The sportsman's workshop

Contents

PAGE

I. Equipping the Shop - - - - 7

II. Tent Making _ _ _ _ 21

Chapter I

I SUPPOSE that back in the mind of each one of us there lurks a certain dark and obscure

scheme, carefully concealed from the female members of the family, that some day we are going to grab a room — that small one off the upper hall will answer — and in that room we are going to establish a shop, a sportsman's den, where none of the conquering sex may enter. We visualize that shop in our mind's eye. We long for it, yearn for it, especially what time the various repair jobs on tackle, camp gear, and shooting irons become pressingly urgent, and we have to upset the kitchen and get in everybody's way to make them. We curse our way through these jobs, hunting up lost tools, trying to make a chair do the work of a regular bench, using feet, hands, and teeth to take the place of the vise that should be there right to hand — you all know all about it. "Ain't it the truth," brothers ?

Some of us have been bold enough to assert a modicum of masculine authority and seize said room, to have and to hold. There is no escaping the fact that camp gear will come back from the hunt shot to pieces, reels and rods go on the fritz, guns get rusty and in vast need of taking apart and overhauling throughout. We just must have a place we can call our own to do these things in.

Let me describe you my ideal of a shop, and see if the picture is attractive enough to make a struggle for: A small room, with two windows in it, and eight by ten feet in dimensions or even less is plenty. In it I want, first of all, a place to work on^ and for this I do not think you can equal the ordinary deal kitchen table with stout legs, compared to any carpenter's contraption whatever. You want a place to stow your legs under and to work in comfort while the old pipe sozzles in its bowl and the snow and sleet are beating against the panes outside. As you work you dream over the camps and tramps of the season before and plan for the ones to come when spring again wakens the forest to life.

This table, then, may be 3 feet 6 inches long by 2 feet wide, standing 1 feet high, with plain board top. On it, at your right, is a husky vise, with anvil and horn; a vise that will hold gun barrels, woodwork being planed, and the like. At the left end is a little fellow for holding fine work, small gun parts, reel pinions, fish-hooks being converted into artificial baits, delicate work of all kinds. The only other fixture on the table is a small lathe head, with chucks and face plate, set well back to the left, and with a round belt going to a wheel and treadle under the table. This will be for turning small parts, rod-winding, and various polishing jobs. It is all the lathe you will ever need.

'8

In front of the table goes a bench, an ordinary low laundry bench — not a chair. Why? Because you cannot beat a bench as a place on which to lay long pieces of timber being sawed, while you hold down with a knee; and, moreover, you can shift along it with ease to front your job and set hammers and tools beside you on it, where they will be handy to pick up when wanted and not cluttering up the surface of the table where the work is. Am I right?

All right: On the table, at the back, and pushed flat against the wall, we have to have a flat cabinet, say 28 inches wide by 36 inches high and 9 inches deep. This cabinet has a row of drawers, one above the other on each side, deep drawers, 6 inches by 8 inches, for holding our sets of tools and materials for mending and making camp gear and tents, the leather work on straps and moccasins; a drawer for reloading tools for rifle and shotgun cleaning implements, broken shell extractors, etc.; a drawer for your rod-winding and repairing materials, and parts for making baits and lures; a couple of drawers on each side, as flat as trays, for holding nails, screws, rivets, grommets, and all those small odds and ends that we men keep against the day they may come useful.

The space above the drawers and in between them is kept clear and open for hanging saws, hammers, wrenches, planes, metal-working tools, brace and bits — those tools that we have found from long usage are just what we need and no more.

Now, as to tools. This is going to be a joy shop, a place where the philosophical sportsman can sit him down and enjoy the pleasure of seeing good work grow under his eyes with good tools. Nothing is more aggravating and nothing induces the furious cussword more readily than to see good material for well-planned work being spoiled by dull, weak, or inept tools, things to work with that not only do not do what we ask of them, but spoil the material by being too large, too small, too dull, or out of order, like a sticking saw. We are going to avoid all that and enjoy our winter evenings, while all the time dreams of what we shall do with all this in the woods next season float through the mind.

