How To Hold And Handle Tools
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HOW TO HOLD AND HANDLE TOOLS
Observation may form part of each boy's lesson, but when it comes to the handling of tools, practice becomes the only available means of making a workman. Fifty years of observation would never make an observer an archer or a marksman, nor would it enable him to shoe a horse or to build a table.
It sometimes happens that an apprentice will, with little observation, seize a saw in the proper way, or hold a plane in the correct manner, and, in time, the watchful boy will acqu
re fairly correct habits. But why put in useless time and labor in order to gain that which a few well-directed hints and examples will convey?
Tools are made and are used as short cuts toward a desired end. Before the saw was invented the knife was used laboriously to sever and shape the materials. Before planes were invented a broad, flat sharpened blade was used to smooth off surfaces. Holes were dug out by means of small chisels requiring infinite patience and time. Each succeeding tool proclaimed a shorter and an easier way to do a certain thing. The man or boy who can make a new labor-saving tool is worthy of as much praise as the man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before.
Let us now thoroughly understand how to hold and use each tool. That is half the value of the tool itself.