Thread: "Hand crafted" semantics?

Perhaps my Luddism is a little extreme - and I'm not suggesting power tools don't require skill to operate, nor that spray finishing is anything but a highly skilled pursuit - just that they aren't really 'hand' work.

So where do you draw the line? You've already objected to shooting boards, which are useless without a hand plane. Why are hand tools OK at all? Why not say that mortices must be dug out with the finger nail and tenons chewed to size with the incisors? I think your definition, apart from being pedantic, is arbitrary and not very useful in this discussion.

Originally Posted by Robomanic

...I would be trying to remind the customer that the piece was customized to their needs (whims) and this piece received personal attention with them in mind. That is what the brand/logo etc should stand for. I think that is worth a small premium (bearing in mind that not many customers will pay an arbitrary amount for extra care) and a piece is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

I agree completely that a bespoke commission merits a premium, since it will need designing, perhaps prototyping, and possibly additional tooling.
But such is also the case with the commission executed entirely using CAD/CAM/CNC. Surely even the most avid machinist would consider 'handcrafted' an inappropriate label in that instance?
On the other hand, should I speculatively make a run of 50 identical pieces by hand, they would be handcrafted.[/i]

There are perfectly good words to describe commissioned, customised or bespoke work.
But 'Handcrafted' describes the method of production, without any reference to the quality of craftsmanship or the nature of the order.

Ian and silentC - I was being a little too proscriptive, and of course evey worker must choose their own line.
[i]I used my chuting board just this evening. What I was trying to show is that every jig (nevermind the board - the plane itself is a jig) moves production one step further away from pure handiwork. (O, and my nails and teeth break much too easily to use in place of a chisel - even without using a mallet )
So, of course human turned goods can be described as handcrafted. I'd also desctibe
Sam Maloofs bandsawn freeform chair arms as handcrafted (big of me, huh?)
But when a cut is fully jigged (router dovetail jig, or David Charlesworth's bandsawn dovetails for instance) it becomes machining, not handiwork, and so surely can not be described as entirely handcrafted (though the jigs and fixtures might be.)

As I said, what proportion of machining disqualifies a product has to be up to the individual. For me, the joinery would have to be cut freehand, and surfaces finished without resort to a stationary sander to properly qualify.

Cheers

That's why I said it was arbitrary. Further up you suggested you would be happy with an item that had been roughed out by machine but completed by hand, but a bit later you say that an item that was simply scraped by hand you would not consider in your definition.

I think this is a difficult line to draw. What percentage of material must be removed by hand before you would consider it 'hand crafted'? A tree is cut down and milled into rough-sawn planks. After drying, it is dressed. You buy it and cut a bit off the end of a board for a shelf. The only finishing you might do is a final sand. Is that shelf hand made or not?

Why draw the line at hand tools? They are tools no different to a power tool. We had hand tools before power tools. Is a carver who uses an Arbortech carving attachment on their angle grinder creating a hand crafted item? I know that an angle grinder thus equipped does not make me a wood carver by any stretch of the imagination. What about people who create unique wooden sculptures using nothing but a chainsaw? Would it be any different if they used an axe? Why?

Originally Posted by Different

"Organic" is one of my pet hates

I'm not hijacking the thread, but "hand crafted" is a descriptor which is similar to "home baked".

The number of people in this country living in the back of small cafes or in service stations must be enormous for that particular description to apply.

Health regulations simply don't allow home baking any more.

Have I missed something earlier or has the emphasis been on the term "hand crafted" rather than on the words "hand" and "crafted".

"Crafted" probably implies, whether by definition or not, that some particular care has gone into the product, that it is not part of a machine assembly line. I don't think by any stretch of the imagination that an entirely machine produced product has been described as "crafted", even though one can use a machine to "craft" something.

The use of the word "Hand" (on the other hand ) notwhistanding anything a dictionary says, implies some particular care has been taken, rather than that it's been made entirely literally by hand.

If I was to say "silentC had a hand in this", no one would expect to see his grubby paw marks, or remnants of his thumbnail in the finished product, rather they'd understand that he'd helped in the process.

Therefore, I suggest that the use of the word "hand" implies the same thing, that it provided assistance in the process!

If ever I see a sign offering "handcrafted organic homebaked pies" I'll enquire as to whose hand and at whose home the things were produced and through which organs they'd been processed.

cheers,

P

Thanks again for all the discussion guys (and girls), I certainly jabbed more nerves than i expected.

