The Roman period - woodcraft.

AS and A Level Physical Education (Sport & Coaching)

The Roman period involved the use of tools such as saws, drills, and chisels, and different kinds of joints. Finished products of the many hours spent by carpenters do not exist in large quantities simply because wood does not survive long enough. What does survive, in addition to a small number of wooden objects, are the remains of some of the tools used in woodworking and descriptions of them and their uses in text.

Since screws were not yet in use in woodworking during Roman times, joining two pieces of wood was generally done through the use of joints. A joint is the way of joining two separate pieces of wood at an angle, or making a long piece of wood out of two smaller ones. The choice of specific types of joints was made based on the wood available and what use it would serve. Joints were made to withstand tension, compression, or torsion. Tension is the stress caused by a force exerting a pulling action, compression is the stress caused by a force pushing two objects together, and torsion is the stress caused by a force twisting or turning on both sides. The joints were not made, however, to withstand all three of these stresses at the same time.

The saddle joint is a frequently used joint because it is one of the simplest. This joint is done by making matching, opposing notches in two pieces so they can be joined at a ninety degree angle. This saddle joint was made to withstand longitudinal tension and compression, and does not require any external forces to keep it compact so that the notch would hold together without the use of wooden pegs or other connection device. This notch can be compared to a notch used in more recent times in the building of log structures.

The dovetail joint was developed to overcome the shrinkage and twisting that might occur with other types of joints. The dovetail joint is made to withstand both lateral tension and compression. The joint is made with a thin neck and an increasing width up to the shoulders. It is made on the end of either one or two pieces of wood. If it is made on only one piece, then a notch matching the shape of the joint has to be made in the other piece of wood and the joint pushed into the notch. If the joint was made in two pieces of wood, then the dovetail joints are placed on each other to turn the direction of the wood ninety degrees. The weakness of this joint comes not from the thin neck, but from the shoulders because the grain of the wood has been cut at an angle and this makes it easier for the wood to split.

The dovetail joint has been used in the building of log structures. It is made as either a simple dovetail or compound dovetail. The simple dovetail has only one angled face and the compound dovetail has two angled faces. The compound dovetail is a flush joint and is commonly used on square logs.

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The mortice and tenon joint is the great all - around joint in carpentry. The true mortice and tenon joint, which is the basic form of the joint, is when a tenon is made square or circular on the end of a piece of wood and fitted directly into the mortice, which is a slot carved in the piece of wood to which the tenon is to be connected. These joints can be pegged or unpegged, meaning if it is pegged a peg is inserted where the mortice and tenon connect. A mortice and tenon joint can also be made by cutting corresponding mortices in two pieces of wood and connecting them with a rectangular tenon. This is called a draw tongue joint. There are differences between these two types of mortice and tenon joints. In the true mortice and tenon joint, it is very important that the tenon fit as perfectly as possible for the joint to have maximum efficiency. In the draw tongue joint, the shape of the tenon is not as important for the joint to have maximum efficiency. These two types also resist different kinds of pressures. The draw tongue joint will resist torsion, lateral tension, and compression, whether it is pegged or unpegged and the true mortice and tenon joint will resist only lateral tension and compression.

An unpegged draw tongue joint has a flexibility that makes it suitable for use in wheels, where as the pegged version has a decreased flexibility and eventually the joints will separate the mortice and tenon joint can also be compared to a more recent joint used in the building of log structures. The tenon joint used has flat joining surfaces cut out of the wood. These flat surfaces are easily created, and fit on top of each other at ninety degree angles, connecting without the use of a mortice. They do not need pegs to hold them in place and the joint sheds water very well, helping prevent decay and last longer.

Fine workmanship and accuracy can be used to distinguish Roman joints from the joints of other periods. The saddle joint, dovetail joint, and the tenon were all cut using a saw, and the mortices were drilled out using a bow drill. The bow drill was also used to make dowel holes, the holes for wooden pegs, on a draw tongue joint. The joints were finished by using a chisel.

With the Roman period came the use of iron as the primary source of metal for tools. The number of tools surviving from the period falls sharply due to the fact that iron is more likely to decay over time than the metals used in earlier times. Most woodworking tools consist mainly of a blade with one or more cutting edges and a block or handle with which the tool can be guided. The axe, adze, saw, bow drill, and chisel all consist of these main components. The evidence for the tools of the Roman period discussed below are the actual tools that have survived and depictions found showing the tools in the ways that they were used.

