When Sharpening Your Coutre Don't Neglect Its Tail

E

Ernest DuBois

Joined
Mar 2, 2013
Messages
1,772
The stylized tip serves also a function and so this feature needs to be kept in order. One should never mistake the coutre, (no non-French equivalency) for the départoir, (froe), though both are tools of the cooper. I consider the coutre fulfills the criteria defining what constitutes an axe.
p6132591.jpg


As I sharpened my coutre today I had noticed that over time and through continuous edge maintenance the fish or swallow tail has gotten rounded and diminished. So clearly it was time for addressing things at this end as well.
unadjustednonraw_thumb_b6cf.jpg

The edge on such a tool can pose certain difficulties in maintenance because, being so long and with a eccentric center of gravity, taking its handle into account, it becomes unwieldy. The provision of the separated points at the blade's end is an ingenious means for anchoring it in a block of wood to stabilize it while sharpening as show here in this film.
[archiveorg Coutre width=640 height=480 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true] <iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/Coutre" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe>
https://archive.org/details/Coutre
 
Last edited:
Ernest DuBois said:
Sure Hairy, not many are familiar. I use it primarily for shingle making work but it is also a tool of the cooper.
dscf2974.jpg
dscf3675.jpg
Click to expand...

A long deceased friend lived in the house his Grandfather built in the 1870s that was sided and roofed with a shingle much like what your photographs show. I had not driven by the old house much the last few years but I did drive by yesterday with with the intent of taking a photograph and posting it here. However, his widow appears to have preferred the newer vinyl interlocking siding and asphalt shingles on the roof. I was in the basement once a long time ago and remember the huge square oak beams under the floor as well as the foot deep or better window sills. My brother was a carpenter and I can't help wonder if he would have done so if dimension lumber were not available and he had to hew logs to make the sizes he needed? It amazes me at how flat and smooth those shingles are. Is that the surface after cutting with the coutre or is there another step in the process of making a shingle?

The shingles on my old friends house were easily 1/2 inch thick and my fading memory tells me they were closer to 5/8 inch thick and also fairly rough on the surface much like a shake would be here.
 
Last edited:
It's taking me a while now to navigate my way around all these wonderful and exciting advertisements popping up on my feed - which I could of course avoid by paying up my bribe, but anyway...

This vinyl siding is familiar to me. I do believe there is a particular cultivated fungus which feeds of them and can eventually break them down and make them compostable. Asphalt roof shingles are maybe more problematic.

The exposed surfaces - 1/3 the total length - once the shingles are mounted are as they come straight from the billet split off using a froe. Sometimes a shingle, more like a series, will need some twist removed but the correction always is limited to the top 2/3 section and this is done with the coutre but mostly the coutre is for trimming the edges making them more or less parallel.
dscf1844.jpg
dscf1845.jpg

These shingles are nowhere near as uniform and flat-lying as say cedar but then that is a big part of their particular appeal.
 
Fmont, Hairy Clipper, Yankee Josh, Agent_H, et al, my excuses for leaving such gaps in the essential elements of the story line. Sometimes I do get a bit ahead of myself.

This particular example is Sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) not to be confused with the Horse chestnut which is a wood with precisely the opposite characteristics of what it takes to make a good shingle wood.

On a side note, given Hairy's description I have to wonder if the house of his cousin that's shingled is not also Sweet chestnut. It wouldn't surprise me at all.
 
I am just barely old enough (50) to remember a few wooden shingled buildings. This was deep in my youth and most of the buildings I remember were old farm buildings and sheds. If I remember correctly shingles here were made from American Chestnut for their rot resistance and straight grain. Dad had a bunch of Chestnut shingles that someone gave him when I was a boy. Obviously these predated the Chestnut blight in America. After the blight, the tree that we call locally , Red Oak, were used. The reason I say locally is that there are dozens of trees in the Red Oak family. This one is very straight grained and a froe can be used to split very uniform shingles. I remember Dad teaching me to do this when I was a pup. Our Red Oak is a pleasure to work with as it splits easily but the only downside is it has an unpleasant smell if stacked indoors for firewood. Smells like a Tom cat has been marking his territory. I hope my memory hasn’t failed me. I will check with Dad later this morning.
 
Good Morning Gents! Ernest, you may very well be right about the shingles being Sweet Chestnut. As I think back I remember the grain being very straight and colored very much like your photograph posted above. The time frame that the house was built would put it before the Chestnut Blight that Peck Price has mentioned that was first noticed in 1905 and by the time I was born (early 1950s) the Chestnut was pretty much extinct in North America. My Grandfather Clyde had what he called a Horse Chestnut tree that he had planted and I distinctly remember him tell us kids not to eat them as they were poisonous! We never did eat any, we did see squirrels hiding them and we did try out our trusty Barlow pocket knives cutting the smooth dark brown hull off the chestnuts that I remember to be about 1½ inch in diameter to see what was in side once the nuts hit the ground. I remember the nutmeat being almost white, slightly cream colored. The dark brown color of those hulls is still so vivid in my memory, I really like the color of them. Next time I go up to my old home town I will drive by Clyde's old house and see if that Chestnut tree still exists, it was about 15 feet tall in the 1960s. I will call my old friends widow and see if any of those old shingles still exist and if there is one I will get a photograph and post here ... But, I am not holding my breath.

