Improvised Workshop Tools: A Dentist's Forceps Vise and a Copper Worm Gauge

Take the lantern, friend, and mind the third step down. It is loose, and I keep it loose on purpose, for a deputy who does not know of it learns of it with his tailbone. Below lies my workshop at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, and in it the tools I made by moonlight. Barnaby, my black bear of some four hundred pounds and a great many grudges, keeps the watch above upon the woodpile, lying like a duchess on a fainting couch. We shall be undisturbed.

The Forceps That Became a Vise

In this year of our Lord 1865, a country man does not buy his tools. He makes them, steals them, or marries into them. Down in Baltimore they have kept a proper college of dental surgery since 1840, the first such school on God's earth, where young men learn from books with pictures in them. Up here in the Suncook Valley a tooth-puller learns by doing, and the patients learn by screaming. Most country forceps are hammered out by the village smith or ordered from a cutler in Boston, and they fit a jaw about as well as a borrowed boot fits a goose. So I made my own.

The instrument of which I am proudest began life as a pair of lower-molar forceps, curved of beak and made of good Sheffield steel. I took them off a traveling dentist who owed me eleven dollars and a mule. The mule I never saw. One night I was counterstamping a run of large cents, and the coins kept skidding beneath the punch like a drunk deacon on ice. I looked at those forceps, those forceps looked at me, and we came to an understanding.

A tooth and a coin die want the same thing of a man: a good grip, a steady hand, and no sermon. I ground the beaks flat, filed a shallow seat into each jaw, and fitted a thumbscrew through the handles. Now that jig grips a coin as tight as a widow grips a will. I lay it upon the anvil, set my hardened steel punch reading G. G. WILKINS over PITTSFIELD N.H., and strike. Mark this, experimenter: the punch must be harder than the coin, or you are only beating two pennies into a quarrel.

The learning runs in every direction. Coinwork taught me patience in the wrist; coppersmithing taught me how metal behaves hot and cold; and all of it went back into my dentistry. A man who knows how a copper cent gives beneath a punch knows how a rotten molar will give beneath the beak. I have pulled a molar, stamped a penny, and bent a coil all before breakfast, and my wife maintains I still cannot fix a squeaky door.

What Lies Beneath the Anvil

Picture October, three years back. I stood down here with the worm gauge in one hand and a jar of tooth tincture in the other when Barnaby above made a sound like a church organ falling down a well. That means boots on the turnpike. Two county deputies came, one fat and one fatter, bearing a warrant soggy as a doughnut.

Now, under my anvil there is a trap. The anvil sits upon a stump of white oak, the stump upon a plank floor, and three of those planks lift if you know which nail is a liar. Beneath lies a dry cellar the size of a coffin, lined with birch bark against the damp. Into it went the stamping punches, for a man in a sheriff's office who sees my name in steel gets ideas about my name on a docket. In went the coin jig. In went my calipers. That little hollow holds more hidden iron than a Concord politician's conscience holds hidden excuses.

And what did I leave in plain sight? Every dental instrument I own, laid upon a clean towel like a surgeon's altar. Nothing sends a deputy back out the door faster than a man in a leather apron cheerfully asking which tooth is troubling him. The fatter one went pale. The fat one tried to circle round behind the still-house, and Barnaby, who had been feigning sleep, rolled off the woodpile and took hold of the seat of his britches. There came a ripping like a sail in a gale, and that officer departed up the turnpike toward Barnstead in his long-handles, one suspender flapping behind him like a flag of surrender. Nobody bled, but the deputy's dignity has never been found.

The other had spied a pair of calipers I had missed, and asked their purpose. I told him I was measuring his head for a hat, a coffin, or a jar, whichever the county could afford. He left without his warrant. I used it to start the forge.

A Carolina Runner's Bag of Tricks

A guest of late, Junior Vance, a runner out of North Wilkesboro, quick of tongue and quicker of wheel, came north to compare notes on hiding tools from the law. Among his people, he tells me, making do is the whole religion. His Uncle Odell, wanting a length of pipe bent one Saturday night and possessing neither bender, vise, nor a lick of sense, slipped into the Baptist church and bent it round the iron armrest of the third pew from the front. The pipe bent fine, and so did the armrest. Sunday morning the preacher discovered it and preached forty-five minutes on how the Lord's own hand had smote that pew for the sins of the congregation. Half the church got saved, and Odell, seated in that very pew, said amen louder than anybody. That is more return on a dent than I ever got out of the Merrimack County treasury.

