This was the final opportunity I had to examine the H.O. Studley ensemble prior to submitting the manuscript. The next time I encounter Studley in person will be after the book is out, and I show up to pack it for shipment to the exhibit. With that in mind I showed up for a full week of final exams, complete with many pages of notes and hints of things to check out. Armed with my measuring tools, lights, camera, notebooks, microscopes, and laptop I set to work.
I had three days to myself with the chest before Chris and Narayan showed up on Wednesday night for the final “formal” photography and video sessions. Highest on my “Things To Do” list was to examine as closely as possible the tools I believed were the product of Studley himself. Sure, I already had thousands of photos in my camera and dozens of pages of notes, but are these ever really enough? Did I overlook anything?
Sure enough, even at this late date after two dozen days of examination prior to this episode, I discovered some jaw dropping stuff.
For example, the head of the mallet is a single piece of sand cast brass. A. Single. Piece. Folks, that is just showing off.
The moldings on the faces and around the collars are integral to the casting, not pieces brazed on. Being from the patternmaking/metalcasting trades myself I know how he did it, and that makes it all the more spectacular.
One of my goals for this final trip and this coming winter was to document tools enough that I could replicate them and have those replicas in the exhibit “The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” I had already mapped out the strategy, workspace, materials, and a series of blogs on the subject of cutting, brazing, finishing, and assembling this magnificent tool.
I still have that plan, although now all I have to do is change my strategy, workspace, materials, and the concept of the blog.
Henry, Henry, Henry, what am I going to do with you?
My final day in Cedar Rapids was pretty much one of relaxation, as all the goals I had for the visit vis-a-vie the exhibit The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley were met.
I turns out that in a nearby town was a hot rod gathering, and Jameel and Father John’s dad Father Raphael had been a car buff and knew the organizers for the event. So off we went to spend a glorious day in the sun looking at the rods from the days of my youth.
After that we went to a huge yard sale with tons of tools, none of which tempted me, and finished off the evening dining on Mexican food.
Thanks to the fantastic contacts the Abrahams have in their home town, the visit was about as perfect and productive as it could be
Today was a seamless continuation of the successes of yesterday, as Jameel Abraham and I first went to the Scottish Rite Temple in Cedar rapids, Iowa, which will be the venue for the exhibit The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley. We spent about an hour in the exhibit hall, brainstorming about the actual layout and design of the event.
Can’t you just see it now?
Following that we went immediately to a theatrical lighting supplier to order the necessary fixtures to make sure the exhibit is visually compelling. It will be.
I spent the afternoon heading an hour north to purchase some Select white oak to complete the purchase of materials for the Studley workbench replica I will build to use as a prop in the exhibit.
Now that is a bench top!
I can now leave Cedar Rapids knowing everything is moving forward.
During last month’s foray into the alien planet known as Newengland I stopped in South Portland to visit MikeM, who had emailed me about a wheel-handled vise he found at a flea market up there.
Since I have been on the hunt for piano makers’ vises for several years, and since he was literally less than a mile off the interstate, stopping to check it out was a no-brainer. The vise itself was a head-scratcher.
It is definitely in the same vein as all the others I have seen, and no two have been identical thus far, this one was a real outlier.
The general configuration certainly conformed to the style, but the travel of the face was quite short, and where in the world did that five-spoke wheel come from?
One thing that definitely made me smile was the factt hat he had taken my advice and made some polissoirs himself from whisk brooms. I was honored to add to his collection with a genuine Roubo Polissoir from Don’s Barn.
Thanks Mike for sharing this peculiar tool with me. I will look fine alongside all the others in the book.
This year’s just-completed whirlwind blitz through New England began with a day of photographing Ben’s bench in central Rhode Island.
It turns out that Justin, the son of some dear friends here in the mountains, knew a guy with a piano maker’s workbench. The upcoming book on HO Studley and his tool cabinet and workbench will include a gallery of similar benches and vises, and Ben’s was certainly worthy of inclusion.