The axe was the first, the simplest, and for a long time the most common cutting tool. The axe is a heavy wedged - shaped forged piece of metal with a shaft hole. The shaft hole is the hole where the wooden shaft, or handle, was inserted. The head of an axe was on an average around six and one half inches long and three inches wide at the cutting edge. The shaft hole was usually around two and one fourth inches long and two inches wide. The general purpose Roman axe had a flat butt and slightly curved blade and was fitted with a straight wooden handle. The Romans also made an axe with the same blade features but with lugs above and below the shaft hole to make the handle fixture sturdier. There is also some evidence that an axe hammer is a common type of Roman tool. The axe hammer was around seven and one half inches long overall, with a cutting edge that extended downward to give the tool a hammer like appearance.

The modern axe does not differ much from the axe of the Roman period. It consists of a wooden handle attached to an axe head made of metal whose shape has been altered to perform better. It compares very well with the general purpose axe.

The adze is the universal woodworking tool of antiquity. It was used for trimming rough timbers and shaping and smoothing the surface of timbers. If the adze was in the hands of a skilled craftsman, it became a very accurate, versatile, and effective tool with a blade ranging from five to eleven inches. The angle between the blade and the handle of an ancient bronze adze was forty five degrees while on a modern adze it is between sixty and seventy five degrees. The iron adze has some original features. The blade of this adze was fixed to a bent handle by the use of an iron collar and a wedge. This is the earliest appearance in woodworking history of the use of a wedge to secure the blade.

The use of iron as the metal of choice for the saw brought improvements to the design of the tool, but because of the weakness of the metal and the fact that narrow blades were used; the saw could cut only when it was being pulled, not when it was pushed. Typical saws of the Roman period have a small curve in the cutting edge and a handle of wood or horn fixed with rivets to a long tang. The tang is the metal part of the saw that is inserted into the handle, and rivets are the metal pegs used to connect the tang and handle together.

The saw also contains teeth that are hooked towards the handle. The number of teeth on the blade varies per saw. One saw with these characteristics is thirteen and one fourth inches long overall, with four and three fourth inches taken up by the handle, and about ten teeth per inch of blade. Another example of a saw from the Roman period has a blade ten and three fourths inches long and one and one half inches wide with the end tapering almost to a point with six to seven teeth to the inch, distinctly hooked towards the handle.

A large blade would sometimes be more efficient for a Roman woodworker. The problem was that as the blade became longer, it became easier for it to buckle under even slight pressure. A way to prevent this buckling is to strain the blade in a frame. One example of this type of saw is the pit - saw. The pit - saw had a blade of varying length depending on what it was being used for with four to six teeth to the inch. The varying length can be seen in the different depictions of it being used that exist. A common method of using this type of saw has the plank of wood which is being cut propped against a saw horse supported by an upright strut. The top man stands on the bottom of the sloping plank and the other stands on the ground. Another large, but also primitive in design, frame saw was used by the Romans. The frame was made up of an oval piece of wood, bent into a semi - circle, to connect with each end of the saw blade. The blade was inserted into the wooden handle and clamp - like attachments that were fastened by spikes.

The teeth of a saw were set in a way to reduce the friction between the wood and the saw. This was done by setting the teeth so that they projected right and left, alternately, so that the saw creates a cut wider than the blade and discharges the sawdust(Mercer300). The fact that in this way less strain was put on the blade allowed it to be both pushed and pulled, which increased the efficiency of the saw(Goodman 116).

Bow drill

Since the Romans did not have screws, they often used wooden pegs and dowels to connect their pieces of wood(Goodman 160). The tool used for boring the holes in which the wooden pegs and dowels were inserted was the bow drill. The bow drill was the only boring tool known to have been used by the Romans. The Romans were the first to use a curved stick for the bow(Goodman 161). This curved stick had the cord of the bow attached to it and the cord was wound around a spindle that turned the drill bit as the worker moved the bow back and forth(Adam 99). The drill bit is made of iron, with a square middle section, a long tapered pin at the top and a spoon bit at the bottom that performed the actual boring(Goodman 162).

Chisels

For work that had to be done more accurately and neatly, a variety of chisels could be used along with a mallet. The length of a chisel was usually around sixty millimeters long with a blade around thirty seven to sixty nine millimeters wide. The chisels sometimes had a wooden handle. The metal could have been forged to create an ample surface for striking the chisel(Goodman 196). The mallet would be held in one hand with the chisel touching the wood in the other. As the chisel is struck by the mallet, the wood is removed.

The tools of the Roman period were fairly advanced and efficient. They do not differ greatly from comparable modern tools. The Romans appear to have been good woodworkers, but only a limited amount of their handy work and tools survive. This has led to limited, but clear information on this subject.