[TheForge] Mastermyr Hinges

[Steve Smith]

The article was in Swedish, but had great drawings showing how various 
locks went together. I did send one drawing with a one page writeup to 
go along with the chest; I don't know if it still survives. I have 
appended the text below. I will send you the image via your personal 
email (theforge rejects images). If anyone else wants a copy, please 
write me.  I'd send the MS Word file, but it is 8.1M. Only in MS Word 
could it become so large...

I'll try to find my copy, but it looks pretty hopeless at this time.

Steve Smith
---------------------------------------------------------------
M�stermyr Chest, with Certain Liberties taken about the Lock
Steven O. Smith
sos@alum.mit.edu
April 29, 2002

If you study the lock in the M�stermyr book 1, you will see that the 
drawing is not detailed enough to determine how the lock worked. In 
addition to this, no key was found with the chest. I wrote to the museum 
which has the chest 2, asking if they could tell me how the lock worked. 
Mr. Kent Andersson, Docent, senior curator was kind enough to send me an 
article 3 including the figure on the back of this page.

The chest was found with damage to the lid, leaving a gaping hole. The 
authors of the M�stermyr book 1 argue that there was originally a 
smaller hole in the lid for a person to put their hand in when carrying. 
I think this is silly�the chest weighs 30 pounds empty, much more full; 
this would be an incredibly awkward way to carry it. In addition, 
careful measurements of the drawings of the chest has convinced me that 
the hole would have been too small for this purpose. For these reasons I 
decided to leave the lid with no hole. I think that the chest has no 
handles because it was originally built to be a stationary chest, not 
portable.

1 The M�stermyr Find - A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland by Greta 
Arwidsson and G�sta Berg, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie Och Antikvitets 
Akademien, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, Sweden 1983.

2 Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.

3 Bronsnycklar och Djurornamentik, Av Bertil Almgren, Uppsala, 1955. I 
don�t know what it says either, but it sounds bibliographical.


Scott Lane wrote:
> 
>> making the chest which is part of the travelling collection. I did 
>> have a little
>> more, an article describing locks of similar type to the one on the 
>> chest. Not
>> specific documentation, just supporting. Next you're going to ask for 
>> a copy,
>> which would be very difficult; we're in the middle of moving cross 
>> country, so
>> finding it will be non-trivial.
> 
> 
>         Could I get a copy?  ;)
>         Do you remember where the article came from, or and author?  
> I'll try to look it up....
> 
> Thanks,
> Lord Aodhfin Seibert
> White Fire Forge
> 
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