The unedited John Brown

[bugbear]

It's quite an extreme view which I can only partly agree with. He seems to suggest that if you use machines you make ugly work. If you use hand tools you produce beauty. The fact is, if you are talented and skilled you use the machines to make the elegant designs you want. Machines make life easier but you need to make them work for you and not be restricted by their capabilities.

Machines make more waste. Really? Use a saw bench to rip the timber, it's a 3mm blade not a 1.5mm (double the waste!!) use a p/t instead of a jointer plane? The wood is either true or not. Router or moulding plane, the shape is cut or not. A tenon is the same size cut by hand or machine. I don't buy it.

In real life you need balance and, as much as I enjoyed reading the article, this is an extremist view and so lacks balance.

Agreed - it's a matter of wether the machines are master or servant. It's also easy to use handtools to make very blocky furniture. A curved moulding is (almost...) impossibly laborious to carve by hand, where a spindle moulder will allow this design element to be used freely.

On a literary, he also says the same thing, over and over again. Some editing would have helped, and good editing would have kept his message, and probably made it clearer.

BugBear

 

[Cheshirechappie]

John Brown lived life (at least, the latter part of his life) in his own way, by his own rules. He made a small income by chairmaking, and lived within that income, accepting what many of us would regard as significant sacrifices of modern comforts. To live life that way requires a fairly strong mind and a certain bloody-minded determination, which I think is reflected in his writing.

I agree with Bugbear that his writing style is not the most elegant or concise, but as he lived and worked first and wrote as a secondary activity, his writings do have integrity. I think there are many in the environmentalist movement and some in journalism who write very eloquently espousing the 'simple life', but who themselves enjoy a good standard of living with all the mod cons. That makes John Brown the better writer for me - his words carry weight because he wrote as he lived.

John Brown's way would not be my way, nor I suspect most people's way, and he was very opinionated; but at least he was honest and consistent in his opinions, and himself lived as he advocated.

Would his way work as a wider social model? I very much doubt it - you can't turn the clock back. But it would work for some people, and there's no harm at all in that.

 

[marcus]

He made a small income by chairmaking

Which is a significant point I think — it is possible even now to do this with chairs using only hand tools, just about. The trouble comes if you want to make bigger things. Then you find that the time and energy required increases in direct proportion to the size of the piece in a way that it doesn't if you have some machine help. If, for example, you make a dresser twice as big by hand, then it takes close to twice as long, and almost twice as much energy is expended. If the dresser is four times bigger, it costs almost four times as much in time and energy. With machines to help with the hard work, the increase in size doesn't come with anything like such a big time and energy penalty — you can make a chest in not that much more time than it takes to make a jewellery box.

So when he writes:

If you make your furniture by hand, news will soon spread, and people will travel to see your work, and they will buy it!

I can only say that my experience is that, yes, people will look at it, and they will often love it, but they will then say that they cannot possibly afford it. Nowadays you can't make fine, one-off craftsman made things that anyone but the richest people can afford even using machines, unless it is something reasonably small and generic like chairs — so how can you hope to do it with larger objects by hand, where you are spending hours doing something that a machine can do in minutes?

And I do think there is an issue about honesty there. To me it's dishonest to bang on about the dangers of dust, and to harp on about the good old days, while conveniently ignoring the toll that a life of un-remitting manual labour would take on the bodies of those who were subjected to it. And it's dishonest to hold up his own particular ideal of production and craft as being superior to everyone else's without acknowledging that what he is proposing is completely economically impractical at anything more than the level of a chap making a few chairs. We can't go back to living like that without killing off most of the people, and if we did we would soon discover that, as something faced out of necessity rather than as a lifestyle choice, it is not nearly so much fun as it looks.

Having said that, I think he is right about certain things — there's a strong case to be made for questioning the direction we are headed as a culture, and what our priorities are, and how we approach work and design and building, and the environment, and all sorts of other things, but what he seems to be proposing is no kind of answer, unless it's a personal answer only for himself, which doesn't seem to be his point....

 

[Jacob]

....
Would his way work as a wider social model? I very much doubt it - you can't turn the clock back. But it would work for some people, and there's no harm at all in that.

