The edge-tool maker

At a glance

• Workshop: maison Alexis, Orléans, founded 1872
• Starting point: an iron bar about 30 cm long
• Up to 24 heats and 5 hours for one tool
• Durability: around thirty years

A trade of cutting tools

The taillandier makes tools with a cutting edge: hoes, weeders, billhooks, adzes. The trade was so rare that the local Chamber of Trades no longer listed it. Bernard Solon, apprenticed at fifteen, took over from his grandfather in 1956 and called himself a dinosaur.

At the forge

Two forges glow under a glass roof, now fanned by a small electric fan instead of the old bellows. Every gesture counts: seize the metal with tongs, lay it on the anvil, knock off the scale, then shape the rough tool under the martinet, a foot-operated power hammer, with a socket for the handle on one side and the blade on the other. Sockets are opened on the martinet and formed on a mandrel; hoes are forged in pairs and separated with a mallet.

Tools made

Besides classic adzes, planting picks, weeders, carpenter's drawknives and hoes, he made regional tools and professional ones: bark scrapers, an arborist's knife he designed to score fruit-tree bark, a garden knife shaped like a spoon for potting. North of the Loire tools are pulled and have curved handles; to the south they are pushed and have straight ones. He bent chestnut handles himself.

A disappearing craft

Grandfather Alexis used to say that when the fire burned well it was heating "lovingly". Solon dreamed of opening a museum of his trade so that it would not end up in the cemetery of the iron age.