Plate A · About the place
Old craft, future tools.
A 1910 pattern-maker’s shop that also runs a laser and a small server. That is the whole argument.
Ethos
Anvil & Bough takes the old maker ethos seriously and does not freeze it in a costume. No goggles. No carnival of gears. The shop that knew a marking gauge still knows a controller. The judgment has not changed: is it true, will it last, does it belong on the bench.
Central Alabama is the ground. Materials here are worked because they are at hand, and because making is a local habit rather than a weekend theme. Welcome to Alabama. Where creativity and natural materials combine. That sentence is not a slogan laid over a generic rustic. It is the condition of the work: wood and metal, heat and grain, in this part of the state.
The two materials in the name are the two materials in the work. Metal — the anvil — holds a shape when the heat is gone. Wood — the bough — still remembers it was a tree. Mechanism is how they meet: jigs, screws, code that moves a cutter, sunlight that feeds a bench. Hand tools and contemporary machines are one continuum. The catalog that listed a backsaw can list a spindle.
This site is an information space. It is not a shop. Nothing here is offered for sale. The plates on the work page are diagrams, not goods. Correspondence is welcome; biography is not the point. The place is the thesis. The tools are the evidence.
Wood and brass you can smell, with a machine logic underneath.
A short index
What this catalog holds
- MetalStruck faces, threads, fasteners, the work that rings when it is done right.
- WoodGrain, joint, the patience of a shoulder that meets a mortise without a gap you can see.
- MachinesCNC as a plate, not a product. A laser as a tool. A small server as shop furniture.
- PowerSunlight as a contemporary utility for making — listed the way a catalog once listed a treadle.
- PlaceCentral Alabama. No street, no hours, no invented founding year. The work is enough.