Why do people say "handmade"?

[fredk]

4 hours ago, chuck123wapati said:

dont ask me how they know lol.

If your referring to the dictionary - Webster's, Oxford Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, etc employ full time and part-time researchers who look for the oldest printed example of a word and in that by the context the word is used what it meant

[Tugadude]

This is from the bigcommerce.com article that Chuck linked to:

Other definitions include the aspect of craftsmanship and imply that a handmade item is typically of higher quality than one mass produced by a machine. Because humans are not machines, many retailers remind customers that handmade products may feature inconsistencies or slight flaws. Those are signs that the product wasn't mass produced.

The underlining is mine.  So which is it?  Is handmade better or worse?  If you read those sentences, you won't get an answer because they contradict each other, or seem to anyway.  

But to take a real example, consider a knife blade.  A machine can churn out thousands in short order and they all will be nearly identical, as identical as it is possible to be.  A craftsperson can make a better knife, but if they made a thousand of them there might be a wide fluctuation in sizes and shapes.  Or potentially so.  So in that instance, yes, there are inconsistencies, but you are still getting a better knife.  So the sentences don't necessarily contradict each other.

[chuck123wapati]

2 hours ago, fredk said:

If your referring to the dictionary - Webster's, Oxford Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, etc employ full time and part-time researchers who look for the oldest printed example of a word and in that by the context the word is used what it meant

no how they came up with the 1700s? they didn't really say.

[fredk]

18 minutes ago, chuck123wapati said:

no how they came up with the 1700s? they didn't really say.

Possibly the researchers looking thru old documents, newspapers, hand-bills have identified the words being used in the 17thC (= 1600s, not 1700s = 18th century)

An example; 'square meal' - often thought to be of Royal Navy of about early 1800s, now known to have been used as far back as 1580s

[Rahere]

One major factor for the English lead in the Industrial revolution was the Armada. Queen Elizabeth 1 had become convinced the previous practice of conscripting trading ships was no longer feasible, and had seen for herself the problems of designs like the Vasa and Mary Rose. Prompted by privateers, she opted for smaller, faster ships, and started producing them in number. That led to standard designs of rigging blocks and a single contract for Artillery, to the former Cistercian Ironworks at Tintern Abbey, very close to the Ordnance Board's base at Monmouth. Architectural research is going on at the moment to the system of leats and races in the Amgidy Valley next to the Abbey (the Dominicans being masters at water management), with the result that the cannon on English ships all had similar sized ammunition and so could be resupplied off-the-shelf. The Spanish didn't: once one of their cannons had fired off its shot, it was useless. As a result, standardisation became part of Cromwell's arsenal, and England was more than 50 years ahead of the rest of Europe by the time of the Napoleonic wars. It took the French 200 years to come up with the Grimbeauval cannon system, for example.

An additional factor was the Roman Catholic response to scientific innovation. Although Athanasius Kircher was near the cutting edge, science was seen as alchemical, and al-quimia was a Muslim craft, therefore heretical. When the same alchemist who'd got the Counts of Hoornes and Egmont executed for that reeason in 1568 resurfaced in 1618, he immediately demonstrated to Jan van Helmont, overthrowing the good Doctor's paracelsian thinking and starting him on the course of empirical observation, which led through his son, the fruit of celebrating his sudden wealth, becoming Leibnitz' mentor. Where the Inquisition could stop Galileo, nobody could stop Newton and the rest of Protestant Northern Europe. So where we had the Freemasonic Royal Society promoting steam, France had a wastrel monarchy playing shepherdesses.

However, industrialisation sought efficiency, and efficiency wasn't always safety-conscious. As a result, quality declined, and craft skills gained an edge. This became significant in the 19th Century Arts-and-Crafts movement, which actually brought the sense of industry back up to scratch, through Quaker and Methodist bosses. It's a lesson we've never forgotten: our success in sorting the ventilator shortage in just 5 days in March last year has given British Industry its mojo back. Prince Philip had had a hand in that in the 1980s, working with my dad to create the cooedination mechanism.

