Before the electric drill, holes in wood were made with a brace and bit. The brace is a U-shaped crank that converts the sweeping arc of the arm into rotational torque at the bit. It is a mechanical advantage device of unusual elegance: the longer the sweep, the more torque produced, and the slower and more controlled the cut. A brace with a 10-inch sweep produces enough torque to drive a 1.5-inch auger bit through seasoned oak without difficulty.
The auger bit is the companion tool to the brace. It consists of a lead screw that pulls the bit into the wood, cutting lips that sever the wood fibers across the grain, and a twist that augers the chips up and out of the hole as the bit advances. The geometry is efficient: the lead screw does the work of advancing the bit, the lips do the cutting, and the twist clears the waste. The result is a clean-sided hole with a flat bottom and a small center mark from the lead screw.
The brace was the dominant hole-making tool from the medieval period until the electric drill became affordable for tradesmen in the 1940s and 1950s. Carpenters, shipwrights, furniture makers, and millwrights all worked primarily with braces and bits for the structural boring work that required a larger hole than an awl could produce. The chair-maker boring angled holes for legs and spindles developed with the brace as the assumed tool.
North Brothers Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia and the Stanley Rule and Level Company in New Britain, Connecticut were the dominant American brace manufacturers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The North Brothers 'Yankee' brace and the Stanley 923 became the standards. Both were ratchet braces -- they incorporated a mechanism allowing the brace to advance the bit on one direction of the sweep and freewheel on the other, enabling boring in tight spaces where a full sweep is not possible.
The argument for using a brace in contemporary woodworking is not nostalgia. It is practical: a brace boring a 1-inch hole in a 3-inch hardwood plank is quieter, slower, and more controllable than an electric drill. The slowness is the feature. An electric drill bores a 1-inch hole in a fraction of a second, which provides almost no opportunity to feel the bit walking off course or the grain shifting. The brace takes ten to fifteen seconds for the same hole, and the entire boring process is tactile and readable.
The furniture maker Chairist Peter Galbert has written that the brace and bit is the only way he bores angled holes for chair legs that must intersect correctly at a compound angle. The slowness and the tactile feedback allow him to steer the bit continuously through the bore, maintaining the sight lines to both the angle indicator and the work surface simultaneously. A drill press can bore precise angles in single planes; a brace, in skilled hands, can bore angles in two planes at once by steering.
Vintage brace and bit sets are among the best values in antique tools. A North Brothers or Stanley brace in good condition can be purchased for twenty to forty dollars and will work as well as the day it was made. Auger bit sets from Irwin, Russell Jennings, or Greenlee in their original rolls come up regularly at estate sales and flea markets. The tools do not wear out under normal use; they only need occasional sharpening of the lead screw and cutting lips with a small file.