Planer, Wood

Description

Four-sided planer. Roughly shaped slats passed through pair of horizontal planing heads, then through pair of vertical routers on molding heads. Wooden bed painted blue.

Notes

Hancock Ministry Elder Thomas Damon made this four-sided molding machine in 1854 to smooth and shape thin slats of wood used to make yarn swifts. A swift was used by a knitter to hold a skein of yarn while he or she wound it into a ball. On each swift the skein of yarn was supported by a collapsible cage made of 24 thin slats. Damon, known to have made in a single year over a thousand swifts requiring over 24,000 slats, expressed delight in a diary entry from October 10, 1854, that this tedious job was largely lifted from his shoulders: "Started a new machine for planing and edging Swift slats"... it "worked charmingly and bid fair to be the Ne plus ultra in that line."[1] The machine, once operated by a belt that connected it to a line shaft powered by a water turbine in the Hancock Shakers machine shop, used gears and leather belts to transfer the single-direction rotation provided by the line shaft to cutters which moved in four different direction. Two straight cutters mounted on horizontal shafts, one turning clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, smoothed the flat sides of the slats, while at the same time two cutters mounted on vertical shafts, one turning clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, shaped and smoothed the rounded sides of the slats. [1] Thomas Damon, "Memoranda,...Mostly of Events and Things which Have Transpired Since the First of January, 1846," NOC, #13,357.