And that is why hand-made invokes craft detail. Tools are fitted to the individual, not the individual to the tool. As a result, a craftsman never has reason to blame his tools. He's their master. It may not have the cost-savings of mass production, but neither does it have its failings. Just as Hong Kong was a byeword for tat in the 1960s, so Chinese is now, for exactly the same reasons we purged in the 19th Century here, cutting too many corners. The result was Prince Albert's leadership of the extension of the Royal Society into all the Professions, setting up standards bodies in the same way the Renaissance craft guilds did. You get two out of three, pretty, quick and cheap. Which are you willing to forgo? Cheap Chinese may be unreliable. Good design working well, fast, won't come cheap. You might have to wait till the 12th of Never for that cheap tool doing the perfect job.

Edited June 13, 2021 by Rahere

[fredk]

25 minutes ago, Rahere said:

One major factor for the English lead in the Industrial revolution was the Armada. Queen Elizabeth 1 had become convinced the previous practice of conscripting trading ships was no longer feasible, and had seen for herself the problems of designs like the Vasa and Mary Rose. Prompted by privateers, she opted for smaller, faster ships, and started producing them in number. 

1. the Vasa was built in 1623,  about 20 years after Lizzy 1 died

2. Standardisation and mass production of naval ships types did not come till the true Royal Navy under Charles II, 1660 to 1685. Lizzy still held to 'hiring' the private ships, then refused to pay them. She seized the Ark Rawleigh from Walter Rawleigh as she thought it was too powerful a ship for a privateer. She renamed it Ark Royal

Edited June 13, 2021 by fredk

[Rahere]

1 hour ago, fredk said:

1. the Vasa was built in 1623,  about 20 years after Lizzy 1 died

2. Standardisation and mass production of naval ships types did not come till the true Royal Navy under Charles II, 1660 to 1685. Lizzy still held to 'hiring' the private ships, then refused to pay them. She seized the Ark Rawleigh from Walter Rawleigh as she thought it was too powerful a ship for a privateer. She renamed it Ark Royal

This is really a question of a progression of thinking. Yes in the complete standardisation of type, greatly inspired by the Dutch frigate "yacht/hunter" design, no in that it wasn't a sudden inspiration, but something which had been going on for a century. One might even argue that the standard forms of infantry weapons takes the thinking back a hundred years or more before that.

You're talking about Samuel Pepys' work, but he followed on the heels of Phineas Pett (1570-1649), who built the Navy which fought the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th Century at Deptford (which Henry VIII founded in 1513) and Chatham (c1550), clearing a small forest east of Woolwich. I was raised in what remains of it, Petts Wood. It's an accident of history that Cornelis van Tromp's House of Orange then followed the Stuarts! Most of the Napoleonic Navy was built either at Chatham or at Bucklers Hard, on the edge of the New Forest, in a shipyard started in around 1700, but to say we had no navy before then is bemusing. My family got mixed up in that from about 1760, we've generations of naval engineers: my schoolmates were astonished to find my immediate integration in the RN while on attachment, with the family nickname instantly applied. Many officers knew my grandpa, Officers Mess CPO Steward, and almost all my uncle, who did most of the torpedo fitting and tuning in Pompey between 1930 and 1970.

Elizabeth was constrained in her official expenditure, so encouraged privateer action to force the Spanish to pay for it, in letters patent (the birth of the Patent system of intellectual copyright). The Ordnance Board supplied most if not all of the weapons, which were a State monopoly by then: the Tudors rise was not to inspire rivals!  That's how she could legally move against Raleigh. The system still is used, as seen in the conscription of the Atlantic Conveyor and QE2 in the Falklands War: the State had a claim.

Either way, it still demonstrates a huge technological lead in mass production.

Edited June 13, 2021 by Rahere

[Handstitched]

21 hours ago, Spyros said:

Nothing good comes to mind, I keep thinking of MILF for some reason

O'h dear, great minds think alike . 

When my customers ask where my belts are made,( even though my sign says where)  I tell them  where and  by me, then I show them my hands, covered in dye to prove they're hand crafted . I don't use gloves, .  But thats another story for another thread . 

