GENERAL INFORMATION

This web site is the result of a thorough work carried out in September, 1998.

Situation of the town where the fieldwork was made:

Before this page was put up on Internet, it was necessary to get past several stages:

1. Compilation and cleaning of tools.
2. Classification and numeration of tools.
3. Photographing and scanning the photos that we had taken.
4. Recording and reproduction of a video of explanations about each tool given by the owner of the tools to give the necessary information to work out the Index of tools.
5. Graphics processing.
6. Stage of investigation, trying to find the translations of the names of the tools given by the owner in colloquial Gallician into the other languages of this site. Some of this names can't be translated precisely because of the peculiarity of the tools, so you won't find any translations.

If you knew the translations of that absent names, I should be glad if you would send me an e-mail to communicate it to me.
7. HTML programming of the code of this page.
8. Stage of off-line tests.
9. Puting this page up to Internet.

This site is destined for all kind of people: ordinary curious navigators, professionals, researchers, ... Introducing the tools which were used by old gallician carpenters is the aim of this site. Besides, we were lucky and we had found a so careful carpenter that he designed the tools that he needed to finish his works himself and he built them with the help, often, of a smith succeeding in simulating the effects of the modern machines.

The carpenter who we are speaking about, Julio Álvarez Pereiras, began on the world of carpentry when he hadn't be still 10 and nowadays, when he's 85, he goes on using many of the tools that we can see here. He told us that, when he was a child, in the afternoon, while his father (carpenter too) had a doze, he eluded him to build his own toys at the carpenter's shop. During his life he specialized in carts and casks making until he emigrated to Venezuela where, after working at several carpenter's shops for two years, he took up building contracts specializing in bridges, canalizations and roads, taking part in work of great importance such as Trade Exhibition of Maracay, bridges over the Guaire river, sewerage system of about 7 Km. from Prados del Este to the Guaire river, going across Baruta and Las Mercedes, aqueduct of drinking water at districs of Caracas, building of several faculties at the University of Caracas, and others.

Finally we can say that watching the tools directly is very different from watching them at the video monitor of a computer though we were surprised by the obtained results in most of images, achieving our aim: bringing the little world of the ancient gallician carpentry near World.

The use of this page is very intuitive. We hope to complete and update it bit by bit, with more tools (since we reduced to 100 the number of tools we've shown here, overlooking a lot of those because of a matter of space and not of importance) and even with new sections.

If you had doubts or suggestions about the operation of this web site you can send me an e-mail.

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