Belknap Hardware was a department store similar to Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward, founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 1840 and in operation until 1986. This catalog is a sub-catalog for their offerings in Department 2, those being primarily lawn mowers, garden hose, grinding wheels, scythes and related tools, rakes, and shovels, with some equine equipment for good measure. Belknap’s “Bluegrass” line of tools was famed for their often elaborate decoration, and were made for them under contract with major manufacturers rather than being a manufacturer themselves.
This post was facilitated by use of an overhead document scanner, as the dimensions of the catalog were too large for a conventional flatbed. Crooked pages are the result of the difficulty in working with a document of this volume and speed taking a priority over precision, as some pages refused to lay flat in spite of the scanner’s automated software removing distortion from curved pages.
One of the largest and most notable snath manufacturers, and the only surviving of them all to the modern day. This catalog is mostly likely circa ~1931-1935 due to the inclusion of insert prints of the Ironclad snaths which were patented in 1931, meaning that the earliest issue date was post-patent, but before they formally released catalog No.24. Printing catalogs was quite costly historically, so the norm was to produce them only when changes to the selection, pricing, and other relevant information had become so out of date as to necessitate a new issue. This catalog was likely printed prior to September 22, 1931, but issued within a few years of that date, such that the Ironclad snaths were a recent loose-leaf addition. We apologize for the heavier watermarking on this catalog than on many previous, but due to the wide prevalence of Seymour’s snaths and past instances of people cropping our archived images for eBay listings without proper credit, we’ve had to resort to this approach to prevent commercial abuse of a free resource made available thanks to large amounts of time and money spent in their acquisition and hosting. Watermark-free images are on-hand in our personal files, and we’re happy to negotiate access to them for fellow researchers’ non-commercial use.
Back in the 1960’s, researchers discovered that wood could be plasticized by use of treatment with ammonia gas in a pressure chamber. The ammonia would dissolve the hydrogen bonds between the lignin and the cellulose fibers, allowing the fibers to slip past one another, and enabling extreme bends to be made. When the ammonia evaporated out of the wood, fresh hydrogen bonds would form, setting the bend permanently in place as if the wood had grown that way. In the 1970’s through the present, some experiments have been done regarding the process, but it has yet to meet with any commercial application, mostly due to the difficulty of safely obtaining, storing, handling, and using deadly, corrosive anhydrous ammonia gas.
Meanwhile, woodworkers agree that kiln dried wood is difficult to bend, and that air-dried is the way to go if attempting to make steam-bent wood products. However, many parts of the world are unable to reasonably source air-dried stock and are forced to make do with kiln-dried. Many have discovered that adding a little household grade aqueous ammonia solution (1-3% concentration ammonium hydroxide) to their steam generator helps with bending kiln-dried wood. Ammonia fuming is a common woodworking technique to darken high-tannin woods like oak, and while stronger concentrations work faster, low concentrations have been found to still produce equal results if exposure time is lengthened. This, combined with stumbling across this 2015 study by an Iraqi university, combined to indicate to us that aqueous ammonia could be used as an effective wood plasticizer, significantly reducing the risks involved with working with the ammonia.
We have begun to experiment with treating wood with a 29% ammonium hydroxide solution, and the results are quite promising. Historically snath manufacture has been a costly process, with the steam bending resulting in a very high breakage rate. With good quality ash wood in scarcer supply than ever before thanks to the emerald ash borer, methods for reliably producing the complex bends of a scythe snath are the needed if a traditional or semi-traditional wooden American snath is to remain in production. Now that we’ve developed a soak tank and functioning method for producing a bend that forces compression, we will need to manufacture more clamps to produce the full 3D curvature needed for a finished snath and refine our drying methods to reduce checking due to the rapid evaporation rate of the ammonia.
A collection of writings on edged tools from the folks at Baryonyx Knife Co.