' Hand crafted', now theres a term I haven't seen come up in this discussion, unless I missed it.  

HS

Edited June 13, 2021 by Handstitched

[Tugadude]

I am active on a bicycle forum and I noticed this photo today.  

 

Craftsman built is a new one on me.  By the way, I own a vintage Raleigh and also a Carlton, which was constructed in the Worksop factory.  Both are very nice.

[chuck123wapati]

1 hour ago, Tugadude said:

I am active on a bicycle forum and I noticed this photo today.  

 

Craftsman built is a new one on me.  By the way, I own a vintage Raleigh and also a Carlton, which was constructed in the Worksop factory.  Both are very nice.

little off topic but what do you know about shimanoo sti 600 brifters?  it seems they aren't very good but i have a couple to fix.

[Rahere]

Oh, here we go.Patents were originally enterprise initiatives in the face of the craft guilds which had appeared after the Black Death freed skilled workers from feudal serfdom in Free Towns across Europe. They took likely pupils on as apprentices to learn the basics, before sending them out as journeymen, travelling as a kind of pilgrim between hostels, sharing ideas as they went, before returning home ready to demonstrate their competence with a masterpiece. There's a Musée de Compagnage in the French city of Tours dedicated to this: it's where the idea of the original Tour de France came from, long before cycling hijacked it. The craft guilds became excessively powerful, stopping newcomers from getting established, and so letters patent gave some years of Royal protection.

Edited June 13, 2021 by Rahere

[Tugadude]

5 hours ago, chuck123wapati said:

little off topic but what do you know about shimanoo sti 600 brifters?  it seems they aren't very good but i have a couple to fix.

Shimano 600 is the 2nd tier from the top, Dura Ace, and was later named Ultegra.  They are quality shifters.  If they are sluggish, before opening them up, squirt some lubricating oil into them and move the shifters.  They might just have gummy residue in them.  Otherwise they can be repaired, but it is quite difficult from what I hear.  They aren’t designed to be serviceable.

[chuck123wapati]

12 minutes ago, Tugadude said:

Shimano 600 is the 2nd tier from the top, Dura Ace, and was later named Ultegra.  They are quality shifters.  If they are sluggish, before opening them up, squirt some lubricating oil into them and move the shifters.  They might just have gummy residue in them.  Otherwise they can be repaired, but it is quite difficult from what I hear.  They aren’t designed to be serviceable.

Thank you! lol it took less than an hour to get them both working, I used brake cleaner  then air then some pb blaster over and over about 6 times while working them. I figure if i can rebuild a holley double pumper then i could manage these but didn't have to. They work like new now. i read they were hard to service and about a dozen posts suggesting wd 40 might work or one guy in the whole US who can repair them lol. you can check out my $8.47 bike in the all about us section and off topic if you like. 

Edited June 13, 2021 by chuck123wapati

[Handstitched]

8 hours ago, Rahere said:

The craft guilds became excessively powerful, stopping newcomers from getting established, and so letters patent gave some years of Royal protection.

Thats exactly right. This is a little off topic too, but theres a  really good reference  to guilds in the movie " Jabawocky" , in a scene with " Wat Dabney & Dennis Cooper "  where Dennis wanted to get a job coopering where a guild sign was displayed  .  Roughly, Wat Dabney's line : " To get a job there you must be part of a guild, you're not, and I'm not" . Dennis: " Thats not fair "  WD: Fair or not,  the guilds have the town sewn up"...etc .

Needless to say Wat Dabney, ( the inventor of the inverted firkin)  cut his foot off to make some money,  because he couldn't get a job  coopering, damn funny  

The movie was very much historically accurate too. 

HS

[Rahere]

7 hours ago, Handstitched said:

Thats exactly right. This is a little off topic too, but theres a  really good reference  to guilds in the movie " Jabawocky" , in a scene with " Wat Dabney & Dennis Cooper "  where Dennis wanted to get a job coopering where a guild sign was displayed  .  Roughly, Wat Dabney's line : " To get a job there you must be part of a guild, you're not, and I'm not" . Dennis: " Thats not fair "  WD: Fair or not,  the guilds have the town sewn up"...etc .

