Twelve inch swing Whimble brace, double stamped
Price: SOLD.
B&D-40
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No remaining plating; nice patina instead. Good
rosewood handles. Nelson Spofford's split-chuck brace was
possibly the most
successful and rugged patented brace of all time. It was
originally
patented in 1859 (next row, left) and manufactured by
cutting a slot in a malleable iron casting and shaping the graceful
solid iron wrist handle by grinding and polishing. Those braces
were weakend by that sharp-cornered slot. Next, Spofford
and his licensees added a split rosewood wrist handle that was held
together with pewter rings. Then they forge welded the malleable
iron chuck casting (patented as shown in the bottom row, left) onto
a
wrought iron bow. One can identify these braces because they have
a thin bow and a rosewood wrist handle with no pewter rings. They
were difficult to
make, so Spofford came up with the design in the bottom row, right,
wherein a
steel or wrought iron bow was pinned or screwed into the iron
chuck casting. This permitted the rosewood wrist handle to be
made in one piece again. |
| One fault of Spofford braces is that
users mistakenly overtighten the thumb screw onto the bit to hold it
tightly. It will hold the bit just as tightly if one uses the
thumbscrew to adjust the taper of the bit socket and then tap the bit
into the correctly tapered socket so it will stick there. This
brace is one of those braces whose screw threads were worn out by
overtightening the thumb screw. I fixed it in a way consistent
with the
original design by adding a pin to a bolt (bent to match the angle
between the two halves of the split chuck) so that the bolt would not
turn. A found malleable iron thumb nut completes the
repair. It meets the
side of the chuck flush to the surface while the underside of the bolt
head meets the other side flush to that surface. My only
modifications to the brace were to ream out the useless threads and
drill the semicircular hole (to accommodate the bolt's pin) on the side
where the threads had been. |
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