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Over at Hackaday is a pointer to The Heritage Crafts Association list of endangered crafts:
The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation and mass production, and today very few of the products you use will be hand-made. There may still be a few craftsmen with the skills to produce them by hand, but in the face of the mass-produced alternative there is little business for them and they are in inevitable decline. In an effort to do something about this and save what skills remain, the Heritage Crafts Association in the UK has published a list of dying crafts, that you can view either alphabetically, or by category of risk.
It’s a list with a British flavour as you might expect from the organisation behind it, after all for example hand stitched cricket balls are not in high demand in the Americas. But it serves also as a catalogue of some fascinating crafts, as well as plenty that will undoubtedly be of interest to Hackaday readers.
Obviously this is UK specific, as many of these crafts survive elsewhere in the world. However the links to individual crafts provide the history, techniques, and further background on each area. The hackaday comment threads also contain some additional suggestions.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday August 14 2017, @11:22AM (5 children)
Folding knives, really? Have these people even looked in the general direction of the knife-making community?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 14 2017, @01:15PM (4 children)
The UK is a bit of a nanny state, so making a folding knife in the UK would likely be analogous to building a nerve gas plant or ICBM in the USA.
For laughs I looked up the laws and lockback knives are completely illegal, no one under 18 can touch a knife, etc. You can make and own an illegal knife, they only criminalized carrying, buying, and selling. From a chef perspective its interesting ceramic knives are illegal in the UK. They have their weird UK analogy of american's "driving while black" in that there are "good reason" exceptions that I'm sure are unjustly enforced.
Its actually a lot easier to legally own a silencer or machine gun in the USA than to own a knife in the UK.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday August 14 2017, @01:27PM
Probably similar reasoning to here in AU. Ceramic knives aren't illegal, but they all must have a slab of steel in the handle. The thing that scares them is knives that don't show up on metal detectors.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
The entry here [heritagecrafts.org.uk] is interest but really seems to downplay the issue, and even says pocket knives are exempt. Of course they don't mention lockback knives.
I'd like to know why they're whining so much about this: this entry about folding knives is actually one of the longest entries in their list. It's well-known that the UK doesn't like people to have knives, why why are they whining that no one wants to work in that field as a craftsman any more? Clearly, the society there would prefer that people stay out of it, so they should be celebrating that it's dying out.
No one under 18 can touch a knife? Really? Even kitchen knives?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday August 14 2017, @04:04PM (1 child)
I found the overall list bit odd - why mention both knives and then folding knives but not lockback knives, which by law are two separate things -- they might in essence both be pocket knives but the the folding one you just fold and the lockback knives lock the blade so you have to release it before you can fold it back again, one would assume to prevent accidental folding. Why don't they then also mention Daggers? Daggers are knives but not all knives are daggers -- dagger should be symmetrical and sharp on both edges while knives normally only have one edge and is blunt on the other side.
People under 18 can touch knives. Under normal circumstances you might just not be able to buy one if you are underage. But overall you can have as many kitchen knives as you like, you can fill your entire house with them. You just normally can't bring them with you outside in public except for very specific reasons. Similar laws in most of Europe.
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives [www.gov.uk]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:24PM
Have they made any progress on banning knives (including kitchen knives) with sharp points? I read several years ago how they were trying to pass such a ban in the UK.