That's the way to do it Johny,
When we make a study of the building methods in early America it is there that we see the importance of iron, steel and most importantly the nail.
All of the buildings built well into the 1800s were pinned together with
Trunnels and well joined. I know it's hard to imagine what a world without nails looked like but that is what they were dealing with.
Making nails was a very labor intensive and costly job, you needed a "Slitter" to cut sheets into pieces of bar stock and then a "Nailer" to make those bars into nails. It wasn't until 1590 in Kent that they had even contrived of a machine to do the slitting.
Slitting Mills were as you would imagine very large and complex machines built into mill houses, not the sort of thing that would hit the American shore until 1746 when John Taylor erected his Iron Works in
Glen Mills. Before that happened the raw material used to make nails ie "nail rod" wasn't even mass produced on the Continent.
Mr. Taylor had piss poor timing, in 1750 the English passed the
Iron Act which greatly curtailed what could be made with iron in America. Nails were still rare and expencive, the common nail we know today didn't even exist yet.
Nails were so scarce in fact that in pre-1850 America people would burn dilapidated buildings just to sift the ashes for nails. They did so because pulling the nails would have damaged most of them. After the nails were recovered, a blacksmith could easily straighten any nails that had been bent during construction.
Thomas Jefferson was quite proud of his hand made nails. In a letter he wrote, ?In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail maker.? Jefferson was among the first to purchase the newly invented nail-cutting machine in 1796 and produce nails for sale.
Rather than forming the whole nail with a hammer and anvil you would shear a piece off of a peice of flat stock and a seperate machine to form the head of nails. Cut nailes didn't enjoy their hay day until 1820 when they finally surpassed forged nails in the market.
It wasn't until the 1850s that the nail we know today were produced using French made machines in New York. The "Wire Nail" had arrived in America, although they weren't used like we use them. They were mainly used to knock together pocket book frames and cigar boxes. It was not until after the Northern War of Aggression that wire nails began to gain acceptance in construction. Even through the 1890?s many builders preferred using cut nails because of their holding power. It was well into the twentieth century before wire nails became the dominate type and only then because they were so much cheaper.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the history of the nail it may behoove you to put some away just in case. [URL=http://www.smileyvault.co
