Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #255148 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 204 pages

Customer Reviews

This book will save you both time and money.
This reprint of the 1909 classic should be on the shelf of every serious homesteader. Farming is hard work, and this book will teach you how to save both time and money to get the job done. In this little gem you'll learn how to make your own tools for your workshop, how to build things for around the house, for the barns, and for your livestock, in addition to other devices for your garden and orchard, including a section that discusses fence-making and gate-making. Several pages are devoted to building a farmhouse (including the floor plan for my wife's "dream house"), barns, and other outbuildings. This book also makes for very entertaining reading. Peppered throughout are worthwhile quotes from famous (and not-so-famous) farmers from the past. I'm glad I found this book. I hope you will be, too!

An American Curiosity
Having bought this book partly because of its recommendation here, I was disappointed. It is an American diy book from 1909 when large projects like pulling up trees were done with a team of horses and small jobs around the house utilized discarded barrel hoops. That would be acceptable if the farm devices were indeed 'handy' and well-designed, but they aren't. The drawings look kind of like Dorothy's farm in Kansas in The Wizard of Oz and they aren't very practical either (a bicycle-powered clothes washer, a corn-husking rack?). The section on how to construct reinforced-concrete beams would be dangerous if anyone were to take it seriously. The so-called 'dream house' reminded me of the Bates Motel, in Psycho. There's a very long explanation of Pythagoras' Theorem, using a diagram with little squares.

Entertaining source of ideas
I also think this old-fashioned book is worth a place on the bookshelf of a serious homestead. It is worth dipping into occasionally to remind you that you don't have to buy expensive things, and that simple home-made gadgets may be better than bought items. Although the author suggests tens of uses for barrel hoops, here in rural Portugal there are plenty of those! No old piano crates, though. The point is that the book prompts you with other people's ideas (well over a hundred of them) so you can move on to find better solutions for your own small-farm problems. It gives you confidence to tackle jobs like pulling out tree roots with a 35HP small tractor. Its not a how-to-do-it book but a try-thinking-this-way book.