brian. “Feel them, feel the energy ... they're beautiful. It's music; it's like a handrail on a staircase, or a doorhandle, been in one of the old houses for 150 years - how many hands have rubbed this or opened that door? Timber talks to you.''
Working with wood runs in the Smith family. “My father was a carpenter, my brother was a carpenter.'' Unable to obtain his licence as an ambulance officer until he was 21, Brian filled in the time with a carpentry apprenticeship, continuing the family tradition, even if only for a short time. It's a skill he has maintained, one which led him to this array of wood planes for his “Vaults'' story. “Now they've got bench planers and different heads they can fit to machines to create mouldings,'' he says, nostalgic for the romance of the old hand tools. “There is wood in some of Wanganui's old shops and houses that would have seen these very tools. And the guy probably only got paid tuppence an hour.''
The planes are labelled, their names describing their purpose in language old and respected. Tonguing planes, moulding planes, rabbet (also known as rebate) planes, plow planes; all once used daily, now relegated to history and the vaults of the Whanganui Regional Museum.
Original article appeared in the 'Wanganui Midweek on 8th April 2012, and republished here with permission from the editors.
