In the latest in our tool collecting series, John Adamson looks at gimlets
David Garrick, the actor and playwright, is said to have been the most portrayed Englishman of the 18th century. In one likeness by Angelica Kauffman, the Swiss artist, we can see a seated Garrick peering out at us. When the actor Ralph Wewitzer was told that the eye of his fellow Thespian could ‘pierce a deal board’, he quipped: ‘I presume, sir, that is what is called a gimlet-eye.’ There must have been many who were kept in thrall by Garrick’s famously penetrating gaze, captured so strikingly in Kauffman’s portrait. But now that the gimlet has been forsaken by many craftsmen the imagery has lost some of its bite and gimlets are seldom found in woodworkers’ tool-boxes today. One of the humblest of hand-held woodworking tools, the gimlet is often T-shaped like a corkscrew but terminates in a very sharp point. It has a shank that ends in a tang fitting into a socket in the head to provide a handle for turning.
Nowadays, the gimlet is mostly used to bore small, shallow holes, including those for starting nails and screws. A fine thread at the conical tip draws the tool into the wood as it is turned, without the need to apply much pressure.
History of gimlets
Writing in the late 17th century, Joseph Moxon in his Mechanick Exercises outlined the tool’s practicality: ‘The gimblet [sic]. . . hath a Worm at the end of its Bitt. Its Office is to make a round hole in those places of your work where the Stock of the Piercer [i.e. brace or bit-stock] by reason of its own Sholder, or a Sholder, or Butting out upon the work will not turn about.’ Diderot and d’Alembert echoed this idea in their Encyclopédie in the mid-1700s when they described the joiner’s gimlet (vrille) as a tool for boring holes when a brace cannot be used.
The French today still use the term vrille for a gimlet, having added a figurative meaning to their word for tendril. Its etymology ultimately goes back to vitis (the Latin for vine). Our English word ‘gimlet’ seems to have had a former life in the French language: guimbelet (1412); gymbellet (1534); giblet (1549) are all attested, and signified a tool for piercing casks, in other words a kind of wine fret. Alain Rey in his Dictionnaire historique de la langue française suggests that the word was a western adaptation of the Gallo-Romance word wimblequin, an early form of the modern French word vilebrequin (a brace or bit-stock). This is strikingly like the English word ‘wimble’, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a gimlet (or an auger or even a brace), and given an Anglo-Norman etymology – and before that a range of cognates in several Germanic languages.
Types of gimlet
Gimlets of all patterns, whatever their application, are essentially augers in miniature – but they have been adapted for working with one hand. Their lead at the tip is in the shape of a cone with a fine thread. The worker is given a fair degree of accuracy as he starts to bore a hole, but needs to bear in mind that the point at the end of the thread is very slightly off-centre.
The thread acts as a worm as the tip is drawn into the wood. In contrast, ordinary twist drills are much harder to position accurately. The way the hole is cut then depends on the type of gimlet being used. The twist gimlet relies on its threaded tip to start a tapering hole by squeezing the wood while the helical half-round groove that twists around the lower shank serves both to side-cut the wood and clear the waste; it is an ideal tool for making pilot holes for screws or nails.
The shell or spoon gimlet (what the great 19th-century tool-maker Charles Holtzapffel dubbed the ‘common gimlet’) with a side-cutting edge along the length of the stem flute reams a straight-sided ‘through’ hole. The tool tapers slightly towards the head to avoid friction in the hole. In Holtzapffel’s words: ‘The principal part of the cutting is done by the angular corner intermediate between the worm and shell, which acts much like the auger … The gimlet is worked until the shell is full of wood, when it is unwound and withdrawn to empty it.’
The auger gimlet has two cutting edges forming a double helix. Often the auger gimlet is of the Scotch square-nose pattern with sharp edges to the nose, which in this instance is the bottom of the helix at the junction with the threaded tip. As the gimlet is turned, material is cut from the bottom of the hole and the chips are speedily removed through the helical throat without the frequent need to withdraw the tool from the work. The resultant hole is also straight-sided but smoother than that made with a shell gimlet.
Gimlets have also been manufactured as bits designed to fit into a brace and so are often equipped with a square-tapered tang for insertion in the pad or chuck. There is the huge mechanical advantage here of using a brace, with its greater rotary force applied steadily in one direction instead of the intermittent motion of a gimlet being turned by hand. The Swiss-pattern gimlet bit, or wilk shell bit (as the Scottish makers Alexander Mathieson & Sons liked to call it), has a pod-like shell body with a half-twist tapering off into a screw point, whereas the twist and shell gimlet bits match exactly the patterns of handled gimlets of these types.
Stemming from these main patterns is a range of specialist gimlets for a variety of tasks. Spike gimlets, for example, are sturdier gimlets of either the twist or shell pattern and are designed to make bigger holes for spikes (i.e. larger nails). In contrast, there are sprig gimlets designed to make holes for small nails with very small heads.
Bell-hanger’s gimlets come with a particularly long shank (some 12–36in long) and are used for making holes in floors and ceilings for the wires of household mechanical bell installations or, more recently, for telephone cables. Spout or gutter gimlets, on the other hand, whether of the twist or shell pattern were made some 9–12in in length and were presumably once part of the kit of the workman installing gutters.
