Flopcakes and a Screwdriver - Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

How can you screw up a pancake? Well you can.  

After a hard week, I had a serious craving for them. Work had me where I could sleep at home (albeit briefly) the last few days which was good and on my first morning off it was in the low teens and snowing and I didn't have a long drive to get home.  A perfect morning for pancakes. I was seriously tired, (when your eyes look like Chinese flags even VISINE® is not going to help) but was determined to make them, turning down Partners offer to make some eggs and toast..  I decided to try a new recipe using some self rising flour.  Once on the griddle, I noticed how, well, thin, they were.

They weren't puffing up at all. Partner looked in on them and said "are we having French crepes?"

No, Flatjacks.

I looked at the counter at the two flour containers.  *%#@  I used the NON self rising flour.  I was making hardtack.

OK, I can make another batch, except I was out of eggs and butter and though the store is just a 10 minute drive, it IS cold out (that 18 degrees is the temp inside the garage).  To the Internets!  I found a vegan pancake recipe on a blog, made with no butter or eggs and the picture looked like regular pancakes.  I made them as instructed and they looked like the picture.  But let's just say, assuming they have a long shelf life, they'll be perfect for the first aid kit to pack wounds. Absorbent, not edible.  Another failure.

Flopcakes.

Attempt #3, with fresh butter and eggs from the store (and look, bacon fell into the cart!), went much better.

But I realized, until I catch up on my sleep,  it's best to putter around using the simplest of tools.  Perhaps like 3 or 4 new screwdrivers that showed up on the Range last weekend.

The screwdriver, the tool that likely every household has at least one of.  It has long genealogy, with Archimedes considered to have invented the screw in the third century B.C.with others saying it was Nebuchadnezzar II who did. Actually, what Archimedes of Syracuse invented was designed to transfer motion (as in the continuous worm of a worm and gear assembly), rather than to fasten two things together, so I'd say he didn't really likely "invent" the screw, though no one really knows for sure.  What we do know is that  around the first century, screw shaped tools became common,  with early  screws were made from wood and were used in wine presses, olive oil presses, and such.

If you have enough books, you'll find there's historical records on everything, tools, cars, party boats (which according to famed tool guy Red Green, date back to Cleopatra and the crew of the Exxon-Valdez). But there is a ton of information on the Roman Era and the many developments in tooling and building that came about during that time. Romans had most of our other hand tools and also invented the stiffened backsaw, whose blade is reinforced at the top. This prevents straight-through cuts, but in combination with a miter box, can be useful for cabinetwork.

Cranks showed up in the The Middle Ages, as did the carpenter's brace.  The handsaw, too, is even more ancient.  Archaeologists have found metal-toothead Egyptian saws dating back to 1500 B.C., with  broad blades, some as long as twenty inches, curved wooden handles and irregular teeth.

A soft metal was used, copper, which required the saw to be pulled, not pushed to keep it from buckling.  Since during the pull you can't bear down on the cutting stroke, sawing wood for the Egyptians must have been about as much fun as plumbing.  The Romans used iron for the blades, making them stiffer.

The Romans also added something to the world's toolbox of cutting tools that was beyond ingenious for its time. The frame saw. A fairly cheap narrow blade is held in a wooden frame and is kept taut by tightening a cord. Wooden frame saws worked so well that they continued as the most common type of saw well into the 19th century and if you look at your hacksaw in the garage closely, you can see the principle is still alive (though if your spouse catches you in the shop fondling and staring at your hacksaw he or she  may cut off the beer supply).

The first metal screws used as fasteners date back to the 15th century. They had square or hexagonal heads and were not turned with a screwdriver, but a wrench. Screws also appeared as a spinoff from Renaissance warfare, keeping the parts of a matchlock rifle linked. The screws of the 16th century were hand-cut which is both expensive and less than reliable, but they were needed for timepieces as well as armaments. At the end of the 1700s, screw-cutting lathes were developed, making screws more widely available and consistently sized.

But when did the "screwdriver" show up on the scene?

Scottish crafts manuals from around the time of the American Revolution give screwdrivers as "turnscrews"; the same word in French, tournevis, turns up in 1723. .But the origin of the screwdriver itself is obscure and not widely mentioned in texts even though screws were evident in many applications during this early period.

Now, there are multiple types of screwdrivers, cabinet screwdrivers, stubby screwdrivers, electricians screwdrivers, spiral ratchet etc, and assorted tips, Parallel tip, Pozidriv,  Phillips, Clutch, Robertson.

Some handles and shanks can take multiple tips, and one of them here, even has a magnet built into the shaft.  You might laugh at the Ronco Food Dehyradator/Flashlight/Auger but combination tools have been around since ancient times, the two oldest woodworking tools being the ax (timber!) and the adz, with its blade turned ninety degrees, which is then used for dressing the timber.  The Minoans in Crete were using it  long before the Romans started getting that bigger tool box.

Some of the modern screwdrivers have the head as you see in the pictures here, others have a bulbous head, which  provides a little better grip, with a greater area of surface contact between paw and tool, but that's just my preference.

But the other day, there was a Sears Hardware going out  of business and well

Tools

Sale

Need I say more.

Just a few were picked up, with one deciding difference.  Something you all may know, but I didn't catch on to immediately.

Square versus round shank.  What's the advantage of the square?

You can place a wrench on the square shank so you can apply torque with one hand and downward pressure with the other which is more effective than simply trying to twist the handle, especially when you don't have the upper body strength of most handymen (but more than Justin Beiber).

It's also more effective in stripping out slots on screws on 1960's British Cars.

And that is your HOTR range tool lesson for today. See, I've mostly figured out a screwdriver and Lucas Wiring (I think Lucas is difficult because Britain is an island and they have to import their electrons :-)  After that,  completely gutting a kitchen update done in the 40's and starting from scratch doesn't seem so intimidating

 

It's not perfectly to scale and the right side is the antique farmhouse sink with drainboard that will be on the perpendicular wall underneath the stained class window, but here is the proposed, tiny but efficient, Range kitchen. AutoCAD, then add color, even the Romans couldn't have this much fun.