SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:49PM (2 children)
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
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
Neon signs have traditionally been made from lead glass. Lead-free [brillite.com] tubing is now available.