Spills, Spills, Spills, Spills,

This is another resurrected project from a year ago or so.

Last year at Willamette mission Civil war reenactment, one of our friends in the traveling town folk let me borrow a tool that her brother had given her for her birthday. She brought it over to me and I knew exactly what it was, and she graciously let me play with it (thank you Heather) all weekend. I had so much fun with making spills with it I just could not stand it, I had to make one for myself.

A spill is a spiral of wood, generally pine, that is made into a long cone for which it is used to take fire from the fireplace and transfer the flame to a candle or light a pipe. This was before the mass production of matches. People would have to go to

the local cabinetmaker and he would make them out of scraps, because nothing went to waste.

Being the way I am, I was not going to buy one, so I set out to find, or try to find plans

so I could make one in the more traditional manner. Well after many attempts, I finally shelved the project for another time, sometimes a little time does wonders for the mind.

So last week with wood in hand, I trekked on down to the shop and started on the mock-up, just to see if I could make it right, well to make a long story short IT WORKED!!!

Next thing was to make the real deal, and came up with a very good working spill plane. Below are the pics of the not so finished plane, I want to put more period correct screws and finish on it.

Front view of the spill plane.

Left end

This is the fun part when the spill is coming off the plane knife.

Just a few minutes of work and I have a full cup, I think that I will make a sign to sell them at reenactments, 12 for a nickle, at least they are period correct. It is real addicting pushing a piece of wood

over a piece of metal and cumming up with a useful product that we can use in reinacting.