Dating furniture square nails

For thousands of years, the traditional hand-forged nail was square and tapered, These nails fairly accurately date furniture to the 's, although it is worth.
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Hand-Forged Nails Nails were among the first metal objects made by mankind, indispensable or such everyday items as doors and roof coverings, shoes, buckets and barrels.


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Early nails were usually square in section and the earliest were individually forged by hand from iron. The head of the nail was formed either by simply turning it over to form an L-shape or by striking a hand-held mould or 'bore' over the end of the shank to produce a shaped end such as a 'rose-head', a simple four sided pyramid shape.

Dating old square nails

However, being hand-forged, the variety of shapes and forms are infinite. These nails were expensive to produce and were used sparingly. Early Cut Nails The introduction of cut nails dates from the late 16th century with the advent of water-powered 'slitting mills'. After hammering or, from the late 17th century, rolling the hot iron into sheets, each sheet was slit into long, square-sectioned bars by rollers which cut like a shears.

Bars of the requisite thickness were then made into nails and spikes by 'nailers'. Only the head and the point were forged, so these nails, which were common from the 17th to the early 19th century, can be distinguished from earlier ones by the sharp regular profile of the cut section. It has the original back and inlaid eagles with bow in feet, and inlaid fans style motif in corners of drawers. They graduate bottom to top.

How to Identify the Age of Furniture by the Nails

There are cracks in wood on side panels. The drawers and slides, with older dovetailing, are original.

There seems to be square nails throughout, and here and there, round headed nails. The bottoms of drawers are one piece of wood, rougher on the underside — Castors included — do not know if original. The pulls have been changed and a hole inside the ones on it are filled but visible. No markings of the maker. Thank you so much.

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A Your tiger maple chest of drawers has some of the basic elements of Hepplewhite , the string inlay outlining the drawers and the quarter fan inlay in the corners and the eagle is a typical symbol of the Federal or Classical period of the early 19th century. The chest is certainly handmade evidenced by the handmade dovetails. You can even see the jack plane marks on the rear panels showing the wood was hand dimensioned by the maker in the shop as opposed to the field cuts of the mill saw faintly visible on the drawer bottoms.

Iron ore and carbon heated together and then cooled created wrought iron, from which a nail length piece was cut and hammered on four sides to create a point. Hand-wrought nails have tapered but irregular and crooked square shafts. These nails have heads known as rose heads, a faceted and shallow pyramid-shaped design created from four blows of an ironsmith's hammer.

Dating square nails

Between the end of the 18th and the end of the 19th centuries, nails were cut into shape. In the early part of the period, nail-makers cut them by hand from a sheet of iron.

All About Nails

Later, machine did the cutting, but nails were still made one at a time. The shaft of each exhibits cutting marks where the nail is stamped out of a sheet of iron in much the same manner as a cookie cutter. The nail has a tapered rectangular shaft but straight on two sides, and the shaft is smoother than that of the hand-hammered nail.

The head is usually round or rectangular but sometimes has an off-center notch.


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Around , a machine was invented that produced a round nail drawn from a piece of steel wire and formed with a perfectly circular, stamped head and a sharp, cut point. Cabinetmakers continued to use cut nails into the start of the 20th century until stockpiles were used up, so you may find either type of nail in furniture between and But because of their smooth shape, modern nails have less holding power than hand-forged or cut nails.

To determine if missing nails were antique or if they have been replaced with modern nails, look closely at the shape of the hole and the color of the wood around it.