Spoon drill.MOV

Spoon drills were the most commonly used before the industrial age when modern "cork screw" drills became easy to manufacture. They were common for basically any type of woodworking from stool and other furniture, to chests to shipbuilding. The spoon head eats through wood and other soft material as it spins and makes a hole. It doesn't transport the residue from the hole though so you have to clean that out more often than we're used to with modern drills or you get stuck. There are many examples of these from iron age, the best known are the tools in the Mästermyr chest from viking age which contained several spoon drills. Nowdays they're still used by chairmakers but not many others and are hard to come by. So I made my own tempered tool steel bit for the 19th century antique spoon drill crank I bought recently.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Spoon
• drill

[Fargbollen]

I made the drill bit from modern high grade Chrome-Molybdenium tool steel to make it extra durable. Historically they'd have been made in high carbon steel or possibly iron body and welded in steel tip, though probably you'd have to use good steel able to take a temper for the whole bit for it not to bend when working with it in harder wood types lilke oak, i.e. when building ships.