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Practical Carriage Building
This combined reprint of Volumes 1 and 2 of the 1892 edition of Practical Carriage Building is perhaps the most complete and accurate contemporary work on the subject. It covers in great depth, and with many illustrations, the materials and tools used, the making and repairing of wheels, the making of carriage parts and their assembly, framing and construction, axles, yokes, whiffletrees, patterns and layouts, and many other useful and fascinating subjects. All sorts of carriages are discussed: buggies, cabriolets and broughams, phatons, rockaways, as well as sleighs and sleds, and express, delivery, and farm wagons. A definitive, easy to follow reference on this early trade that is now enjoying a well-deserved renaissance.
- GenresWoodwork
512 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1994
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July 20, 2018
A few dozen short essays on carriage building, written by actual craftsmen and beautifully illustrated. An interesting historical perspective for people interested in late 19th-century American carriages, but not especially useful as a resource for building your own, for a few reasons.
The foremost is that the book is written for people who are already in the trade—it's a jargon-heavy collection of tips and tricks for making your life easier as a worker in a medium-to-large industrial workshop, not a fundamental treatment of carriage-making that lays out the basics for people who've never built one. This is what the book sets out to do, but it could do nothing else: not a single one of the individual writers has a full view of how to build a carriage anyway.
1892 was a worse time for the craft of carriage-building than is commonly acknowledged: while competition from the automobile was not yet a concern (the Benz Patent-Motorwagen had just become a thing half a decade earlier, and fewer than two dozen existed—the book makes no mention of it at all), industrialisation was omnipresent, with all the loss of skill that implies. Electricity itself was still something of a novelty (a few of the essays insist that it is well worth having installed), but the American obsession with patent machines was not, and compartmentalisation of labour into small chunks to the point where nobody really knew why they were doing what they were doing, and which things they were doing because they were meaningful and which were merely fashionable, is the norm. This is less obvious when it comes to wheelwrighting—wheels are easy to conceptualise, and it's relatively hard to skimp on skill while still ending up with a usable wheel—but incredibly clear when it comes to making carriage bodies, all of which are a bizarre mixture of corner-cutting and great elaboration apparently purely to make them impossible to replicate in small shops. Cartwrighting is always a genuinely difficult exercise in trade-offs, because carriages need to be as light as possible to spare your draught animals while still being strong enough for purpose, but few of the writers here have any real insight in which trade-offs are made for the sake of the horses, and which are made purely for the sake of short-term profit.
So depending on why you're reading this book you may find it the best thing ever written or, as I did, somewhat disappointing. It certainly has great historical value, but as practical instruction, its most valuable perspective may be that woodworkers were always prone to pontificating and overestimating their own insight, and that publishers, when faced with contributors disagreeing with each other, have always been prone to just throwing up their hands and pretending both must have something meaningful to say.
The foremost is that the book is written for people who are already in the trade—it's a jargon-heavy collection of tips and tricks for making your life easier as a worker in a medium-to-large industrial workshop, not a fundamental treatment of carriage-making that lays out the basics for people who've never built one. This is what the book sets out to do, but it could do nothing else: not a single one of the individual writers has a full view of how to build a carriage anyway.
1892 was a worse time for the craft of carriage-building than is commonly acknowledged: while competition from the automobile was not yet a concern (the Benz Patent-Motorwagen had just become a thing half a decade earlier, and fewer than two dozen existed—the book makes no mention of it at all), industrialisation was omnipresent, with all the loss of skill that implies. Electricity itself was still something of a novelty (a few of the essays insist that it is well worth having installed), but the American obsession with patent machines was not, and compartmentalisation of labour into small chunks to the point where nobody really knew why they were doing what they were doing, and which things they were doing because they were meaningful and which were merely fashionable, is the norm. This is less obvious when it comes to wheelwrighting—wheels are easy to conceptualise, and it's relatively hard to skimp on skill while still ending up with a usable wheel—but incredibly clear when it comes to making carriage bodies, all of which are a bizarre mixture of corner-cutting and great elaboration apparently purely to make them impossible to replicate in small shops. Cartwrighting is always a genuinely difficult exercise in trade-offs, because carriages need to be as light as possible to spare your draught animals while still being strong enough for purpose, but few of the writers here have any real insight in which trade-offs are made for the sake of the horses, and which are made purely for the sake of short-term profit.
So depending on why you're reading this book you may find it the best thing ever written or, as I did, somewhat disappointing. It certainly has great historical value, but as practical instruction, its most valuable perspective may be that woodworkers were always prone to pontificating and overestimating their own insight, and that publishers, when faced with contributors disagreeing with each other, have always been prone to just throwing up their hands and pretending both must have something meaningful to say.
Displaying 1 of 1 review