A long experience in making gear of all kinds for outdoor use has shown me that the sportsman's workshop needs but few tools, and most of these specialties. But they must all be good, the best; steel that is steel, that no carpenter would be ashamed to use in his business. That refers even to hammers, that useful tool so often slighted. It will be of good steel, well balanced, with a hard, flat face that will stay flat and not glance oflf the next nailhead. Of wood saws we will need three: a first-class cross-cut, ditto compass, ditto backsaw. Then we want a metal-cutting saw for the shootin'-iron bench, and the tale of toothed helpmeets is done. Of planes, two: an iron jack-plane for edging and smoothing, about a foot long across the flat, and a small, keen hand plane for little jobs. A good ratchet brace comes next, and such drills and bits and metal-working twist drills as we need for the various jobs that come up. Buy as you go along; they will accumulate fast enough! A breast

TABLE, BENCH AND CABINET FOR A SPORTSMAN S WORKSHOP

II drill is a wrist saver not to be despised. I for one vote for it and repeat. See that it has a chuck that will hold metal drills.

Of screwdrivers you will need quite a set, from the big fellow that can be used as a pry and will turn an obstinate quarter-inch screw stuck fast in oak, to a little slender one that will take out the smallest thing on your reel or your rifle mechanism. On the pliers list come first a heavy one with good side cutting jaws, and then a small fellow, also of steel, with hatched face to hold the smallest hook, and then one round-nosed one for turning things. Half a dozen files — rounds, flats, and triangles. Two cold chisels, 8-inch and 4-inch. That is about all the regular line tools; perhaps you have a good many of them already.

And now for the special tools that we woodsmen find indispensable in our business. In tent-making the ^-inch brass grommet is the one that will give universal satisfaction — and you will need 'em to stick in here and there in pack gear, too. A grommet set for it costs about $3, and consists of a die anvil and a punch with long, smooth nose, which curls the thimble of the grommet over its ring. A single blow of the hammer sets the grommet ring fast in the hem of your tent, where it grips the cloth tight, and is finished over in a neat round hole. Beats the scheme of trying to turn the thimble edge with a big nail out of sight, makes a round hole for your rope to pull through, and holds the cloth like grim death.

For leather working we want two kinds of rivets: the tubular, with a blunt cone punch to set them, 12 and the split, which comes in small boxes, with a holding tool to seize the head of the rivet while you put it on the spot and hit it a crack with the hammer, which drives it through the leather. Turning it over, the points are started apart by a blow on a small round bar like the shank of a screwdriver, and then flattened out with a finishing thwack of the hammer face.

The shoemakers use a sort of lever punch for setting tubular rivets. I have one, but never got much satisfaction out of it, and generally prefer to drive my rivet into the leather and meet it on the other side with the set punch, a single blow on which curls over the edges of the tube so that they roll down on the leather and hold. A third type of rivet is the common copper one with copper washer, used for big strap corners where a heavy strain is to come on straps or woodwork and you need something to hold till the leather breaks first. This type requires a punch to make the hole first, which punch is also used in making buckle-holes in straps. It is a sort of pliers with a steel ^-inch punch and a brass seat on the lower jaw. For larger holes, particularly through canvas in setting grommets, a plain T^inch punch that one hits with a hammer, with a block of wood underneath for anvil, is a tool that you cannot make camp gear without. A small cousin of the grommet is the eyelet, that little brass fellow that you see in boots for the lacings to run through. An exceedingly useful critter in leather is the eyelet; in canvas he will not hold well enough to be worth setting in. Better use a grommet instead. A combination tool for punching and setting the eyelet is sold at the hardware stores for about $2.

Three or four awls, straight and curved, a hank of stout twine with brass needles attached, a patent hand sewing awl, a ball of linen shoemaker's thread, a blob of beeswax, and a ball of cotton twine, make up your outfit for tent and moccasin repairing. The sewing is best done with two needles at once, pushing through from opposite sides and so making a double lock stitch along the seam. Using the awl to punch holes, almost any moccasin seam can be repaired that way. For leather work where you cannot get at the inside a special tool comes, called the "hand sewing awl," handled by most sporting goods houses and hardware stores. It consists of a stout needle with a spool of twine on the handle. You punch it through the leather and pull out again. A length of thread is left inside. Putting your hand into the moc, you guide this thread through the needle point loop for the next punch, and so get a lock stitch. How many perfectly good mocs have we thrown away, simply because they had a hole in the sole up near the toe where they could not be gotten at with a needle! This tool will save $'s in repairing such soles!

For further tent and leather-working tools, add a stout, sharp pair of shears; a sharp knife, with a bevel edge for cutting leather and making moccasin thong strips, and a small ^-inch chisel for making holes where an overhand seam of flat rawhide is to go. It may not seem that there is so very much of leather and canvas work to do in the sportsman's workshop — but just look over your camp gear! Here are burn-holes and tears in the tents, straps off and rivets torn out in duffle bags and pack harness, mocs with leaky seams and holes in the soles — no end of it to be fixed up, so that you will hit the woods with outfit in good order next time.

