A Shipwright in Training

Before heading to boat school I thought that bit braces were cool in the same way that, say, a steam powered apple press is cool.  Quaint, handsome, satisfying when they were engineered well.  Any tool collector worth his salt was sure to have a couple of rare ones, but no one used them.  Electric drills pretty much made them obsolete as far as I could tell.  

And then I noticed that boat builders always seemed to have them around.  Well, that’s just because these wooden boat guys have a thing about old tools.  I mean, they’re basically smitten with all things old, so of course they’re going to have a pile of old tools around.

And then I got to know some of these boatbuilders and the explanation for the old tool smiting got a little more complex. 

First, boatbuilders are cheap.  We have to be.  We don’t earn much money, and it used to be that you could get yourself decent tools for pennies on the dollar at flea markets and estate sales. 

Second, boatbuilders are practical.  Lots of the old tools do things that new tools simply can’t do.  So, if you can get yourself a cheap wooden plane at an estate sale that you can make into a spar plane with a couple of hours work, you’ve now got yourself a tool that is exceptionally good for smoothing a cylindrical surface.  You can’t buy a tool like that. 

And that last point leads to bit braces.  Like this one.

That’s mine, an old Miller’s Falls.

The bit brace was the drill and power screwdriver of its day.  It had a couple of advantages over the normal screwdriver.  For one, you can really lean into it.  That round knob at top makes a good surface to push your chest or weight into.  This keeps the bit firmly in the slot of the screw.  One thing that will strip an old screw faster than anything is the driver blade slipping out of the slot.  The other thing is that the offset handle acts as a lever and gives you a surprising amount of power when you turn it… much more than you can get with a normal screwdriver.  These two things combined make for a tool that’s strong enough to twist the heads right off of the screws as you drive them in if you’re not careful.

But, coming from the world of decent-grade cordless drills, I figured that my handy old DeWalt with a good clutch feature would work just as well.  The clutch could be set to drive screws in with just the right amount of torque, and I could lean into the drill to apply pressure just fine.  So, why not just use that one instead?

Here’s where the old time builder will do a little eye roll and say something along the lines of “fine then, you sure do seem to know everything.  You just go ahead and refasten that old boat with your drill and let me know how it comes out, ok?”  When you keep bitching about broken screws they’ll look over with a mixture of pity and annoyance that you didn’t show a bit more humility early on.  They may rub it in by letting you know that you’re going to eat some of the extra time your fancy drill is costing you.

So here’s some of what they know, and what I’ve slowly learned.

1. You will never get as good a feel for what’s happening with the screw from an electric drill as you do from a bit brace.  The brace connects you right to the screw.  There’s a motor between you and the screw with a drill.
2. You get infinite torque control with a brace.  You can apply exactly as much torque as you need, as slowly or as quickly as you think the screw can handle it.  A drill tends to start up suddenly, even with a variable speed trigger.  You can feel exactly how tight you’re driving the screw in with a bit brace. 
3. You can’t get as much body pressure into a screw with an electric drill as you can with a bit brace.  It’s just that simple.  I can lean my chest into the top pad of the brace and get huge pressure on the blade.  I’ve removed screws that barely had any head on them this way. 
4. You can hear and feel things with the brace that are lost with the drill.  The tiny snap of the tip breaking off of the screw or the slight grinding feel of the new screw rubbing against a broken off part of an old screw still in the hole are things I can’t detect through the noise and vibration of a drill.
5. If you come out of the slot with an electric drill, you’re likely to do a pile of damage to the surrounding wood before the bit stops.  With a brace, you’ll do far less damage.

There, now you know it too.

Being practical folks, boatbuilders will of course use drills all over the place.  I never use my brace to drill holes for instance.  A power drill does that job faster and easier.  In fact, I don’t use my brace for anything other than working with old screws and fastening planks to the hull.  The planking we’re doing often involves fragile woods, mahogany and cedar, and you just don’t want to overdrive a screw through these materials.  That could really ruin your day.  Contrast this with the 1 1/2″ oak planking on Roann that was installed using bronze lag bolts driven in with impact drivers. 

The hard and fast rule:  use the best tool for the job.

For instance, some builders choose the Yankee screwdriver for driving screws.  This is likely to be a tool everyone who grew up in my generation has at least seen.  I remember playing with dad’s as a kid.  They look like this:

(thanks Bob from ebay for the photo)

The blade twists as you push them in.  They were the speed drills of their day, and in capable hands, they can drive a screw as fast as a power drill.  You still get excellent feel for how much torque you’re putting on a screw with these fellows.  You won’t get as much torque with these as with a brace, and they’re not nearly as good for getting out stubborn screws.  That’s because as you apply pressure to get the blade to bite into the slot, they’re translating that pressuring into rotation. 

Here’s something I’m starting to learn in my bones:  if you don’t have the right tool for the job, make it yourself. 

Case in point: clearing screw slots. 

If you can get a screw out by unscrewing it, you’ll go faster and be happier than if you got the same screw out by drilling it out.  The first step is to get the slot as clean as possible.  A clean slot gives your blade more surface to bite on and drastically increases the chance you’ll actually be able to unscrew the little varmint. 

I was using a screwdriver, an awl, and the small flat blade on my knife to clear slots, until I remembered that I could actually make the exact right tool.  A while back I ordered a pile of screwdriver bits for my bit brace, knowing that I’d probably grind some of them to fit different screw slots exactly.   A little bit of grinding got me this shape:

 

The tip is exactly the width of a #10 screw slot.  The cut out allows me to angle this into the screw when it’s recessed in a hole.  You can use it with the cut out facing down in the slot.  When you rap the bit with your hammer it slides along the slot, clearing as it goes. 

For instance, here’s a typical screw that needs cleaning up.

The blocked area in the lower left corner had to be cleared for the bit brace to get a good grip.  

Insert the cleaner in, cutout side down, and give it a good rap.

Voila!

Clean slot, happy boat builder.

You can also use it in the opposite orientation with the bottom angled edge to pry gunk out of the slot.  It took about 5 minutes to make this thing and it saves me piles of time.  After a while, you amass a pile of these little tools that do just what you want and you wonder how other people live without them.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t lust after the 18v Makita cordless drills with the little LED lights built in.  Hubba hubba.  That’s one… um, practical… tool.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Classes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.