Craftsmanship Today

[Jim Koepke]

The other thread was getting a bit long of tooth and argumentative.

Hopefully this one can point to examples of companies that still exist and adhere to their principles of craftsmanship.

Someone sent me a story about one such company that has been around for 100 years and is still independent and run by members of the founding family.

I have often drooled when I see one of their products.

167570

Just looking at their site has me feeling good.

Oh, and there is a lot of woodwork in a product that one would not expect to see such.

http://www.queenslandarmchairguide.com/morgan.html

http://www.morgan-motor.co.uk/about_morgan/the_manufacturer/the_manufacturer/the_manufacturer.html

jtk

[john brenton]

You should see what they put in Gulfstream jets. Of course the mechanical side is solid and first class....but man, they go ALL OUT with woodwork.

The guy who told me about this forum is a Gulfstream employee I met when I was looking for wood. The quality of the work and materials is superb.

[Tom Vanzant]

Jim,
Recently my boss asked me to design something for a friend's Morgan... a $160,000 newly manufactured custom car. It seems the AC coil is located horizonally, under the radiator scoop, ahead of the front axle. After ripping the coil off a couple of times on parking lot bumper-strips, he wanted some protection added.
Short story... the chassis is a maze of nearly parallel tubes and formed bracketry, typically British, so after a couple of PVC pipe mock-ups to get it right, we installed a set of stainless steel nerf bars to protect the coil.
It might have been simpler for the man to learn how to drive his $160K toy and do so only when sober. Or maybe not...

[Jim Koepke]

It might have been simpler for the man to learn how to drive his $160K toy and do so only when sober. Or maybe not...


That would have been my first suggestion after you said "parking lot bumper strips."

I knew a person who gave up driving because he couldn't give up drinking, sad.

jtk

[Jon van der Linden]

I believe there was an article in Fine Woodworking a while back about a French firm that made a reproduction the famous Bureau du Roi. It was noteworthy because it was intended to be as exact as possible and because it was the 3rd such desk the company had undertaken in the last 150 years. Each desk required fewer hours to complete than the preceeding, and from what I can tell they all started from zero, i.e. no patterns etc. from previous work. The first was over 130,000 hours, the last (which I think was made in the 90's) took under 100,000 hours (close to a 40k hour difference).

Along similar lines there was a Belgian student whose work was pictured on the back of the Dec. 2001 issue of Fine Woodworking, a reproduction of a small desk by Oeben. It took only 11,000 hours.

Of course for non neanderthals there is the Martin machinery company in Germany which makes classic woodworking machines. All of which are top in their category and generally regarded as the only machines that you can truly expect to have delivered and be absolutely calibrated off the truck. One of their most impressive products is their cross cut table which reads to .01 degrees. Their company motto "Experience Perfection!"

The only company that makes a product that might be preferred over Martin is Kuwahara of Japan, their large (500mm) jointer is really a masterpiece and costs about $25,000. Then again, very few people outside of Japan have ever seen one.

The list is endless. There is so much quality and precision work out there, but most of us live surrounded by junk - that goes for rich people too.

[David Weaver]

If anyone ever makes a trip to IWF to look at sliders, as a buddy and I did a few years ago, the worst thing you can do is go to the martin booth first and get a demo.

Once you look at the martins, the rest of the stuff looks amateurish. Even their reps were more polished and organized. There were other reps who were polite and professional, like minimax and felder, and others who weren't professional at all and who wanted to press you into a sale with as little information as possible.

I'm glad I went the other way into hand tool work, because the "good stuff" that's true precision in the power tool world is otherworldly in cost.