And then, making new stuff! We all plan new tents, new packs, new sleeping rigs. We lost our hunting knife, perhaps, and if we just could make a good sheath, there are plenty of fine butcher knives at one tenth the price that will answer just as well — if they had a sheath! And then that big ax of ours has never had a sheath of its own, having gone along with its edge swathed in gunnysack. Why not make a real sheath for it this winter?

I should say that the metal-working part of the shop comes next in importance. The cook outfits get out of repair, lose their bails and wire, need rivets, get battered and bent, and the guns and reels have a way of accumulating rust and dirt that passes belief. I would rather blow myself on that big vise, for a starter. There is a very good one with 2>^-inch jaws, opening about five inches, with an anvil and horn on the body end. Blessed tool! There is hardly a metal job in the shop that does not get into or on that vise at some time or other. For metal rivets, a store of the ordinary round-head soft iron rivet will be in one of those tray drawer pockets, and is requisitioned for cook kit repairs, also for new work like tinkering up a camp stove that you swear is the best bet ever, or making a new-fangled camp grate out of a broiling spider. Then the hardware stores are full of neargood camp utensils that have a foolish gadjet or handle sticking out somewhere, and this the metal bench removes and you are the proud possessor of something new and good to hit the trail with next time.

You try that salt-water reel. Gummed fast; its drag sets itself; its take-apart doohickie is fast with green rust; it needs taking all to pieces and each part cleaned, oiled, and vaselined. Out come the screwdrivers, the oil can, and the kerosene dropper, and you go after him. The fresh-water reels are not apt to suffer much from this sort of thing; their troubles are mostly working loose or having been squeezed in a pack until the frame is skewed or out of round, when you take it apart and fix the frame at the metal bench.

A general overhauling of the guns finds the actions inside caked with old grease, rust, powder corrosion; and that new sight that you intended putting on has come in by mail. With the metal bench and the oils and screwdrivers a happy evening is spent, ending with the satisfactory and smooth clicking of a clean gun. In these days of ten-cent cartridges it more than pays to save the shells and do your own reloading. Both the Ideal and Winchester people have new tools now for the big high-power rifles. A Bunsen burner and stand for it is the first special tool I would want. A very good substitute for it is one of those little cast iron blue flame gas burners with level wings to set pots on. Either of them is to be connected to your gas tap with a length of flexible hose, and you thus have a clean, safe means for melting lead, soldering,

i6 drawing temper, or heating iron to a bending heat. For a forging heat you would need a pot forge of some sort, with bellows.

Another special tool which belongs in this section is one of those small emery grindstones, operated by hand, with gearing. One of these will cost as little as a dollar, and has a screw clamp for attaching on the table edge. It will save much weary filing and hand sharpening; for with it rough edges are put on axes, great and small; on tools and knives; and jobs of taking off metal to get a smooth fit are ground down on it. Another "special" is that bullet ladle supplied by the reloading companies. This has a tube nozzle so that it can be faced on the mould and then inverted, when you get a pressure pour, which means a good deal in averting spoiled and bubbly bullets. A few Cclamps for compressing gun springs, emery and crocus cloths of various degrees of fineness, and you have done with specials for the metal bench.

In general reloading I find several extras which are worth while. A shell rack which will hold fifty of them is one of these. You can make it by simply boring holes of the size to take the shell base. Mine is a two-story one, with the upper board perforated so that the shells are gripped at mid-height. In either case it prevents that aggravating annoyance of a row of shells being tipped over while filled with powder or shot charges and no wads in. It goes without saying that shell loading proceeds quickest when all the separate operations are done in batches, all powdered, wadded, shotted, primed, decapped, etc., at one time. Something to hold the shells firmly is the needful, especially during the later operations. Another special tool is a metal rammer. Mine is made of brass. The wooden one furnished will not stand much tapping with your mallet. You are supposed to use the cup of your hand, but this becomes irksome long before fifty shells are done, let alone a hundred of them. No; a brass rammer and a light mallet make the ideal combination.