Other kinds of gimlet have long been used in the brewing and wine-making trades. The brewer’s gimlet (or spile gimlet), often wittily given a barrel-shaped head adorned with hoop-like rings, serves to bore a vent-hole in the shive or bung of a barrel, which would be stoppered afterwards with a spile or tapered peg. The wine fret is for sampling purposes; it bores a hole in the head of a cask, which is afterwards plugged with a wooden spigot.
Deceptively simple
The remarkable invention of the helical screw is crucial to the way the gimlet works. Long credited to the ingenuity of Archimedes, the first-known mechanical screw, may, according to Stephanie Dalley, the scholar of the ancient Near East, have been known to the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 BC) and put to use to lift water to his palace garden at Nineveh. Not dissimilarly, the spiral groove on the twist gimlet lifts away the shavings as it is turned, as well as side-cutting the hole. The double helix on the auger gimlet likewise makes the shavings rise. We must not forget that the conical worm found at the tip of most types of gimlet also relies upon a thread to penetrate the wood with relatively little effort.
Long used to make the pilot holes for woodscrews, gimlets in earlier times were vital, for early screws, made by hand, were blunt. Making pointed screws by hand was an arduous and expensive task because their thread or worm had to be cut with a special file and were inevitably hard to make perfect. Since lathes could not cut a tapering thread, the first machine-made screws were also blunt and not self-starting. Workmen still had to rely on a gimlet to drill a lead hole. True, the tool-maker had to file the threaded tip of the gimlet by hand, but that required much less work than cutting a threaded tip on every screw by hand. The challenge for manufacturers was to find an economical way of putting a gimlet point at the tip of woodscrews to improve their efficiency.
Tips for collectors
1. Gimlets seldom have any great monetary value as collector’s items but nevertheless are fascinating in their variety of pattern, size and function.
2. Decorative gimlets seem mostly to be those from the wine-making and brewing industries, where the handles are sometimes very attractive.
3. Ken Hawley and Dennis Watts give a succinct account of gimlets and how Sheffield blacksmiths used to make them until the 1960s in their booklet Gimlet Patterns and Manufacture, edited by Tony Waldis and published in 2017 by the Hawley Collection Trust Ltd in association with the Tools and Trades History Society (ISBN 978-0-947673-25-3).
4. Quality gimlets are made today by manufacturers such as Claude Hamon, Outillage Émile Peyron in France and Star-M in Japan.
A flurry of patents in the United States from the late 1830s reflected attempts made by tool-makers to make a gimlet-pointed screw by machine, among whom was Thomas J. Sloan, who patented an effective method on 24 November 1846 (‘Making Wood Screws’, US Utility Patent 4864), where the thread at the point had the same pitch as on the body of the screw. The American Charles D. Rogers was later to solve how to taper the threaded core into the smooth shank with the thread running out to nothing.
The London iron and screw firm of Nettlefold & Son acquired the British patent to Sloan’s design (GB 11,991, in 1847) and with Joseph Chamberlain formed a partnership to manufacture gimlet-pointed screws in Birmingham. Chamberlain’s son was later to become mayor of Birmingham, and his grandson prime minister. The handle of the gimlet has varied over time and according to the tool’s purpose. At first it was ellipsoid and fitted comfortably in a clenched hand. Many gimlets today are of a T-handle type, but for certain trades in-line handles are used owing to the restricted space in which the gimlet has to be used. One of these is the piano tuner’s gimlet. There are also hand-pad gimlets where gimlet blades are fastened in the pad handle, much like a pad-saw blade. Nowadays, wooden handles have often been succeeded by ones in man-made materials. Scotch-eye gimlets come with a hoop at the head to insert a shaped wooden rod for turning. Ring-handle gimlets also exist.
For some of these, the wire is gracefully bent round to form the handle. Twist gimlets handled in this style are still made today by firms such as Claude Hamon or Émile Peyron in France, the bent-wire head lending itself to mass-production. Writing in the 1960s, the tool historian William Goodman opined that the gimlet was the last survivor of the auger family still in common use. In today’s world of power tools and twist drills, the potential usefulness of gimlets should not be underestimated. Thankfully, modern-day manufacturers of gimlets like Hamon and Peyron, or Star in Japan, are clearly contributing to the hand-tool revival we are witnessing and are helping to bring the gimlet back into wider circulation.
Besides the adventures of Biggles, Captain W. E. Johns wrote another series of books for boys. This was about Captain Lorrington King, the retired leader of a commando troop, who went by the nickname of Gimlet. In a letter addressed ‘to every boy who reads this book’ and inserted in copies of one of the Gimlet books when put on sale, Johns wrote: ‘Gimlet is still on the job – not regularly, but from time to time when something unusual crops up, some nut that cannot be opened by normal diplomatic nutcrackers. Gimlet usually manages to bore a hole in it.’ A keen-witted problem-solver, working on jobs in hard-to-reach spots, Captain King was indeed the hero throughout the series. One of the books, published in 1950, was fittingly titled: Gimlet Bores In.
If you’re enjoying tool collecting you will find more examples in Antique Woodworking Tools: Their Craftsmanship from the Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century (ISBN 978-1-898565-05-5). For more information see www.antiquewoodworkingtools.co.uk