Needless to say Wat Dabney, ( the inventor of the inverted firkin)  cut his foot off to make some money,  because he couldn't get a job  coopering, damn funny  

The movie was very much historically accurate too. 

HS

It's actually at the root of modern issues with Freemasonry, that we lurched from feudal to industrial serfdom with very little change at the bottom - or at the top, for that matter. It misrepresents them now, although they do have some élitist tendencies. To put the Commies back in their box, there's nothing wrong with that, if it's based on delivery: sadly the social élite don't deliver, mostly. Right, boxes closed, let's get on.

[Handstitched]

" The movie was very much historically accurate too." I'll correct that  to " mostly historically  accurate". They  actually made a few faux pas in the movie. 

Moving on.....

@Rahere Would I be right in saying that theres a bit of.... 'snobbery'  and/or aristocracy  involved,  being part of a guild ? 

Just to  verbally say to someone" I am in a guild" , can't help but think it sounds a bit ....snobbish    

HS

[chrisash]

We have lots of guilds or Royal  Charters / Associations etc still in the UK though their powers have been diminished over the years so non members can often compete be it accountants , Surveyors saddle makers and so on we also have fresh start ups like Guild of master craftsmen but i understand that's just a marketing thing with no practical or academic qualifications needed. Germany i think still has very powerful guilds

[Rahere]

The Royal Society led to the Professions, though: part of my father's responsibility was membership and discipline of the Mechanical Engineers, and an accident of history made him good friends with Prince Phillip in coordinating that entire sector. It paid off in trumps a year ago getting ventilator production off the ground in just 5 days, his successor in the IMechE leading the entire project. It's illegal to set yourself up as a doctor or accountant, though, if you've not done the exams and gained the experience.

Edited June 14, 2021 by Rahere

[Rahere]

5 hours ago, Handstitched said:

" The movie was very much historically accurate too." I'll correct that  to " mostly historically  accurate". They  actually made a few faux pas in the movie. 

Moving on.....

@Rahere Would I be right in saying that theres a bit of.... 'snobbery'  and/or aristocracy  involved,  being part of a guild ? 

Just to  verbally say to someone" I am in a guild" , can't help but think it sounds a bit ....snobbish    

HS

The Guilds are more visible as the Livery Companies of the City of London, with input into its very autonomous governance. That aligns with wealth, quite often, in much the same way as the Boston Brahmins behave in the US, albeit with slightly less scandal. Sometimes it's family: I once gave my former boss a reference when he'd built a sufficient stache to make tax exile in Jersey attractive. Why me? My family are Channel Maritime, and that includes Jersey's oldest hotel. That's the connection with a certain Flotilla Captain. Grandpa, Officers' Mess CPO. It's not what you know, nor who you know, but what you know about who you know.
I'm often seen as having a superiority complex - and why not, I was the visionary on the team which won the 2012 Peace Prize, but that mostly counts because a certain bespectacled Indian gets his claim through me: I was privileged to tie up the loose end he left when he was assassinated. It worked precisely because his values of humility are cardinal. Yes, when I was a nipper, my neighbours, babysitting, were both the Duke of Norfolk's old nanny on one side and a gypsy rawnee on the other, so I've known high and low, and there's more spark in the low than in the high. It's because we're hands-on, craftsmen.

[Rahere]

Returning to the subject, I've just had to replace a curtain rail, plastic fatigue after 30 years. The same design shows a difference in the runners, the old ones have metal axles, the new ones, plastic, and don't run as smoothly. That's mass production for you, slow degradation of standards. Us, either it's right or it never sees the light of day. There's the difference: their product was never perfect and is declining to the point where "good enough" has to be prefixed by "barely", with the though that in a couple of years, even that won't be true.