The bench featured a number of exciting revelations, not the least of which was the number “15” stamped perfectly on three of the adjacent parts. I can only conclude that there are (or were) at least 14 other units of the same manufacture somewhere.
What was best about the visit was that Ben’s bench is still a working tool to this day. He was apologetic about some of the accretions, but I was thrilled to see it still helping a guy make a living.
The motley crew, with Ben in the center and Justin on the right.
Now that the rough/first draft of VIRTUOSO: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley is in the computer I can now focus on those areas of the manuscript that need beefing up. One of those areas was the dearth of description regarding the possible daily activities of Studley in the Poole Piano Company when he was building the tool cabinet and work bench. That information has been very hard to find.
Fortunately I came across a shop in Charlottesville, two hours away, that was dedicated to the restoration, preservation, and care of fine old pianos. Owner Tom Shaw (right) and historical piano specialist Randolph Byrd (left) were a tremendous source of encouragement and information. Their framed poster of the Studley cabinet is jut out of sight on the right.
What made me excited to visit them was the breadth of their activities, plus the fact that Tom’s grandfather was a piano craftsman in Boston beginning in 1907, in other words, a contemporary of Studley’s. Here Tom is proudly showing me his grandfather’s piano tool kit, which his grandfather made himself. It put food on the table, and you can’t ask for much more than that.
The one and only known portrait of Studley depicts him as an “action man” at the Poole Piano Company. His task would have been to assemble a kit like this one (this is for a grand piano, but you get the idea) into a perfectly functioning mechanism that would produce beautiful noise whenever the keys were pressed down.
I even got to see the working of one of the tools identical to Studley’s for adjusting some part of the action mechanism.
One of the final steps before assembling the action is “sighting the hammers” in order to make sure they are aligned and evenly graduated. While this is for a grand piano action, the process for an upright would be conceptually identical.
Gentlemen, thank you for pushing back the boundaries of my ignorance considerably. A copy of the book will wing its way to you when it is available.
Among my recollections and acknowledgements from the recent MJD auction is to thank again Martin Donnelly himself for encouraging me to spread the Studley Exhibit gospel among the attendees. From the auctioneer’s podium at the initiation of activities, he announced the exhibit, pointed me out by name, and encouraged attendees to speak with me about it.
Martin also welcomed the stack of announcement post cards I’d brought with me, and they were right next to the sign-in station the whole weekend. (If you would like some to share and help promote the exhibit, just drop me a line via this web site’s “Contact” function and I will try to get you what you need.)
Like I said in a previous post, there are an awful lot of great folks in the tool world, and Martin Donnelly is certainly royalty in that world.
After having been shut out for the first 4/5ths of the auction I managed to snatch two lots late on Saturday morning. I’ve already mentioned the Lamson machinist’s lathe I got but I also garnered this nice lot of Japanese planes and a really neat bamboo divider. The largest plane had never been used, but the others were well polished, both wood and cutting edge, by multitudes of handlings. I can’t wait to get them all up and running and integrated into my activities in The Barn.
As always you leave events like this with a mixture of aggravation at not getting what you wanted and exhilaration at getting some things you didn’t expect.
One of the frustrating things about my documentation of Studley’s tools, but still useful in projecting future observations, is the ambiguity about how his tool collection was assembled, and in many cases modified or fabricated. My notes on the subject during the examinations are not glib — they are in fact quite thorough — but neither are they as complete as possible. Or to paraphrase another project, my written and photographic notes, while extensive, are not “as perfectly as possible.” In fact there is no doubt that much about the tools and the man that is un-knowable at this point in time.
These lacunae come into clear focus as I continue writing the manuscript for VIRTUOSO: The Henry O. Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench. “Yes,” I mutter to myself, “I can see that this was modified, you dope.” My conversations with myself are at best self deprecating. More usually they are caustic and cruel.
