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posted by martyb on Monday August 14 2017, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the craft!=boat dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @03:18PM (5 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 14 2017, @03:18PM (#553705)

    From here [heritagecrafts.org.uk]:

    I read about this a while ago, as they have the same problem in the US. Scientific experiments have long needed highly custom and technical glassmaking to facilitate them, so universities usually had scientific glassblowers on staff to work with scientists in designing the glassware needed and making it. But now they're all retiring and no one's bothering to go into the field, probably for the usual reasons: it doesn't pay that well, and jobs these days aren't very secure, so unless it's extremely lucrative it's a bad idea to get into a tiny niche field where it's really hard to get a new job when you get laid off because some MBA wants to improve profitability for the quarter by cutting staff. So the answer is simple: people need to stay out of fields like this, and let the chips fall where they may. If that means we can't do a lot of scientific experiments any more, so be it: we as a society have decided that that's not a priority for us.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @04:23PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @04:23PM (#553739)

    I saw this one too, also a comment on hackaday about learning to bend glass tubing in smooth arcs for neon signs which is rapidly becoming a lost art (the comment mentioned that most of his signs now are LED lit).

    I wonder if hot glass work could be made easier with an IR camera and an "enhanced reality" overlay (ie, Google Glass). It seems to me like the primary problem is controlling the glass temp accurately so it stretches (blowing) and bends where you want it to? Or maybe IR cameras don't work on hot glass and there needs to be some other non-contact method of measuring temperature.

    This opens up a a related area for discussion: Does preserving an old craft require that the old tools be used, or are updated tools acceptable as long as the result is truly identical?

    If I heli-arc (TIG) weld where my grandfather used oxy-acetelyne, am I doing the same job?

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:49PM (2 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 14 2017, @04:49PM (#553749)

      Does preserving an old craft require that the old tools be used, or are updated tools acceptable as long as the result is truly identical?
      If I heli-arc (TIG) weld where my grandfather used oxy-acetelyne, am I doing the same job?

      For that particular thing, I'd assume no: the type of welding you do can affect both the way the weld looks, and how well it performs, so the result is not "truly identical". With some things, it may be really hard to tell the difference though. But if you're trying to preserve the old craft itself, and not just make modern products that look old, I'd say using updated tools is out of the question. If you use new tools, you're not preserving the old craft, you're evolving it (such as doing 17th-century-style ornate wood inlays but using a CNC machine): you get a product that looks like it's from a certain time period, but it's really not, and most likely if you look very closely you'll find it's too perfect.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @05:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @05:56PM (#553779)

        OK, so using a coordinate measuring machine (Romer arm, etc) to measure the dimensions of a window opening, before making the replacement leaded-glass (possibly with colored/stained parts) window is right out. Instead you have to use the same old ways of measuring, perhaps making templates to fit the rough opening shape?

        I know what you mean about too perfect. A friend was restoring an antique Franklin air-cooled car. The original grille was brazed (probably in a furnace, with a jig) from zig-zag strips of metal that resulted in a honey comb hex pattern. Where the strips were brazed together the thickness was doubled (+ the very thin line of brazing material). He had the replacement grille water-jet cut, including the doubled "line thickness" and the result looks great...but the original probably had a few places that weren't brazed completely.

        I suppose if he really wanted to do it "right", he would have to recreate the original jig along with match-dies to make the zig-zag strips, then furnace braze. But the tooling would also be easiest to water-jet...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:24PM (#554361)

        Neon signs have traditionally been made from lead glass. Lead-free [brillite.com] tubing is now available.

    • (Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Monday August 14 2017, @06:13PM

      by Kromagv0 (1825) on Monday August 14 2017, @06:13PM (#553783) Homepage

      And now I feel old as I know people (through my brother-in-law) who restore vintage neon signs as well as make new ones. At first I was going to call BS of it becoming a lost art but then I realized that all of these guys are over 50 with a good number of them being over 60 and being simi-retired or fully retired so it is just a hobby now.

      I do wonder if there is enough of an overlap in skills that one could have a go at doing both.

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