As a side note, I have always wondered what Chestnuts roasting over an open fire tasted like. I saw a package of three for sale at a grocery store 30 some years ago and an elderly woman reached for them before I did. I have not seen any of them since then. I think I will put it on my bucket list.
 
dscf1823.jpg
I think the socket is unique in that it really is not just the mounting mechanism but the grip as well, the handle providing some grip but its primary function is as a counter weight to the blade. This is best illustrated in the top photo.
dscf2841.jpg
 
Hairy Clipper said:
If you find a half dozen or so that you don't know what to do with, I would happily pay a reasonable price to have them shipped here.
Click to expand...

I would love to be able to, but when I say well guarded I mean it. My chances have come only when visiting the site with a hort postdoc friend! Otherwise the nature center has a fellow who picks up the fallen fruits daily. I'm not sure what they do with them. Fenner Nature Center in Lansing, MI. Conveniently five minutes from the horticultural building at MSU.
 
Fmont said:
I would love to be able to, but when I say well guarded I mean it. My chances have come only when visiting the site with a hort postdoc friend! Otherwise the nature center has a fellow who picks up the fallen fruits daily. I'm not sure what they do with them. Fenner Nature Center in Lansing, MI. Conveniently five minutes from the horticultural building at MSU.
Click to expand...

In talking to the widow yesterday about the shingles that used to cover their house I was told those shingle were put on in the late 1970s early 1980s time frame so the likely hood of the shingles being Chestnut are pretty slim. She thinks there might be a couple of shingles out in a shed yet which I will try to find later this week. And then she mentioned there are Chestnut trees in the farm yard and east of the house near the lake. My ears perked up a bit when she said the nuts are now starting to fall. So with some luck I will have a photograph of a shingle and a Chestnut tree or more with leaves still present and perhaps be able to figure out what type they are and if the nuts are edible.

I have spent some time in the U.P. at a couple of shooting tournaments (sporting clays) and traveled around sight seeing. I would love to be at Whitefish Point during a fall storm before the lake freezes up. I really want to see how big the waves get there when the wind has 300 miles of unrestricted terrain from the west. I have never been south of the Mackinac Bridge into lower Michigan.
 
By the way - and by way of a funny coincidence - in the photo - discretely hidden under cover of the blue squared question-mark ? icon at the beginning of my posting #13 - at least it is so on the browser now open on my screen - this panel underneath the coutre is made from, get this, Horse chestnut wood. Hairy I wouldn't pop any of those nuts you find up there in UP in your mouth.

My (limited) understanding of efforts at reintroduction in USA is that the trees till now reach a kind of juvenile stage before contracting the disease that is still present in the ground and dying.
 
Ernest: Since you posted this I have done a little research into Chestnuts thanks to the miracle of the Internet and I think I now know how to tell them apart for reasons of food safety ... provided I don't wash them down with a little hemlock.

One thing I find interesting about the chestnut is, and I could be wrong here, but, their unique brown color that seem to take on a red hue in certain light seems to be the only place in nature that I have seen it. I confess, I have talked to people in many lands via amateur radio and in that sense I have been a world traveler, however, the only country I have set foot in other than the USA is Canada.
 
Ernest DuBois said:
By the way - and by way of a funny coincidence - in the photo - discretely hidden under cover of the blue squared question-mark ? icon at the beginning of my posting #13 - at least it is so on the browser now open on my screen - this panel underneath the coutre is made from, get this, Horse chestnut wood. Hairy I wouldn't pop any of those nuts you find up there in UP in your mouth.

My (limited) understanding of efforts at reintroduction in USA is that the trees till now reach a kind of juvenile stage before contracting the disease that is still present in the ground and dying.
Click to expand...

There are pockets of old American Chestnut trees here and there. In various states small populations have by happenstance avoided the blight by way of isolation. Michigan, being a tad colder than the native range of the American chestnut, seems to harbor several "refugee" populations.
 
Fmont said:
There are pockets of old American Chestnut trees here and there. In various states small populations have by happenstance avoided the blight by way of isolation. Michigan, being a tad colder than the native range of the American chestnut, seems to harbor several "refugee" populations.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we have a handful here in Pugetropolis planted in parks as ornamentals at the turn of the century. The blight never crossed the Rockies because there are no hosts at high elevation. I've heard other west coast cities have the same.

I sent samples to The American Chestnut Society who confirmed them as American Chestnuts but weren't interested in them for their breeding program.
 
Square_peg said:
Yeah, we have a handful here in Pugetropolis planted in parks as ornamentals at the turn of the century. The blight never crossed the Rockies because there are no hosts at high elevation. I've heard other west coast cities have the same.

I sent samples to The American Chestnut Society who confirmed them as American Chestnuts but weren't interested in them for their breeding program.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. Did they tell you why? I wonder if they're looking for specific genetic markers that correlate with hardiness or compatibility with their breeding program. It's interesting stuff. Lot's going on with developing resistant cultivars in many crops these days.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top