Re: Monday clean up
I don't mean to belittle the value of the gold star but they go all around today. I couldn't clean up my own mess. I meant turpentine not kerosene. As Ken called to my attention early, the only tree associated with kerosene is the metal Christmas Tree at a petroleum well head. I tried to correct the question but access was difficult. My error. Turpentine comes from the pine tree. The item I was searching for was a tool called the "HACK". It has a gouge like shaped head standing off of a long handle. The tool is placed about ten feet off the base of the tree and the item is hacked and pulled down making a furrow in the tree trunk. At the bottom of the furrow a cut is made with a tool called a box ax. There at the base the sap oozed down the trunk, collected, and eventually was scraped out into a bucket with a scraper. As an alternative a similar tool called a PULLER was used. It had an arrow head shape and it too made a �V� shaped furrow down the tree.
As to the hub question. The wood I was looking for was Black Gum, also called Tupelo. Elm was also used, so to John and Dale that answer is correct. The lathe was called a �BIG WHEEL� lathe and it was a large diameter drive wheel turned by an apprentice. The wheel was about ten feet in diameter and the close edge of the wheel was located about ten feet away from the lathe and connected by a leather belt to the lathe spindle. It geared the lathe for high rates of spin with heavy blocks of wood. It was also used for mill shafts and large bed posts. It was used for over forty years in Bucks County, PA (Conestoga country).
Examples can be found at the Mercer Museum, in PA.
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