The skilled hand-trades, long transmitted only by watching and apprenticeship, can and should be set down in writing and illustration so that their rules become teachable rather than secret. Moxon treats the tacit practices of smiths, joiners, and printers as a 'doctrine' with statable principles, not as mysteries that resist explanation.
Each trade is taught by first naming and depicting every tool and its parts, then explaining the actions those tools perform. Competence is organized around knowing the instrument's construction and purpose before attempting the work it enables.
Viewing smithing, joinery, carpentry, turning, bricklaying, and printing side by side reveals that disparate crafts can be analyzed through the same template of materials, tools, and procedures. This treats manual trades not as unrelated mysteries but as parallel instances of a single analyzable category of 'handy-works'.