I don't think he's proposing it as a wider social model. And anyway he used a band saw, and his timber would have been almost entirely be machine produced, up to the point where it arrived at his shop.
But the wider social model possibility is interesting in that it would certainly create jobs. Not just pie in the sky - lots of studies show that in agriculture the peasant small-holding is generally more productive than agri business. People produce more food and are better off farming their own bit rather than working as labourers for someone farming the whole lot by machines, or more likely just being unemployed. And there's been a big revolution in micro brewing, micro baking, etc. I can see this working for wood products too. Not turning the clock back but a different (modern) approach.

PS In fact almost everybody on this forum agrees with John Brown to some extent - we are doing what we do because we choose to, hand tools and all, non of us can compete with IKEA and it'd make more sense for us to get proper jobs and allow somebody else to do our work

 

[RossJarvis]

I can agree very much with a lot of what John Brown says, but I do feel he is being a bit "elitist" and unkind about others who have not followed his own path. If this is the way you want to go then as one poster says, do it, though it involves a perceived sacrifice of material standards. However I feel there is also some rose tinted spectacle wearing and a bit of harking back to a "Golden Age" which never existed. Many ills came with industrialisation, but historically craftsmen would not have been able to possess the medium to higher end stuff they made themselves. Henry Ford may be guilty of much, but at least he paid his workers a good wage and made a product which they could afford. Industrialisation also brought with it modern medicine, soft bog-roll, an end to cold lino in the winter, drive-by shootings, the atomic bomb, web-sites like this. Every advance or regression is a double edged sword maybe?

We seem to be in a situation where we have to work harder and harder to possess more and more and the "economy" has to keep growing to stay still, That does seem a bit like madness to me. Slowing down a bit and making do with less and appreciating it more, seems like a good antidote to the modern malaise. However maybe its been like that since time began.

 

[bugbear]

However I feel there is also some rose tinted spectacle wearing and a bit of harking back to a "Golden Age" which never existed. Many ills came with industrialisation, but historically craftsmen would not have been able to possess the medium to higher end stuff they made themselves.

Quite right - even the lovely Arts and Crafts stuff was only for the wealthy!

BugBear

 

[rafezetter]

Where do I sign to re-train?

First learn the difference between turnover and profit

Sorry to go offtopic a sec but, but even if his profit is only 50% for that chair - (which I don't believe for a second - 2.5k for materials and overheads to make such a chair.. really?) - 2.5k for woodworking for approx 120 hours, even a skilled craftsman, is incredible by anyone's "normal" standards.

To be frank if I was quoted such, my first question would be "show me how you came by such a large sum".

I'm not a cheapskate by any means, I've always believed in the system of a fair price for something, IF it's justified.

 

[marcus]

To be frank if I was quoted such, my first question would be "show me how you came by such a large sum".

I don't have any idea about this particular case, but if it were a complex and high-end custom chair made to measure for one person that sounds about right. Obviously if things are being batched the price can come down dramatically.

£5000/120 is about £40 an hour, but it doesn't work out like that in real life. Most people running a small furniture-making business are doing well if they can get three solid days in the workshop a week to actually put in those hours. On top of this there is design time, marketing, quoting, accounts, web design, photography, dealing with suppliers, sourcing hardware, ordering timber, sending back timber that is not what you asked for, delivering pieces, visiting clients to quote, days spent quoting for jobs you don't end up getting etc, etc etc. And then the inevitable mistakes which you have to put right in your own time and can't charge for. All of this has to be paid for, but is not being charged for directly.

Then there is a need to pay for a workshop and possibly business rates (which depending on where you live can be eye-watteringly expensive). And electricity for running machines which is not getting cheaper. And heating a largish workspace so it is at least dry enough for the timber to stay at a sensible moisture level and you can feel your fingers. And then there's the day to day running of the workshop. This week alone I spent £40 on replacement filter elements, £35 on shellac, £30 on re-grinding blades. And then things break and need replacing. It's constant, all the time. It's amazing how much things like abrasives cost. And there may be loans to pay off for machinery. And insuring all that machinery, and power tools and hand tools, and a store of valuable timber, and pieces worth £000's of pounds in the workshop and in transit.