Junior's own trouble was noise, for wrenches rattle, and a rattle in the load is a confession on wheels. He took his mother's old wedding-ring quilt, sewed little pockets all through the backing, one wrench to a pocket, and rolled it tight. One cold night at a roadhouse outside Elkin, a shivering deputy asked to borrow that very quilt for a nap by the stove. He slept two hours beneath twenty-two pounds of good steel and woke declaring it the warmest quilt he ever had, with, as he put it, "a real substantial feel."

He sized his fittings by eye until he took up his grandmother's knitting gauge, a little tin plate full of holes, each sized for a needle, and failed to put it back careful. That winter she knit his cousin a sweater with one sleeve a whole inch wider than the other, and gave Junior a look no sheriff in two states has matched. Another time he hollowed a great mail-order catalog with a razor and nested his tools in the pages, neat as eggs, until his Aunt Pearlie opened it to order an Easter hat. She closed it without a word, wore last year's hat, and stared at him through the whole service. Between the pew, the quilt, the knitting plate, and the catalog, I am persuaded the women and clergy of Wilkes County are the true law of that land. As Junior summed it: "Doc, the sheriff only wanted to arrest me. Granny wanted me to understand."

The Worm Gauge and the Temper of Copper

Now to the instrument I prize above my own children, who are less accurate. My worm gauge is a pair of outside calipers forged from a broken buggy spring, with a little brass scale scratched upon a strip of old sheathing. Every smith and machinist uses calipers to check a diameter or a wall without a finished rule. I made mine for one office alone: checking copper tubing before it becomes a coil.

Why such care? Because tubing thick in one spot and thin in another is a liar, and a liar fails at the worst hour. A thin spot cracks, a crack leaks, and a leak of spirit vapour near a fire is how a still-house becomes a funeral pyre. So I walk the calipers down the whole length of the tube and feel for any place the jaws pinch or slack. If the wall be uneven, the tube goes back to the scrap pile.

Copper has a temper like a deacon. Beat on it long enough and it goes stiff and cracks; warm it and it is agreeable again. Smiths call this annealing: hammering hardens the metal, heat softens it, and the smith who forgets it will split his work and blame the Lord. Here my dental hand serves me. The same light wrist I use on a stubborn tooth I use on soft copper, coaxing, never forcing. And the metal must be honest: pure copper, joined with silver solder or sound mechanical unions, never lead, for lead is poison. I would sooner pull my own teeth with fence pliers than put lead in a still.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

Every run is an experiment divided into cuts: the foreshots, the heads, the hearts, and the tails. The foreshots and heads carry methanol and other nasty volatiles, and a careful man throws them away. He does not drink them, rub them on a gum, or sell them to a deputy, however much the deputy deserves it.

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote that his uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. His uncle is half right, with the right half in the wrong bucket. Here in New England every farmer saved his hardwood ashes like gold dust, poured water through them in a leach barrel, ran off the lye, and boiled it down to potash; refined further, it became pearlash. Potash was one of New England's chief cash crops, shipped off for soap, for glass, and even to raise a cake before saleratus came along. My own grandmother made soap that would strip the bark off a birch. Ashes are mighty useful at the soap kettle, not in the doubler.

Oak surely works upon spirit, but slowly, in a charred barrel over months and years, lending color and flavor. Shavings tossed into a thump keg for one run do about as much as a sermon does for a mule. No ash, no shaving, no prayer will take methanol out of a bad run. The only remedy for bad heads is to cut them off and throw them away.

Last, the blue flame test, a dangerous myth. Some fellow sets a match to a spoonful in a tin and declares a pretty blue flame proves the whiskey safe. Hogwash in a hat. Wood alcohol and grain alcohol both burn with the same pale, near-invisible blue; the flame cannot tell the difference, and a man who trusts it may lose his eyesight or worse. The flame tells you only that something burns. Honest cuts are the only test worth a damn.

I will tell you plain, as I tell everyone: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and these words are for history and education only. Barnaby is not licensed either, and look how he turned out. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.