[chrisash]

Doctor is a academic qualification and there are different qualities of academia, Accountant is not a protected qualification any one can use the title

[Rahere]

I'm talking doctor of medicine. I'm functionally a doctor of history, without the gown, because I chose to work in the real world, turning Peacemaking into a functional reality. I know that, because I'm a founding member of the Warburg Institute's Esoteric Studies Reading Group, which is strictly post-doctoral, working in the origins of the Renaissance. I'm also coming out of a year studying applied trauma, and am widely quoted in both in Academia. The New Yorker described the Warburg as The Library of the Weird a few years back, and as the core of the University of London's Advanced Studies School, we dare to look at the world as they did then. It can be very practical, looking at how they shook out after the Black Death, linking directly to the issues of global trauma we face now: my input is via Bruce Perry.

[Rahere]

I've sailed as close to the wind as an unqualified accountant as it's possible to do, working as HQ Accountant and Head of Finance in a peer body to NATO and the OECD, because the accounting standards resoect but are not constrained by the IAS. I've also been a volunteer accountant for a major UK charity, and as an economist, I started as a Corporate Money Markets and Foreign Exchange Treasury Dealer, before using my economics training at the hands of two future Governors of the Bank of England to dig several Nations on their beam ends out. I still fart at dawn.

[Tugadude]

Nigel Armitage is a member of The Guild of Master Craftsmen.  Perhaps he will see this thread and comment on the organization.  Having said that, here is some verbiage from the guild's website:

 

The Guild emblem recognises businesses that are approved Master Craftsman. Following our application process, including a visit by an experienced Guild of Master Craftsmen Assessor, approved businesses can join the Guild and be able to show the Guild emblem on their marketing. 

This recognition will ensure you get the work you expect every time by a skilled and experienced Guild member. To find a Guild of Master Craftsmen member simply visit findacraftsman.com. You can search by trade, post code or even name. There you will be able to see images of their work, reviews and find details to help you choose. Don’t forget the Guild’s experienced Conciliation team can only be used with Guild members. 

Based on the following, it doesn't sound like just a "marketing thing".

 

 

Members of the Guild of Master Craftsmen are required to maintain our Aims and Objectives, or membership will be revoked.

These are:

1. To bring together all artisans engaged in a craft, art, trade, profession or vocation, in order to safeguard the interests of both craftsmen and the public.
2. To ensure that the minimum qualifications for membership preserve the high standards of The Guild by excluding unskilled tradesmen.
3. To publicise these high standards through national and local media, thus increasing public awareness of the ideals and aims of The Guild and its members.
4. To promote to the public the trading assets of its members, their honour, integrity, professional expertise, high standards of workmanship and the value for money which they offer.
5. To provide clear identification and recognition for members, in order to enable the public to distinguish them from unskilled tradesmen who try to pass themselves off as master craftsmen, and so to attract and direct work to members of The Guild.
6. To assist all members and to protect them against the damaging and devaluing activities of the unskilled, against bureaucratic discrimination, against penal taxation and adverse legislation. Equally, to protect the public by instilling in our members a greater sense of responsibility, alerting them to the national importance of the services they render, monitoring these standards to ensure that The Guild’s high standards are being maintained, and by encouraging members to always strive for excellence.
7. To encourage an interchange of views amongst members, to unite these views and to bring them to the attention of the Government and local authorities in order to safeguard the livelihood and welfare of members and their dependants.
8. To constitute a pressure group to seek the support of one or more Members of Parliament to make sure that someone speaks out for the interests of Guild members where it matters most.
9. To promote continual research within the craft, trade, art, profession or vocation in which members are engaged, thus benefitting both members and the public. 
10. To foster learning amongst apprentices and students in order to perpetuate the survival, evolution and success of their particular craft. 
11. To promote sponsorship of The Guild by persons, firms and organisations, whether by financial support, by endorsement of the activities of The Guild, or by patronage.

[fredk]

I think there may be 'The Guild of Master Craftsmen' and 'The Guild of Master Craftsmen'

A long time ago, when I had a business making wooden toys, all 'hand made' by craftsmen I was contacted by a 'The Guild of Master Craftsmen' and invited to join them. Basically they wanted £1500 per year as a member so I could use their logo and say I was a member, but there was absolutely no need to prove our quality or standards. Just sign up and pay the fee.  It had, generally, the same aims as set out above.