A shopping trip in Amish Country leads to a prize
On a beautiful late-summer Saturday morning, when chores were calling, we turned a deaf ear to work and instead went on an adventure in Amish Country.
Dad, daughter number three and I piled in Dad’s pickup and set off for The Colonial Homestead, which sells antiques and hand tools for woodworking, blacksmithing and working with leather and masonry. The tools — chisels, saws, planes, levels, hand drills, bits and more — fill tables spread out across an expansive shop.
Proprietor Dan Raber makes and sells Windsor chairs, offers muzzle-loading supplies, and provides gunsmith services and does furniture restoration from his shop on Route 241 northeast of Millersburg.
And he sells the materials for timberframe structures, which is what drew us to his place.
We’re considering how best to provide a woodworking shop and garage for our daughter. She currently parks outdoors and has a workbench in the basement of her old house on the farm. There’s a one-car garage out back, but it’s small and full of stuff, including a wagon we used to haul customers to and from the fields when we operated a Christmas tree farm.
She suggested we consider a timberframe structure, which is intriguing for many reasons, as we found when we
visited with Raber.
He said all of the materials come from within 20 miles of his shop, which is appealing because buying from him would help the local economy and eliminate the cost of shipping. The timber comes notched and ready to assemble using mortise and tenon construction.
While he said he can supply labor to build it, we’d also have the choice of assembling it ourselves. Raber said two people can frame up a garage in a weekend.
The cost would be similar to most modern two-car garages, but the timber-frame structure offers an unobstructed second floor for storage and, most appealing to me, is that it looks like it belongs on a farm where the centerpiece is a barn built with mortise and tenon construction by my great-, greatgrandpa.
Raber does his best to keep things natural and sustainable. He keeps the use of metal to a minimum — wooden pegs whenever possible and very few nails — and sells organic, nontoxic milk paint to finish furniture and buildings.
As the name implies, it is made with milk, and it is amazingly durable. He gave us a couple of samples and urged us to try to scratch it. Fingernails didn’t make a dent or scratch.
When we asked about how to insulate the building so that we could still see the beauty of the wood framing, he said we could do that with sheep’s wool.
It’s natural, it’s a good insulator, it repels moisture, an inch or two will do the job, and it’s relatively inexpensive.
While mulling the possibility of a new, old-style building on the farm, we wandered amid the tools, and I came across something I had been seeking for years. It’s a vise, a very special one like the one in my dad’s garage.
It’s a Versa-vise made by the Willburt Co. in my hometown of Orrville, Ohio. I grew up in a house built by Burt
Cope — the Burt in Will-burt, which also made a host of other products from a factory about a mile from our house.
The vise is special only partly because I walked or drove past that factory nearly every day for years, but mostly because of its design. Like many other workbench vises, it swivels to allow you to efficiently position whatever you’re clamping so that you can easily work on it.
But unlike other vises, which have a
secondary clamp to lock it in place after swiveling, the main gear on the Versavise not only tightens the jaws around the mower blade you need to sharpen, but it also locks the vise so that it no longer swivels.
Another clever element of the design is that the vise swivels on a round metal shaft — from which the vise can easily be lifted and placed either vertically or horizontally, depending on which is most advantageous for the work at hand.
I was thrilled to find that Raber had several of these Will-burt vises. I bought one and my daughter bought another.
Then, with treasures in hand, we headed back to the farm for an afternoon of chores.
Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation. amiller@dispatch.com @youroldhouse