Abaca Stripping
"There was a strange looking construction standing on the flat ground behind the house, underneath a roof that protruded from the back of the house. It was a wooden frame, obviously built to a particular specification, with a large rock suspended by what looked to be nylon rope at the end of a plank that had been slotted through the frame. Jerome fiddled about with the setup, using his smaller knife to trim a wooden block before hammering it through a slot in the frame.
The arrangement was very clever, and had obviously been refined as time went by, but in essence the construction meant that the large weight, once released, would drop, trapping anything placed at the other, against the wooden block. I noticed that at the end away from the weight, beyond the pivot point, which would swing upwards to the wooden block, had a piece of local stone shaped into a long, thin block. When the plank descended, the stone and wooden block would meet perfectly in parallel, the sides butting against each other like a bricks wall. It was a sophisticated pincer arrangement. I was impressed at how Jerome had fine-tuned the angles, which didn’t take long, but he clearly knew what he was doing.