The really good news is that I am compiling an extensive and detailed list of “things to check out” during the final visit, and I have have grafted on a few extra days to work alone, with just a bright light and a microscope to examine everything at a new scale, with new questions.
I will spend a lot of time looking microscopic details of things like the moldings along the handle of the mallet along with any further fabrication details (cast? machine from solid stock? brazed from plate stock?), the domed coin-knurled knobs that are everywhere…
While I won’t be able to provide a microscope for you to observe the cabinet or tools in the May 2015 exhibit, I hope to squeeze every bit of information I can out of the collection for you to enjoy along with me.
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For information about the once-in-a-lifetime three-day-only exhibit of the Studley ensemble, you can find out more here.
As we get closer to the start of ticket sales, I wanted to post a quick note about the ordering process and claiming your tickets.
The Purchase
Tickets sales for the H. O. Studley Tool Chest and Workbench Exhibit will start at 12:01am EDT on Sunday, June 1. At that time the TICKETS link in the menu bar will become a live store, and it will have three items — each representing a day of the event (Friday, May 15; Saturday, May 16; and Sunday, May 17).
When you click on a particular day you will be presented with a drop down menu from which you will choose a session time. Each session is 50 minutes long, and starts on the hour from 10:00am to 5:00pm. Once you select a specific session, you will see how many tickets are still available for that session and a quantity box to select the number of tickets you wish to purchase.
Each session will only have 50 tickets available, so we recommend that groups wanting to attend a session together have one person buy the tickets for the entire group. That’s the simplest way to ensure that you all get tickets for the same session.
After selecting your session and quantity, you will click the button to add them to your cart — then a View Cart button will appear. Click that button and then Proceed to Checkout (assuming you have added all the tickets you wish to purchase).
Once you’re on the Checkout page you will register like any other on-line purchase. Simply fill in the fields (red asterisks signify mandatory information) for your name, address, email and phone number. ***We will not be selling, renting, or sharing this information with anyone. We just need to be 100% confident we can contact you.*** Then after double-checking the details of your purchase you will click the button to pay on PayPal ( Note — you will be able to pay with a credit card even if you don’t have a PayPal account), and it will take you to the payment screen where you will follow their prompts to remit payment. Upon completion, you will receive an email confirming your order. While the order is instantly completed and the email is automated, it still may take a little time for it to show up depending on the amount of traffic we are experiencing.
Also, to answer a question we’ve already received: YES! The ticket store is also accessible via a mobile device.
The Event
You will not receive your tickets in the mail. Instead tickets will be picked up the day of the event. For this reason, we ask that everyone arrive at least 15 minutes before their session to assure enough time to get tickets sorted and make sure everyone is there.
Tickets will be held under the name of the person who purchased them. That person must bring a photo ID to claim the tickets, and then be responsible for dispensing tickets to those in their group.
We hope this gives you the necessary information to feel at ease about your upcoming purchase and the steps of doing so.
If you have any other questions, feel free to contact us.
For a moment, think about that ten-page term paper you had to write in high school, agonizingly struggling to finish the assigned task. Now multiply that ten-page paper by a factor of eighty-two, combined with transforming that much of some old French guy’s arcane verbiage into comprehensible English and you know what it is like to spend days on end working with Roubo. It is not agonizing — to the great contrary – but it is grueling.
Combine that with a bitterly cold winter (for these parts) and the ongoing chore of relocating after three decades in the same house without ever systematically winnowing the papers residing in multiple file cabinets and dozens of bookcases, and you get some idea why I rewarded myself this afternoon with a delightful diversion — formatting and massaging the manuscript for Virtuoso: the Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley. No less arduous than Roubo, but certainly a welcomed change of pace.
For the sheer fun of it, I spent several hours creating the tool inventory for the cabinet, merging the notes I dictated to Chris during my examination of all the tools individually during our research and photographic forays with Narayan’s exquisite photographs. Sometimes I just stopped to stare a the screen, to relive the moments past. It was and is unbelievably cool.
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