Passing on to the fishing-tackle section of the shop, the first thing wanted will be a rod-winding appliance. Two wooden uprights with V notches make the simplest combination that can be built. If one of these is fixed permanently at the right-hand end of the table, to the rear, it can be used very effectively, turned by hand or with the little hand emery wheel aforementioned, by running a light tape belt over the wheel and around a wooden flanged wheel slipped over the rod ferrule. This is not so complicated as it sounds. One size wheel is enough, and it is provided with a set of bushings to fit snugly on the male ferrules of your own rods. The proper bushing for the particular rod makes the wheel available for use. I find that the left-hand V upright may as well remain fixed, too, and on the bench is a movable rest with half-round adjustable support, which is to be set up alongside the place where the actual winding is being done.

A more elaborate rod winder is the lathe head aforementioned. It is nothing more than the ordinary small polishing wheel head, sold for a few dollars in the hardware stores, and has a chuck big enough to hold any small work or the end of a rod section. A V-notch upright and a rest complete

i8 the outfit as before. This lathe head is run by a round belt running down through holes in the table to a large grooved wheel, with treadle fixed to a diagonal brace bolted to the left-hand pair of table legs. Those who want both a lathe and a rod winder may well consider putting in such a fixture.

This sketch covers in general the indoor activities of the shop. It is perfectly capable, however, of building you a fishing and gunning skiff, a canvasdecked sailing canoe, a dog kennel, or any other large wooden construction requiring more room in which to lay out and build. Mine has turned out all these delectable commodities, affording me many weeks of carefree vagabondage out in the great open. The boats were built down in the cellar, with part of the shop tools moved down there for the time being. The dog houses were put up right in the shop and eased out of its door — after the alarming discovery that they would just **make it" by taking the door itself off its hinges! The shop is always busy, especially after the strenuosities of the summer and fall camping trips, when everything comes in more or less frazzled. Who shall say that the pleasure of renewing the vigor of those war-worn commodities and of designing and making newer and better ones does not bring the outdoors indoors, an aura of the piney woods and the open waters surrounding each one of them, and the ponderable odor of fly dope and wood-fire smoke filling the shop with the aroma of the woods!

As perhaps one of the first activities of your shop will be building its own cabinet, I give here a sketch from which a design, modified to suit the original preferences of the builder, can be made. And, as prices of ordinary tools have soared to unheard-of heights, I give here a list of the present hardware-store costs of good tools comprising the selection suggested in the first part of this article.

Hammer, steel, best quality $\ 66

Saw, cross-cut, Disston 3 45

Saw, compass 55

Saw, back, 16-inch i 70

Saw, hack, metal 75

Ratchet brace 3 85

Bits 40

Jack plane, iron, 12-inch 3 75

Hand plane, small i 15

Pliers, side cutting, large i 25

Files 25

Large steel vise, anvil, and horn 5 85

Small vise i 25

Breast drill 2 25

Leather hand sewing awl 60

Grommet set 2 50

Punches, set punches, etc 35

1. Rucksack and Bed Roll

3. Cree Three-bar Snow Shoes

5. Three-pot Tent Stove

2. Vreland-Forester Tent

4. The Author's Wall Tent

6. Tarp for Eating Table, 2K Lbs.

Chapter II

THE trade of Omar has certain subtle satisfactions for the male animal which makes its practice peculiarly agreeable, even while the actual labor of tent-making is going on. Man is never more at home with himself than when trying to make a tent of sorts. It is the women who have got us into this prodigious tangle of house-owning, house-building, house-furnishing, and then wasting the better part of our lives paying for and repairing these undesirable possessions! The tent whispers to us of emancipation, freedom from all that, a home that costs comparatively nothing, that is better without any furniture, and that has no fixed abiding place. Truly that Persian poet was right when he objected to the palace the sultan had presented to him, on the score that it could not be moved !

I suppose that in thirty years of camping out there is hardly a type of tent that I have not used or lived in at one time or another. It is an incredible list — teepee, wall tent, shelter tent, forester, miner, handy, Nessmuk, canoe, canoe cockpit, lone hiker's, snow, Appalachian, tarp-and-canoe, wedge, Esquimo, "perfect," **Dan Beard," or "Campfire" — ye red gods, what a list! Six of these

THE SPORTSMAN'S WORSKHOP

I designed myself, and one, the ''forester," has been appropriated by the sporting-goods houses without even naming it so as to give its inventor a modicum of credit. Ah, well-a-day; would that I, too, could grab the cash and let the credit go!

