Brace and bit

Also called: brace, bit brace, ratchet brace

A brace and bit is a hand tool for boring round holes in wood. The brace is a crank-shaped frame the user grips and turns in a circular sweep, and the bit is the cutting tool locked into jaws at the bottom of the frame, which does the actual cutting as the crank turns it.

Turning the bit

The bit's shank is usually square, and Bird (2004) noted that it is often slightly tapered so that it seats firmly. Wearing (2010) described the woodworker's brace as having just two jaws in its chuck, gripping that square shank in a matching square socket at the base of the chuck. To keep the bit biting into the wood while the free hand sweeps the crank, the brace has a domed head, or crown, at the top, and Ellis (1908) explained that the necessary pressure is applied by the workman leaning his head or his breast onto that head, whichever is more convenient, as he turns. Jones (1920) gave the same advice from the other direction, that the work in hand should be fixed high enough for the worker's chest to bear down on the brace and support it. Hasluck (1897) added the routine maintenance a boring job needs: with fine bits, use a little grease, and pull the bit out from time to time to clear the core of waste it has cut; if a bit ever binds fast in the wood, take the brace off it and free it with pincers rather than forcing the crank.

Wood to iron, and the ratchet

The brace itself changed considerably over the nineteenth century. Goss (1888) recorded that the well-made wooden brace, which for a long time "ornamented the walls of the cabinet-maker's shop", had by his time disappeared, replaced by the lighter, more convenient iron brace. Yet Hasluck (1907), writing some twenty years later, still listed a wooden brace with brass mountings as one of the two kinds most generally used on the market, alongside an iron one, so the older wooden pattern evidently held on in some shops well after Goss judged it gone. Riley (1905) rated the ratchet brace "perhaps one of the best" of the many types then available. Its advantage is mechanical: Porter (1999) explained that the ratchet lets the tool be turned in short, partial strokes rather than a full sweep, which matters in a space too tight for the crank to complete a circle, close under a shelf or in a corner, and Hayward (1950) made the same point about working close to a wall. Porter (1999) also described a joist brace, sometimes called an upright brace, built specifically for boring between floor joists and other confined spaces where even a ratchet brace cannot swing freely.

What the bit does

Braces were not limited to plain boring. Goss (1888) noted that screwdriver bits, carrying a shank rather than a wooden handle of their own, let the brace drive a screw home with one continuous turning motion, considerably faster than a hand screwdriver could manage. In furniture and joinery work the brace bores everything from fine holes for dowel pegs to the waste out of a mortise, the rectangular socket cut to take a tenon: Rogowski (2002) described boring out the bulk of a hand-cut mortise with a brace held square to the face of the board, before the corners are pared true with a chisel.