The Shanty

The door opened on a work area which was about 12 by 16 feet. In the wall across the shop from the door was a wide window. The window had a shop bench in front of it and was divided lengthwise in the middle with a tool holder. Screwdrivers, hammers, punches, files, and knives filled the tool holder. Natural light from the window lit up the work bench as the shadows turned the tools to silhouette tool shapes.

Mounted on the right front corner of the work bench was a large wooden vise. Between the door and the bench were a table saw and other benches; to the left of these was a small coal heating stove with a chrome finish. Closing the door in the shanty you would notice a ladder leaning up against the wall behind the door. Up above the ladder was a small hole giving access to a small, low attic space. There was a large, round, brass colored; tin box up in this space and it was full of hundreds of buttons of every shape size and color of the rainbow. The box also held dozens of campaign buttons. On the ladder wall hung all kinds of straps, pieces of rope, fishing line, and long tall dowel sticks. The coal stove was centered on the opposite wall with shelves on either side which went up half the height of the wall.

The shelves were packed with old coffee cans of hardware. Some coffee cans held only a few rusty bolts, springs, or nuts, others were packed to the top with nails or screws. Some words stick in your head when you are young and one day my granddad was teaching me how to saw wood. We had a piece of wood in the vise on the bench and I was holding a large hand saw. Granddad was showing me how to get the saw started cutting the wood on a line we carefully marked. The words which stuck were, “Ed, let the saw do the work”. As anyone knows who has used a handsaw or as you can imagine anyway, if you press down against the wood with too much force the saw binds, stalls, and doesn't cut. Let the teeth in the saw cut the wood with maybe a bit more pressure than the weight of the saw against the wood.