Hand Made or is it!

[ericmark]

I was looking at a magazine with Hand Made written on the cover yet every item in the magazine required some tool to make it.

Clearly when a painter uses a brush or pallet knife to paint a picture we still regard it as hand painted even though he used a tool the same applies to knitting with needles but when to produce the item one needs a motorised rolling mill to emboss the cards is that really hand made?

I hand made a crystal set radio as a lad. Used the yellow bit out of coal as a diode and loo role centre with wire unwrapped from an old transformer the only bought item was the head phones. My son had a kit to do the same and just had to solder the items together, and my granddaughter also had a kit where she just plugged the items into a so called bread board which had pre-made links in it.

My day it was just a lump of wood with nails and we soldered wires from head to head of the nails we also called that a bread board and it really looked like one.

So where does one draw the line for calling things hand made? Even as a kid I had an airfix model which I "hand made" glueing the machine made plastic parts together and painting it. Hand assembled may be but not really hand made.

So if you buy a hand made mug how much has to be done by hand? Are you allowed the potters wheel?

 

[HERTS P&D]

Slow day Eric?

Andy

 

[ericmark]

I was looking at my wife making so called "Hand Made" greeting cards she has some plastic plates and metal cutters and embossing plated which are sandwiched in the plastic and an electric rolling mill squeezes these together to cut or emboss to match the plates used.

It may be a cottage industry but to my mind these are machine made cards although some of the other embellishments are hand done.

Be it a stone tumbler or a potters wheel it is a machine and once we use a machine it may not be mass produced but it's not really hand made.

To use a knitting needle or a marking out table I can see is still hand made the same as carving out a wooden figure with a set of chisels but put that wood on a lathe and to me it's then machine made. The chisel rests on a tool rest which acts as a fulcrum which is about the simplest tool.

The potter however still uses his hands even if a machine turns the pot so this would likely be still considered as hand made or would it?

To advertise as home made OK but to call it Hand Made where do we draw the line?

I made weights for washing machines I designed the computer software (PLC) and I designed and fitted all the electrical handling and control and my hand pressed the start button to produce 6 concrete block a minute but I would not call them hand made. Lower quality block were hand made using moulds and vibrating tables these were no where near as strong or as well finished and "Hand Made" meant "Low Quality".

Often "Hand Made" does mean low quality and yet expensive due to labour costs and people are prepared to pay the extra to have an unique product. So to label as hand made but to in fact use a machine is cheating so lets see what others consider to be the demarcation line that defines if hand made or not.

 

[big-all]

hand made is just another buzz word to give a "good feeling" usually or often to poor quality product
for example "british beef" means the last operation happened here in other words the animal may have spent 95% off its life in argentina or any other country spent 4% off its life in a refrigerated ship and yesterday the carcase was turned into steaks and mince and is now british
in the same way as a british car can be something like 85% imported parts as long as the final "event" assembly happens here
other descriptions like "made from solid wood with veneers for stability" sounds good but means it can be 98% crap wood/woodchip but the final surface veneer that makes it look are "only skin deep"

other terms like" dark oak finish" can mean its crap made from crap but made to look quality

hand made means nothing it suggests quality but means nothing other than hands had an input into this production method

 

[foxhole]

I've seen cards in phone boxes from ladies offering hand finish, is that the same thing.

 

[big-all]

I've seen cards in phone boxes from ladies offering hand finish, is that the same thing.

i think most people just DIY as its cheaper

 

[fourbytwo]

In my opinion, hand made is something that has been made by a person whether using hand tools or a machine. ( ie lathe) The point is he is crafting it.
Machine made is just that the use of robotics.

 

[EightyTwo]

I agree with Big-All, "Hand Made" is a fairly meaningless expression.

If it means anything, I think that it implies that an item has been made with less mechanical input than a mass-produced item. It may also mean that it is a one-off item or one of a small batch that are unlikely to be made exactly the same again.

As ericmark suggests, a hand made table could be whittled from a tree using nothing but an adze or could be made my Norm Abraham in The New Yankee Workshop. Neither of these tables would be like the ones from Argos or other high street stores and, I believe, they could both be regarded as hand made.

There are other expressions that may be more specific and less ambiguous such as hand crafted, hand assembled, hand finished, artisan (or craftsman) made.

Surely the bottom line is that a hand made item is not mass produced and may be bespoke or custom made, often at the whim of the maker.