Ah the great debate,

This is what Timberframers from both sides of the pond talk about when their paths cross. The pros and cons of Square v Scribe.

As I'm supposed to be the moderator rather than the oracle, I will not attempt to give you the definitive answers here, I would rather invite comment and input from others.

While we are waiting for the great debate to get underway perhaps we could all could do a little background re-reading. One of the definitive texts on the subject is a publication by Jack Sobon called The Scribe Rule or the Square Rule (my copy came via Randy Nash (Guild member of Canastota NY).

One thing you should bear in mind is that over here many of think of our selves as Barn Builders, Timberframers, Carpenters, and definitely not Joiners or Cabinetmakers, (which is how some of our New World colleagues view themselves. I've debated this over many beers with many people and I swear we will never tire of it.


To illustrate this point, I would enclose what we give to all new starters when they arrive to take up a career with us:

"The Village Carpenter" (Walter Rose 1937 ISBN 0 85442 065 7) along with "The Wheelwright's Shop" (George Sturt - ISBN 0 521 44772 0) should be part of every carpenter's tool kit and should be re-read every four years

"The reminiscences recorded in this book are nearly all those of our old carpentry business prior to my grandfather's death in the year 1893. For some of them I am indebted to others who remembered it in its more active days before I was born."

"Some of my father's men never claimed to be jointers and rarely worked in the workshop. Theirs was a ruder kind of craft, woodcraft of the open fields, the hillside and the valleys. I have heard such work contemptuously called "hedge-carpentry", but the slightest knowledge would convince anyone of its value and a little reflection would also reveal that it constituted art, in its natural, simple state."

". . . The work these men did was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the earth, closely allied in nature and quite free from hard and fast convention. The beauty of it was that they men had never learned what is termed the higher order of the carpenter's craft. They continued to work on primitive lines, with the axe and saw, and a few other elementary tools."

"Thus they had never become enslaved to line and level; their minds had not be trained to revolt if their work deviated from the square, or if it was slightly on the twist and the faces of the joints not absolutely flush. They themselves made no claim to art - I doubt if they knew the meaning of the word. But the work they did was part of the beauty of the countryside . . . with the bark left on in places, and the rough knots trimmed with axe or drawing knife."

"These old workmen had never been separated from the land, and so they understood the ways of the farms and the needs of the farmers as no town carpenter could possibly have done. They know from long experience all there was to know about the erection of new farm buildings and repairs to the old."

The tools they possessed were primitive - a good axe and saw, a clawed hammer, shell augers of different sizes with a mallet and gouge for cutting a disk in the wood whether the hole was required to be bored, a few "parsors" (sometimes called gimlets), and a bradawl. Add to these a smoothing plane and a few strong chisels, an iron square, a rule and a chalk line wound on a wooden reel. All these were arranged in a large flag carpenter's basket lined with canvas, in the inner pocket of which would be found a nail punch, a pot of grease for the saw and a file for sharpening it."

"The carpentry of the open countryside ought not to savour too much of the joiner's bench. In fact it is a separate craft and should be kept so."