And then timber, which is not getting cheaper, and has to be top quality if you are going to charge the sort of prices you need to in order to do the job at all, which means a lot of wastage, and possibly a trip to a timber merchant who is not just down the road, or an expensive delivery from same. And for a chair with curved components you may be sawing curves from the solid, out of boards 3" or 4" thick which is damn expensive. It's surprising how much timber a single curvy chair can use.

Assuming that 120 hours is a reasonable time to make the chair, which it may well be, I would say that taking all that into account you might end up with, maybe £20 an hour, perhaps, out of the £40 you are charging to the client, if you are doing very well indeed. That sounds fair enough to me for skilled craftsmanship. I wouldn't grudge it to, say a piano tuner or a web designer. Go to anyone else who is actually making a living (I mean really making a living) doing custom fine-furniture making and nothing else, and that is the sort of price you will pay. I wish it could be less. How I wish it could be less.

All of which goes to show why making fine furniture for a living is so damn hard to make work, and why hardly anyone manages to make a living from it. Try it.

 

[Rhossydd]

2.5k for woodworking for approx 120 hours, even a skilled craftsman, is incredible by anyone's "normal" standards.

You think £20/hr is "incredible" ? You must lead a very sheltered life.

 

[Smithy]

I am glad this article has generated the debate it deserves. I posted the article back in April and it got one comment. I have always been a big John Brown fan and he was the only reason I bought Good Woodworking. I agree it is a idealistic but it does have it's merits. The hand tool against power debate will continue forever and it is up to each individual to arrive at a compromise. How many people have a workshop full of powertools that for the most part gather dust and it would be more economic to spend a bit longer using a hand tool.

I appreciate that in this consumer driven society where price rules over quality it is a must for people to work with machinery. I would not think it was possible for someone with a family and mortgage/rental to generate enough income without some machinery. Even in John Browns case he had a bandsaw, which I would say is the minimum.

I would be intersted to know of any woodworkers who make a living completely without machinery. In this catergory I exclude people who teach and write.

Mike

 

[bugbear]

I appreciate that in this consumer driven society where price rules over quality it is a must for people to work with machinery. I would not think it was possible for someone with a family and mortgage/rental to generate enough income without some machinery.

True, but only for people working wood for a living. People working wood for the simple joy of it can use whatever they like (and can afford).

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

But in any case its not either/or. Almost everybody (including Brown) does a bit of both. The important things are first, not to lose sight of how useful hand tools are and assume that a machine or gadget is the only modern way, second to recognise how much machines alter products - not just as alternative tools but a whole other area of craft skill and design.

 

[Cottonwood]

But in any case its not either/or. Almost everybody (including Brown) does a bit of both. The important things are first, not to lose sight of how useful hand tools are and assume that a machine or gadget is the only modern way, second to recognise how much machines alter products - not just as alternative tools but a whole other area of craft skill and design.

A good example was how he went against the holy grail accepted wisdom that chair arms simply must be made from out of riven straight stock, nothing else will do. He simply got a wide 1 inch thick ash board, then cut it into narrow strips following the growth lines, then used these as arm blanks to be steam bent etc. Actually much less wasteful than using the wedge/froe/drawknife etc....

edit, should of mentioned he used a big old bandsaw to do the rip cut's.....

 

[marcus]

I would be intersted to know of any woodworkers who make a living completely without machinery. In this category I exclude people who teach and write.

I think a few people in the green-wood working scene manage it. Green-wood chair makers, pole lathe turners, bowl turners etc.

 

[marcus]

But in any case its not either/or. Almost everybody (including Brown) does a bit of both. The important things are first, not to lose sight of how useful hand tools are and assume that a machine or gadget is the only modern way, second to recognise how much machines alter products - not just as alternative tools but a whole other area of craft skill and design.

Agree. If you can use both machines and hand-tools to your advantage (rather than to the machine's advantage) then you have the best of both worlds.

