Is it cap iron or is it chipbreaker?

Re: Rabbets

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Interesting Warren, and thanks for that.

It seems ironic as I do not know anyone from the UK calling a rebate a rabbet.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: Rabbets

Sgian Dubh

I'm not sure about that, Derek. You must have seen the admittedly smallish number of UKWorkshop forum participants usually pretty new to woodworking that appear to have gained the bulk of the knowledge they have on the subject from American based sources such as YouTube, woodworking forums, and possibly American authored books and magazines who talk about lumber, dados, rabbets, lb cuts of shellac, and ask why they can't fit a dado blade to their table saw and the like.

I think it's interesting that American English has retained certain traces of an old form of English, and added newer forms of word usage influenced by developments there. Similarly, British English has evolved, but obviously retains certain elements of older English, but not the same older English that the Americans have kept. I guess that's just an example of how language evolves and diverges over time, particularly in times when communication between continents was relatively sparse. It's only fairly recently that telecommunications and then the internet has made mass communication over long distances relatively easy.

No doubt Australian, Kiwi, and all the other forms of English could be examined forensically to see how the language has diverged from its earlier common(?) source. Slainte.

Re: Rabbets

Joe shelton

Good point. My view is that our language (s) exhibits more intertwined patterns than stark divergence, but that may exaggerate.

It's a wonderful language, especially voiced. But written beautifully, it is astonishing, whether Shakespeare or Frost.

Cheers, y'all.

Re: Rabbets *LINK*

William Duffield

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAYUuspQ6BY

Older English influence on speech

Wiley Horne

Hi Richard and all,

Your observation rings a bell with me. My grandmother was born in the 1880’s on a farm, and later grew up in a small town on the NC/SC border south of Charlotte. Every other sentence she spoke had an ‘I declare...’, ‘I reckon..’, or ‘over yonder’ in it. And most likely some other sayings I’m forgetting. Sometimes a thing was ‘tight as Dick’s hatband’ (which my wife declares to be a bit off-color). These sayings were mixed in with some Latin words from time to time—she taught high school before getting married..

Anyway in those days, there were people in country towns in the South at least, still living and talking in the early 1800’s, using terms brought over not so long before. Time moved slower then.

Wiley

Re: Is it cap iron or is it chipbreaker?

Eric Rathhaus

Warren, was he using the second iron correctly even if he didn't know how it worked?

Re: Is it cap iron or is it chipbreaker?

Warren in Lancaster, PA

Warren, was he using the second iron correctly even if he didn't know how it worked?

This fellow was a cabinetmaker and a tool collector, but no, he did not expect a plane to deliver a tear free surface.

The tool collectors of that era did a lot to preserve old tools and promote their usefulness, but this is something they generally did not understand.

Re: Older English influence on speech

Sgian Dubh

Going off on a bit of a tangent here, Wiley, but I lived in Texas for ten years starting in 1993, which you may or may not know. About fifty or sixty miles West-North-West of Houston we had friends that owned a weekend place near Belleville and we met a few of the locals. I detected a trace of a German or east European accent in the speech of a few of them, especially the older ones. It turns out these locals had German ancestry going back over a hundred years, and apparently some of the most ancient residents still spoke to each other in German. I wonder how much their German differed to the German spoken in Germany now (or even twenty years ago).

I guess this drift into the discussion of language use has nothing relevant to the cap iron thing, but the thread seems to have drifted, which is probably my fault ... but possibly I could care less about that, although maybe I could care more, ha, ha. Slainte.

We're off topic here: language and culture

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

There was a huge German-heritage population in Texas even before it broke away from Mexico; I would not be surprised to find that the language survived in some communities.

You find the German influence in some of the Hispanic music of Texas (tejano, for instance); in many of the songs, a tuba provides the bass line.

You also find it in 18th- and 19th-century Texas furniture. A lot of the cabinets blend what we think of as "Southwest" furniture styles with such Germanic styles as the kast, a large armoire used to store darned near everything in houses before closets were common.

Re: Usage over time *LINK*

Wiley Horne

Here’s a man Richard Washburn using ‘chipbreaker’ in a patent application, June 1864. The term must have been in ordinary usage at that date:

http://datamp.org/patents/search/advance.php?pn=43053&id=8769&set=9

Wiley....preferring cap-iron, as used by Frank Bailey in 1867 patent app.


Patent application for ‘chipbreaker’

Re: Usage over time

Wiley Horne

Thanks Rafael,

Perhaps the ‘chipbreaker’ terminology in ‘Description’ was added by Patent Office. Wonder when?

Oh well....

Wiley

Re: We're off topic here: language and culture

Sgian Dubh

True, as I discovered Bill. New Braunfels, for instance, just north east of San Antonio, and all that area up, down, and around the Guadalupe River and extending down roughly to the Mexican border, collectively known, if I remember it rightly, as the Hill Country has a significant German heritage. Slainte.