Maybe "hand guided" in how the tools are controlled would be worth considering- whether they be power tools or hand tools. The cutting, shaping or sanding control is by hand, so in the case of routing around a template you still have to feed the router at the correct rate or you will burn the edge. Same goes for drill press, if you feed the drill in too hard you will produce a poor quality hole with torn sides. Carving free hand with a 4" angle grinder carving disk - also hand guided.

Maybe this level of involvement is something that most could agree with?

Originally Posted by dunbarhamlin

Ian and silentC - I was being a little too proscriptive, and of course evey worker must choose their own line.
[i]I used my chuting board just this evening. What I was trying to show is that every jig (nevermind the board - the plane itself is a jig) moves production one step further away from pure handiwork. (O, and my nails and teeth break much too easily to use in place of a chisel - even without using a mallet )
So, of course human turned goods can be described as handcrafted. I'd also desctibe
Sam Maloofs bandsawn freeform chair arms as handcrafted (big of me, huh?)
But when a cut is fully jigged (router dovetail jig, or David Charlesworth's bandsawn dovetails for instance) it becomes machining, not handiwork, and so surely can not be described as entirely handcrafted (though the jigs and fixtures might be.)

As I said, what proportion of machining disqualifies a product has to be up to the individual. For me, the joinery would have to be cut freehand, and surfaces finished without resort to a stationary sander to properly qualify.

if it's to be pedants to the fore ...

the two simpliest machines I know of are

• lever and fulcrum

and

• inclined plane

the simpliest example of the second is a screw

need I expand more on why disallowing machines will rapidly become pointless??



ian

My own definition of "hand made" is that it should be made using tools entirely powered by hand, and guided by hand-eye co-ordination.

[note, I'm not a turner, and I'm not sure how I'd reconcile the lathe under the first clause ... I think most lathe work should qualify as hand-made]

As an example, I use a lot of dowelling in my joinery. If I made the dowel holes using a pencil to mark the first hole, drilled it by hand using a brace or drill, used dowel-points to locate the mating hole, drilled it by hand, then that is a hand-made joint. If I used my Dowelmax to guide the drill, I don't believe that to be a true hand-made joint because an accessory is guiding and locating the drill, not dependent on any skill of my own.

Another example is cross-cutting. I use a Nobex mitre saw which is powered entirely by hand. BUT that saw is guided in a frame. Again, the accuracy and trueness of the joint is a function of the device, not of my hand and eye.

Originally Posted by Ron Dunn

My own definition of "hand made" is that it should be made using tools entirely powered by hand, and guided by hand-eye co-ordination.

[note, I'm not a turner, and I'm not sure how I'd reconcile the lathe under the first clause ... I think most lathe work should qualify as hand-made]

As an example, I use a lot of dowelling in my joinery. If I made the dowel holes using a pencil to mark the first hole, drilled it by hand using a brace or drill, used dowel-points to locate the mating hole, drilled it by hand, then that is a hand-made joint. If I used my Dowelmax to guide the drill, I don't believe that to be a true hand-made joint because an accessory is guiding and locating the drill, not dependent on any skill of my own.

Another example is cross-cutting. I use a Nobex mitre saw which is powered entirely by hand. BUT that saw is guided in a frame. Again, the accuracy and trueness of the joint is a function of the device, not of my hand and eye.

I cant help but think the passionately different views expressed here by a bunch of people with largely similar interests and knowledge of the subject show how truly meaningless the term Hand Crafted really is !



Ross

drilled it by hand using a brace or drill, used dowel-points to locate the mating hole

As Ian points out, a brace is a lever and fulcrum and the bit is an inclined plane. Basic machines. A dowel-point is a jig to hold an awl. Surely that is cheating too.

Why is a power drill any less 'hand' than a brace and bit? You still have to locate the bit and guide it in the correct orientation and to the correct depth. Are you saying that the use of electricity excludes a hand held power drill from the definition? Or is it that the motive force, or part of it, is supplied by a machine? So what about the motive force applied to a chisel by a mallet? That is capable of being much greater than you can exert just by pushing the chisel. Why is that OK?

It's pointless to try and nail down a definition that stops at some hard and fast rule. Unless you say that it is using the hands alone, with no tools of any form, then you open up the definition to arbitrary interpretation.

