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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: 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.
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