I think there is a lot to be said for starting out with only hand tools when you are learning, because you then find out how nice handmade things can be, and afterwards it may be less easy to allow machines to dictate everything. Also machines can make you lazy, and once you have them there is less incentive to learn to use hand tools really efficiently, and you may never realise how quick and flexible they can be.... And as bugbear says, if there is no need to earn a living from it you can use whatever you want.

second to recognise how much machines alter products - not just as alternative tools but a whole other area of craft skill and design.

Yes!

 

[Cheshirechappie]

One thing John Brown doesn't explicitly say, but implies, is that working by hand making furniture pretty well forces you to make lasting items.

One capacity machines have is the ability to turn out items of lesser quality faster and cheaper than can be done by hand, thus leading to quicker obsolescence. Kitchens are a case in point - a small factory can churn out particle board kitchen cabinet carcases at a spectacular rate. They don't really last though - there's a sort of acceptance that ten years is about the 'normal' life for a modern fitted kitchen. Not quite the same approach as the old dresser and scrubbed-top table that would last a couple of generations. Flat-pack furniture in general follows the same trend.

I wouldn't suggest that either approach are 'right' or 'wrong'; furnishing a house with just the basics would be a very expensive business if only hand-made stuff were available. However, there is a bit of a reaction against the impermanent nature of modern 'budget' furnishings. People in general do have a feel for items of longer-lasting nature, and also in general respect that quality comes at a cost. I think that's something Brown's writings reflect.

 

[Jacob]

Machines can make long lasting items too. It's not an essential feature of hand-making only. The extra cost wouldn't necessarily be that high. The trouble is they'd run out of customers!
Obsolescence is essential for economic growth. If you have a non-stop production line the faster things end up as scrap the better. Whether or not we need continual economic growth is another question.

 

[RogerP]

......... They don't really last though - there's a sort of acceptance that ten years is about the 'normal' life for a modern fitted kitchen. Not quite the same approach as the old dresser and scrubbed-top table that would last a couple of generations. Flat-pack furniture in general follows the same trend.........

That's probably longer than many folk need or want. Fashions change and the sheep that follow fashion must keep up.

Examples:

House across they road from me has changed owners several times is the last 18 years and on each occasion the kitchen and bathroom have been stripped of perfectly good stuff and new installed.

The house next door has had two kitchens and bathrooms so far in the last 10 years and what do I see pull up at 8.00am this morning? Four blokes in two kitchen/bathroom fitter's vans! Been mayhem for the past 6 hours.

Sad bit is by time they've ripped the old out there's nothing worth me salvaging.

 

[marcus]

Cuts both ways, I got two sinks for the workshop, and worktops, and a load of tool storage cabinets when our neighbours re-did their kitchen.... 8)

 

[Cottonwood]

Obsolescence is essential for economic growth. If you have a non-stop production line the faster things end up as scrap the better. Whether or not we need continual economic growth is another question.

At one time I wouldnt have accepted that view, but I can these days :| .
Check out the old machines by wadkins, robinsons etc, still up and running a century later and doing the job they were designed and built for....norris, spiers, a bit more durable than some crappy disposable rali effort. De skilling I think someone mentioned somewhere :!:

LOL I think I read somewhere recently ikea's annually use 1/10th of the entire global timber supply, amazing when you see what boxy sh#te they turn it into. Perhaps it would make an interesting academic study, what proportion of ikea production consists of recycled "wood" material-theirs (or someone elses). I mean on top of that (sourcing the massive supply) theres the cost of the factories, the latest cnc machinery, the wages bill...the cargo ships, the fleets of wagons, the mega retail outlet-just to get you a pack of chipboard with sticky back plastic beech effect panels....
Thats why disposable tools are so popular, euphemistically called "consumables" should that be consumerables?. And why the so called recycling industry has developed in the last 10 years or so. I do own 2 maklita drill drivers and very excellent kit they are, but I doubt they will still be usable in 140 years time, unlike my disston saws...Old Henry built for quality, for him it was a social and spiritual priority. I guess he wanted to sell saws, but not on the basis of a tradesmen buying a new one every week or however often one buys a modern disposable these days. "Disposable" LOL the exact opposite of "attached to". Thats the thing with fashion, you never get attached to it, its always changing...