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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.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:35AM
I can add three more to this list: reading, riting, and rithmetic :-(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @12:49PM
So they've got a list of all the clogmakers? Missed one [treforowenclogmaker.co.uk].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday August 14 2017, @01:27PM (2 children)
I think there might be an aspect of "English (UK) as a foreign language" as they seem to use "craft" the way Americans would use something like contractor or freelancer. In the context of the website in the UK craft seems to mean low tech very high labor one man income generating full time employment workshop, kinda like a village blacksmith except this one dude makes wood ladders not shoes for horses.
In the USA craft is used mostly to discuss decorative hobby arts done at home, so the list looks really weird when it contains wooden ladders or wooden hand plane making. I would guess theres 10000 to 100000 people making wood hand planes on the weekend after watching TV shows like "the woodwrights shoppe" for every one dude getting full time pay to demonstrate making wooden hand planes at Colonial Williamsburg or selling his homemade wood planes on ebay.
This has plusses and minuses. The amateur ladder maker has to horrendously overbuild heavy ladders or accept failure. The pro knows how to select and work the wood for minimal weight. Being in a financial hurry the pro bicycle frame maker can't afford to spend the kind of time an amateur can afford on appearance and innovation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday August 14 2017, @01:59PM
Yes, it's a linguistic thing. "Craft" originally meant "skilled profession that involves making something". Boat builders, coopers, weavers, blacksmiths and farriers, all that kind of stuff. I guess it grew to encompass similar tasks done on an amateur basis and from there to any kind of hobby that involves making something.
Obviously, as more and more manufacturing jobs have been replaced by machines, the original meaning died off somewhat and left us with a dominant meaning of "gluing together home-made birthday cards." The original meaning still holds, though, at least here in Eastpondia. I don't find it at all odd to describe dry-stone walling or reed-fence weaving as crafts.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 14 2017, @03:26PM
Well, it needs to be understood that "craft" is also commonly used in the construction industry. Carpenter, electrician, field engineer, iron worker, etc. Not to mention multi-craft, who usually start out as carpenters or pipe fitters, then branch out into other crafts. The most common multi-craftsman is probably a carpenter who also does rod-busting and concrete.
As for the obsolete crafts - grandpa was a plasterer, but I'd be totally lost if asked to lath a wall, and plaster it. Father-in-law made and sold mega-tons of siding for houses. I could probably figure that out, if only I had the tools. Granddauther makes a lot of craft stuff for sale at the farmer's markets. (God, I hate what has happened to those markets - you don't go there to buy bushels of stuff anymore, you get high-dollar specialty stuff!) A lot of Mexicans in the area can do stucco and adobe, but there's precious little market for their skills. (No market for their preferred skills, they have turned to concrete work, which few white boys want to do anymore.)
Craftsmen "evolve" with the market, or they are out of work. And, there are a lot of craftsmen left in America, despite mass production taking big bites out of their trade.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Monday August 14 2017, @02:18PM
http://davidadriansmith.com/ [davidadriansmith.com]
I don't like John Mayer's music but he got some exposure thanks to the album artwork he did for him. The YouTube videos on the topic are very interesting to watch, it's pretty impressive how he does his work.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday August 14 2017, @03:03PM (2 children)
I wasn't sure what Gold Beating (http://heritagecrafts.org.uk/gold-beating/) was, and it turns out it is hitting gold with a hammer to form thin sheets. It is "extinct" in the list. However, reading the description it states it stopped because of completion from China in this very labour intensive process. So the job still exists, just not in the UK.
You could argue that some of these skills need to be preserved nationally. However many of them are replaced by cheap labour in other countries or automation, so why defend them? It just means that your country has a higher standard of living than the poor saps who are now performing that job. Congratulations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday August 14 2017, @03:31PM (1 child)
We preserve old skills (not necessarily the same thing as defending them) for the same reason we preserve old books & old artefacts and old buildings and old data. It's history, in this case living history. A connection to the past and to one's ancestry, and a chance to learn something from our forebears - even if the lessons are not immediately obvious.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @04:27PM
Who's "we"? Society only preserves old skills as a profession when there's a financial reason to do so. Otherwise, it ends up falling to hobbyists. This list of "dying crafts" isn't really about hobbyists, it's about professionals, bemoaning the fact that many of these are disappearing from the UK. You can't ask people to take up a profession if it's not going to keep them gainfully employed because there's not enough people willing to pay them enough to do it. Society has clearly spoken: it does not value the skills on this list, so it's better if people avoid it as a profession. Leave the old artifacts to museums.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @03:11PM
I saw this interesting bit in browsing their crafts:
Leadworking [heritagecrafts.org.uk] is listed as endangered on their list. Some of the problems:
Then farther down:
So "listed buildings" (I assume buildings that fall under historical preservation laws) have to have the leadwork repaired just the way it was before, without modernizing it. But this isn't being done because knowledgable leadworkers in this craft aren't available, so they're breaking the laws. The government needs to crack down on this: the repairs *must* be made in the original way, no exceptions. When they can't find anyone who knows how to do it any more, then it should just sit unrepaired. I really hate it when there's laws on the books that go unenforced; if you're going to have a law, enforce it, or rescind it if it doesn't work any more.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 14 2017, @03:18PM (5 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @04:23PM (4 children)
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)
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.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Monday August 14 2017, @06:13PM
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.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 1) by Farmer Tim on Monday August 14 2017, @03:53PM
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday August 14 2017, @08:39PM
Och! Faith and begorrah, praise the Laird, everything is gonna be alright. Bagpipe making is listed under "Currently Viable".
Had me nerves in a jumble there for a wee minute.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:17PM
I've ground and polished four telescope mirrors.
This was once quite popular but has been in decline for years