At the end of the day, 'hand crafted' is a marketing term. Some people seem to have it firmly rooted in a time that has long past. The only people who still use hand tools exclusively are hobbyists and to say that the rest of us are not 'hand crafting' our items because we use machines and jigs is, to my mind, misguided and ridiculous.

To me it seems that if you are going to exclude tools/machines from the definition of handcrafted than you go back to prehistoric man who had yet to discover the primative axe, which is a tool.

If you are allowing some tools and not later ones because of a strange perception that hand tools are better than powered tools than it becomes just esoteric wanking.


A tool is a tool and making differentials about them is being a tool.


Peter.

Originally Posted by ian

Rookie, I had to come back to your comment when I saw this piece on the back of the December 2008 Woodwork magazine.

the timbers are madrone, maple, afzelia burl and leather

the piece is by Chris Martin and the shape was inspired by the Czech Cubism movement. The shell consists of 18 separate pieces of wood.

The exterior finish is paint applied by a company that specialises in spraying cars and choppers

hand finished ? – no

hand made ? – most definitely


ian

I take your point Ian. I guess where I was going with that was that a lot of furniture which I would consider "production line" goes through the line without specific regard to quality. That is to say, nobody checks to see if the sanding is as nice as they would personally like before the next step, nor are they geared up to go back and do it again if not satisfied. My reference to spray booths was an example but didn't mean to imply that everything that uses a spray booth is not hand made.

I would regard one factor contributing to "hand made" as the craftsman having the ability to not go to the next step until they are completely satisfied with the previous step.

Wow, what a discussion!

IMHO everything is made by a combination of hand and machinery, its just the ratio of the two that changes. Is it really important what combination we chose to use as long as we get the quality of output that we aspire to? The quality of the output is paramount, not the way of achieving it. But as woodworkers we are also interested in the journey - it may be more pleasant to use a hand plane than a noisy and vibrating thicknesser, and thats also OK. But we still aim for optimal quality.

When I was at business school we were taught that there were only four production techniques:

1. Craftsman built - all our one-off jobs.
2. Batch processing - when we set up templates and jigs to hasten and standardise repeats.
3. Assembly line - the car industry
4. Continuous processing - eg petrochemical & cement industries where you put the raw materials in one end the the finished products come out the other in a continuous stream.

I remember a class discussion where a student commented that this meant that a small production run (ideally one) resulted in high quality output, and mass production meant low quality. The professor just smiled, mentioned that Holden make 100,000 cars a year and Mercedes Benz make 1,000,000 cars ... "Are you suggesting that a Holden is ten times better quality than a Mercedes..?" All production methods can produce either high quality or crap, or anything in between.

A few years later I visited the Otsuka furniture factory in Shikoku, Japan. Otsuka make very high end furniture in an extremely automated setting - factory air-conditioned and humidity controlled, lasor guided computer controlled saws, routers, sanders, spray painters, etc. The workers were not craftsmen (apart from the pattern makers) but they were extremely proud of their product. They openly described their methods as the Mercedes Benz production model.

I will be very proud indeed when I can consistently produce wooden products that match Otsuka's quality standards.

Cheers

Graeme

Whilst I agree with the general slant of your argument, I would not consider your latter example to be an example of 'hand crafted' furniture. This does not mean it is not of a high quality, and that is probably where people get confused.

I believe it is akin to the 'Made in Australia', 'Made and produced in Australia' etc. labelling. When people use the term 'hand crafted' it is usually in a marketing context: "this beautiful hand-crafted table was lovingly constructed from the finest blah blah blah". They are trying to convince us to buy it because it is some how better than a mass-produced item (which it may or may not be). It is product differentiation at work. None of us would describe our work that way unless we were trying to sell it. I hope...

I would rather buy a mass produced Benz than a kit car built by some bloke in his garage. But a custom-built chopper from those blokes on the Discovery channel would be better than a Honda any day of the week.

I don’t like to use the term “hand crafted”. It sounds like I am trying hard to make things sound more impressive than they really are. It always reminds me of the $20 rusty picture frame you buy from the market, it is hand crafted.

It is similar to the term “my own design”. Some people made a table, a simple table with 4 legs and a table top, just like millions of other tables out there but it is their own design. It just doesn't sound right. Unless my design is very different to others, I would never say it is my own design.