Thread: Whats happening to wood turning Oz?

I look at it from the point of view of those coming of age and how the world is changing, hence my thought that a lot of the hand crafts such as woodwork, as we know it, will be dead or dying by 2050. People in the western world are moving away from working with their hands and don't have a lot of desire for it, even in their recreational time. Even in the trades hand skills are plummeting and also being displaced by technology. The number one recreation is gaming. Coupled with residential living is crippling expensive and becoming smaller and smaller. Most 20 somethings don't think they will own a house let alone have enough space for a shop that can accommodate a lathe... I don't bemoan it as some boomer thinking: those were the days. It's just the world evolving and such expensive and time-consuming hobbies I don't think will be that appealing in the decades to come.

I don't even find the younger gens have much interest in the older hand tools like us boomers do. I suspect as the old-time collectors start kicking it, those that inherited their collections are going to dump them for whatever they can get. They look at a set of moulding planes and have no idea what they are or for...

My personal journey into woodturning may (or may not) reflect some of the way things have changed. Youtube exposed me to the world of hand tool restoration, which encouraged me to "have a go" at fixing up some family "heirlooms", which led to needing new knobs for some handplanes, which pointed me towards buying a lathe, which sent me back to Youtube to learn how to use it. All of this was done by myself and without feeling the need to join a woodturning club, mens shed, etc. If this reflects how others have gotten involved it might be why it is now harder to gauge the health of the hobby.

As an aside, my discovery of this forum was due to a recommendation from the bloke I was buying some lathe chisels from.

Like some have said.......... It's much like anything else, especially collecting. Has it's high points, low points and hopefully high again.
These days I guess the measure is by how much internet chat there is. It could be the internet is the thing people are turning away from (excuse the pun).
It takes time to keep up on forums and youtubers seem to think the longer their video the better!
My forum or youtube use, as much as I like it, only gets done after everything else necessary gets done and when I can't sleep!!!
Unless I need to research something to know an answer, the social aspect is more a nice to have then a need to have, hence comes last.
And really, how much is there to talk about anything that isn't constantly changing or evolving.

On another forum a similar observation / question was made about dropping participation levels. One responder made the point that there is a huge number of younger wood workers / turners who use other social media platforms such as FB, Instagram etc and do not know about the more traditional forums such as our WWF or even peak bodies such as the American Association of Woodturners etc. Many of those platforms also offer more responsive feedback. He also made the point that in their younger years woodies are not likely to attend participation events, Turnfest etc because $$$'s are tight in young families. They are more likely to use those spare $$$'s purchasing tools etc. Plus, there is quite a bit of free content available to them.

I know on FB that there are several groups that others have "kindly" subscribed me to, some of which have thousands of followers. One thing I dislike about social media is the time it consumes to maintain a "presence" there if you wish to promote your work.

This exact problem is being discussed right now on Reddit: ‘I am 30 years old and I miss the old internet. The beautiful people are in charge, just like everywhere else’ : technology

Top comment:

For hobbyist we lost a thing called forums ... I know everyone knows Them but back then it was awesome, getting back from work and looking at all the New post under each category... Car forum , RC forums etc all went to since they all went to facebooks groups.

Facebook groups are terrible for archiving , terrible for daily feeds and only the Most liked stuff Gets to the top and terrible for searching.

Hell , if you have a very particular problem with a very specific car and you Google it, 99% of the Time some ancient car forum Will pop Up from 2006 with someone Who had this exact problen and made a post with 50pictures and a Writeup on how to fix it. (56k beware !) Lol.

Ah good Times it was the Most fun I had on the internet by far. Rctech is still pretty Much Alive luckily but not Like it was back then...


Thank you forums , you'll Always have a place in my heart.

Originally Posted by woodPixel

This exact problem is being discussed right now on Reddit: ‘I am 30 years old and I miss the old internet. The beautiful people are in charge, just like everywhere else’ : technology

Evan

Now you are making some of us nostalgic. Reading that a 30yr old is missing the 'old network'... has me amused! I remember the Internet when that 30yr old was still in nappies...

That was was before any .com, before the then-new WWW had any graphic browser interface, when everything was just screen based text, and, of course, many years before Google.

If you are familiar with any of the following you were there then too. It was before any web based forums when we only had Usenet text based forums (NNTP), Email (SMTP), command line file transfer (FTP) and Gopher text menus.

I remember the day we downloaded our first graphic browser (Mosaic) and looked at some of the approx 300 web servers that were then up and running and shortly after that we added our own first web server.

The graphic based web that followed was a huge leap forward for discussion forums like this, but 'social media' does nothing for me and I have never had an account on any of them and don't intend doing so.

NeilS, same with me. Exactly. Not many of us originals around.

What I was trying to point out is that the "young" have found that social media is a terrible thing.

Posts of this kind are multitudinous. Facebook is losing users as fast as MySpace did. Instagram is having repeated heart attacks. Metas new VR experiment (~$8 billion spent) is utterly dead.

It has no day-to-day relevance, it is the equivalent of sensationalist news, it traps them in bubbles (echo chambers I believe is the term), is a dopamine trap, has NO search-ability, is narrowly controlled and essentially unsearchable. It has no history, it has no community.

This forum, like all others, have all these attributes.


(though I do wish the forum would improve its search functions!)

(though I do wish the forum would improve its search functions!)

To this end Vbulletin is no longer supporting this version of the forums and we need to upgrade to vBulletin v5 or xenforo or similar. I ran vB5 for a couple of years on Photo Forums and wasn't all that happy with it Steven is running xenforo and it seems to be pretty good.

We will have to do something pretty soon as we are in the process of changing/updating to new service provider right now.

A couple of observations.

I first saw wood turning at school back in the 70's.
A fellow student was turning/roughing down a chunk of wood with no teacher supervision (or teacher to be seen) at all.
It looked like great fun compared to just about anything else school had to offer and from that moment on I was hooked.
The school had 5 or 6 lathers (woodfasts).

Fast forward to today's ridiculously litigious world and I suspect there would not be many schools who would happily let kids go for it on a lathe if they had one or had a teacher that knew much about turning to show them how to go about it anyway.

A while ago I was asked to do a quote and make an item of furniture from timber for a client whom I had made other things for in the past.
I did not want to take the job on for one reason or another so to help the client out I went to a local joinery to see if they would take the job on.
The answer they gave me was, "Sorry we do not work with actual timber these days".
When you look around at new homes it is easy to see why. Plenty of melamine, mdf , fake granite, etc but timber is frankly out of style. Except in the framing and sometimes windows. New houses are not made with timber newel posts, balustrades or finials. Those days are gone.
Most folk would rather pay a few bucks for a large ceramic fruit bowl made overseas than a timber handmade bowl from here and there is probably a good reason.

Back in the mid nineties I found that the market for large bowls was very healthy when selling through a gallery. Today it seems to be bleak. I think the mark ups/commission has a lot to do with this as every gallery I use has a 100% (doubles the price) mark up on everything whether it is on consignment or not and it was not that severe in the 90's. This makes sales very difficult.
Talking to the couple of guys who sell largish and nicely made bowls at the Salamanca market they say they can't make them quick enough to keep up with demand. They do not have to pay gallery commission but they do have to pay to have their market stall plus they have to front up every Saturday, all day, rain, hail, frost, or shine.

I still think there is a lot of interest in turning though. At a recent sale of wood turning gear that was advertised by a retiring turner in Hobart I was surprised by how many people were attending hoping to snag a bargain.


It has probably become more difficult these days to make anything like a living out of turning but the fact remains it is still a fun thing to do and some people will always be interested in it whether there a big turning shows/competitions or not.