Hand tool use in a current production environment

[Jacob]

.....
My friend, a long retired (very good) chippie told me that when he did his City & Guilds as an apprentice he worked with the chap on the other side of his bench - he cut the mortices, the other chap the tenons, and so on. Someone queried the arrangement and he told them that was the reality.

That figures because morticing would have been one of the heavy jobs, like pit sawing, needing a very tough human machine. George Sturt describes pit sawyers as a special breed of surly but tough chaps accustomed to a very dull life of very hard work. Morticing would be similar, tenons would be a doddle!

 

[Trevanion]

That figures because morticing would have been one of the heavy jobs, like pit sawing, needing a very tough human machine. George Sturt describes pit sawyers as a special breed of surly but tough chaps accustomed to a very dull life of very hard work. Morticing would be similar, tenons would be a doddle!

I always preferred doing the mortices rather than the tenons if I was doing them by hand. I can swing a hammer all day long but continuous hand sawing gives my dodgy right shoulder some problems (Which funnily enough, I think was caused by many, many hours of machine morticing pulling a lever when I was a fresh-face apprentice and not used to such hard work :lol. I find the same with groundwork too, I'll happily swing a pick or mattock quite hard in a foot wide trench all day long but give me a shovel to remove the debris and I'll be knackered within an hour, not to say I wouldn't keep going but I'm just not suited to it at all.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Bodgers have to be the ultimate example of people making huge numbers of one identical component of something larger.

 

[Jacob]

PS I forgot to say - according to Sturt, pit sawyers were itinerant specialists he only called in when needed.

 

[D_W]

This was true in Japan, too. The workmen who sawed logs into lumber on site appeared at the beginning of jobs and were soon gone. Odates text makes them sound like powerlifters in stature, but the were also highly regarded, and not just dumb labor.

 

[D_W]

Although these replies are interesting, it's no surprise that they are veering away onto specialist heritage work, restoration and luxury goods.
If we stick to woodworking trades in the UK (this is Ukworkshop after all) and look for anything that any of us might buy in the ordinary way of things, I don't think anyone will come up with an example where goods made just by hand work are what we will buy.

I think you're right. Guitars are the only thing that comes to mind for me, and most us and uk guitar making with handwork left in it is very high end. The culture in Japan is different, I guess.

I purchased a guitar from a company called bourgeois years ago. The owner of the company thicknessed (with a sander) and then hand braces and voiced every guitar they made.

The thicknessing wasn't by hand, but was unusual because he has something like 30 employees, but he felt those two steps were critical. He thicknessed guitar tops to a subjective stiffness standard and not to a numerical thickness like most do. His guitars had a reputation for all being voiced nearly perfectly, and similar to each other.

They weren't cheap, but not unaffordable for a serious player.