But of them all, I have come to boil down my preferences to just three, and the first of these is the oldest and best — would you believe it, none other than the wall tent! For general camping a little one weighing \y^ pounds and covering 6 by 5 feet in area by 6 feet high is the one that goes oftenest with me. The year before the war I thought I had designed perfection in tents by a modified "Handy" of the same floor area, but with a dormer window on the rear slant of the roof. But that dormer was a nuisance to rig, and used up as much canvas as would make the rear roof grow to a complete wall tent with the desired window in the back wall. A window I would have — something big enough to keep the tent from turning into an oven in the daytime and to see out of when at work inside. So my final tent was a wall tent with 14-inch walls, a sod cloth run around inside, roof 4/^ by 6 feet long, a scrim front sewed to the door all around in front, and the cover flap of the door openable to make a veranda in front. This tent is always pitched by a ridge rope run from tree to tree, its bottom pegged down with ten stakes, and its eaves guyed out to the surrounding bushes, or stakes if there are no saplings handy. One stands up in it easily; there is room for three to sleep in a pinch; it is easily warmed by a small cylindrical stove, and to get more head-room we gambrel the roof with a couple of withes bent over the ridge rope inside, where they spread out the upper slant to increase the head-room to shoulder width. The stove for it is a mere shell of sheet iron, in which slip three of those aluminum fireless cooker pots, forming a circle between them, and about 9 inches in diameter by 6 inches deep. This shell is of 28- gauge sheet steel, 4 inches longer than the pots, to accommodate a steel folding fry pan and a nest of plates in the lower end. The whole thing goes into a canvas bucket and packs atop my bedding and tent roll, carried vertically by a shoulder harness like an army pack. The stove has a swinging door at the lower end and a come-out for an elbow and a 24-inch length of 2>^-inch pipe. The elbow takes the smoke out through the tent wall, and the riser carries it well clear of the roof. I never could see the use of a long stove pipe. A well-managed fire in the stove requires little piping to make it draw.

This tent is my favorite for cold weather camping, and goes with me on all hunting trips and all early fishing trips in the North where the nights are ''plumb" cold.

The second survivor of all that list of tents is a shanty tent, with net sides and front and a detachable cloth side to snap on as a windshield. It covers 6 by 5 feet in area and weighs 3>^ pounds. It is used for mid-summer camping, particularly beach camping, where your principal aim is to keep cool and escape mosquitoes and flies. It puts up with two 4^-foot poles and two 2-foot stakes at the rear corners. To these the four corners of the roof are tied, and ropes then led out to form corner guys. The net bar is staked down all around, and if there is a cold wind the extra cloth side is snapped on. For both woods camping after bass in June and September and all beach camping for salt-water fish, it fills the bill, is cool and airy in the daytime and full of the all-outdoors at night. The most refreshing thing to sleep in ever!

The third tent is the laziest of all, and is used for lone hiking trips. It weighs 2^ pounds, all told, and includes a canvas pocketed stretcher bed weighing nine ounces and a tarp 6 by 9 feet, weighing two pounds, including 30' feet of ridge rope. This tent sleeps and camps one very comfortably indeed. I pitch it by cutting two long, slender poles, using the bottom lengths of seven feet from each for the sides of the stretcher bed, and the rest to make up two pairs of shears, over which the ridge rope is run. The bed poles are lashed to the shear legs about a foot above the ground, and the tarp is spread over the ridge rope, pegged down flat to windward, and the front edge guyed out to form a veranda, under which a fire can be built in front of the cot in rainy weather. A mosquito canopy hangs down over face and shoulders at night, hung by a string from the ridge rope. A very comfortable little tent for lone hiking or going with a party where each has his own tent and cooking gear.

These are my three favorite tents; you probably have your own. To make any and all of them, certain principles of tent design must be respected. No strain must come on any part of the tent except the seams. Up these the stress of guy ropes and pegs runs to the rafter or ridge rope. Tent

THE AUTHOR S MIDGET WALL TENT duck, eight-ounce, is now around forty cents a yard, but bids fair to go lower. The department stores do not carry brown khaki, but you can get a bolt of it from any of the big outfitters or from such manufacturers as the John H. Meyers Company, of Fourth Avenue, New York. Most of it is in 30-inch widths. For general tent-making ordinary eight-ounce duck is good enough, but a bit heavy. The waterproof brown **army" tentings weigh about six ounces to the running yard, some four. Paraffined linen or cotton, usually dyed green, runs about three ounces to the yard, and now costs somewhere around 60 cents; used to be 38 cents when I was making my own tents. This, too, can be bought from the outfitters, and comes 36 and 40 inches wide. It is best gored down the middle with a single fold, as you will want your pegs nearer than 30 inches. The usual width between seams is 18 inches.