A Marples Ultimatum brace from the second half of the 19th century and a notched bit
I have previously written about using braces in general and some peculiarities of the Ultimatum Brace in my collection. But those blogs came out a long time ago. In retrospect I realized that I missed an important point: from a collector's viewpoint, the Ultimatum brace is a lovely item that graces any tool collection with its beauty. But from a practical standpoint - I gotta drill some holes - the Ultimatum brace is the culmination of a series of developments that turned out to be a blind alley and disappeared around 1900.
Forgetting about drill bit technology for a moment, the whole point of a brace is to turn a fairly large bit with enough torque so that it cuts the wood. For small diameters - let's say 1/4" and smaller - you don't need that much torque. Simply spinning the bit fast makes the hole faster. All sorts of small drills existed since the ancient times. But for larger bits, you need torque. To get that torque, you need an offset handle. You can either make an auger bit, put an handle on top and turn it round and round swapping hands all the time, or you can make a brace. The former technology was used for very large holes. While I don't know when the concept of a brace was invented, one of the earliest was found in the shipwreck of the Mary Rose (1545). As you can see in the pictures of the miniature brace (below), an all wood brace was just a cut-out wooden frame. There is no adjustable chuck; bits were just wedged into the end. You ended up with a weak section in the middle because of the offset needed for torque - and you could crack the frame with too much pressure pressing down to make the bit advance. And press down you did, as early bits rarely had a screw tip and were at best inefficient.
A Boxwood miniature of an 18th century wooden brace
The obvious choice was to re-enforce the brace with metal, but in the 16th century, and really up until the middle of the 17th century, a thin bit of brass or iron plate was a hand-done blacksmithing operation, with enough hassle to ensure that the task was far from routine. Things changed by the early 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution making common brass cast parts and basic machining. Cast brass metal re-enforcing plates were added to braces for strength. The wedged in wooden chuck was replaced by a brass chuck that held in the bits using a button on the brace and a notch cut into the auger bits.
This worked reasonably well, but in 1849 William Marples patented one more improvement on this technology. Instead of having a continuous wooden body with a rounded section for the handle, the Marples improvement used a metal rod to join top and bottom of the brace with a revolving handle in the middle. Marples also extended the brass plates on the sides to form a metal shell. This made for a much stronger brace. The wood was now a filler rather than an essential structural component. Elegant and attractive, the Marples Ultimatum Brace (above) became the fancy brace for the next half century. The brace, however, missed a critical design point. Marples "fixed" the wooden brace, but what woodworkers wanted wasn't a better wooden brace but rather a better tool. And for that we need to look at the Scotch brace (below), which is all metal and essentially the same idea but without any wood at all. The result was both far stronger and had far fewer parts that needed skilled fitting together. A lovely Scotch brace surrounded by a traditional set center, spoon, and other bits that make up part of a traditional bit set. The Scotch brace is loaded with wonderful forged details like the heart shaped bit release button. You can clearly see the notch on the square top of the auger bit that clicks into the square chuck on the brace.
An American version of the Scotch brace from the 1860's replaced the notched chuck with an adjustable two jaw chuck. This was a big improvement if for no other reason that the position of the notch was never standardized, and bits from different makers weren't always interchangeable. Later the Americans added a ratchet so you could use the brace effectively in the parts of the stroke where your arm had the most leverage.
If you look at the fancy precise forging of the Scotch brace, the largely decorative details needed a fair amount of labor. But a wooden brace needed orders of magnitude more skilled labor and that was expensive. The American method of mass production of using intensive capital for mass production machines meant that once the various parts of the American brace were invented, it could be made cost effectively. By 1900, within a few years of the American brace's introduction to the English market, by 1900, the wooden brace disappeared from catalogs. As you can see in the Nurse catalog from 1893, the American brace (no. 58) with a ratchet was slightly cheaper at 4/6 (4 shillings 6 pence) than a Scotch brace (No. 59) at 5/0 and a good two shillings less than their least expensive wooden brace (no. 61) at 6/6.
C. Nurse and Co Catalog from 1893
Just a note about the miniature wooden brace. During my teens I got the bright idea of making miniature tools for dollhouses. My tools never sold, but I still have the samples. This one is all boxwood based on a design in Eric Sloan's "Museum of Early American Tools", the bit is from a twist bit (not historically correct), and it actually works. I don't own a full-sized wooden brace.
Join the conversation
10/25/2023 David Wiegand
Good post Joel. I’d never heard of the Scotch brace until now. When was the Spofford brace introduced? While similar in certain aspects it seems less decorative and therefore less expensive to produce in comparison to the Scotch brace. Competitively speaking how did the two braces fare against each other?
There is a Spofford brace patent from 1859. The technology of the Spofford brace is miles ahead of the scotch brace. the latter is a hance forging with a lot of hand work, the former as a malleable iron casting that could flex without breaking and was machined to final function. I don't have a Spofford brace in my collection and I have never actually used one, I can't comment on which was better. In the Nurse catalog picture #56 they are offering a Spofford brace but it is a little more expensive than a Scotch brace but less than an Ultimatum brace.
10/25/2023 Michael O’Brien
Thank you Joel for that “bracing” history lesson. I really enjoyed learning the real history behind the swing braces. Your blogs are educational and entertaining.
Cheers,
Michael
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Cheers,
Michael