Are we professional craftsmen dinosaurs?

[Tony Bilello]

Ya know, as an engineer, I've realized that the going assumption is that whenever something fails it's the engineer's fault, but when it's a success it's either the architect, designer, or scientist who gets the credit

From what I have seen about mega disasters, most of the time it is the fault of the contractors using inferior materials which were not specified and inspectors that slept through the project.

[Michael Trivette]

Hello I dont want to add any gas to the fire but lets not assume that all local cabinet shops are better craftsman than Ikea or the BORG

I have worked at 3 different Cabinet shops
and 2 different large Furnature Factorys.

While the 2 large factories did have a division an made (some ) nice furnature most of what I saw coming off the assembly line was ....well junk

And out of the 3 cabinet shops I worked in only 1 would I actually purchase from. The other 2 made more junk than the big factorys.

Do you want it Right .. or Right now

The answer seems to be right now

I know this response doesn' help the origional topic so much but I just wanted to remind everyone than not every Craftsman is well a Craftsman

[Rick Fisher]

My argument on Taiwanese power tools being the same principle is this..

A 30 year old General Canadian Made 12" Jointer will fetch $7000 used.. In another 30 years, it will be running fine, perhaps using a new motor..

The men who MADE that machine are actually craftsmen.. That machine was discontinued from production this year. General has stopped making it, just this spring..

This machine wasnt made in an automated factory with robots .. it was made by crafstmen at the rate of 3 per month..

The reason its gone is simple.. it was $15,000.

You can buy a nice new 12" Jointer for $2000 today. Get fancy and you can spend $4000.

So while cabinet makers lament customers buying Ikea and Borg Cabinets because they do the same task as a quality built cabinet that will last many decades......
Iron and steel workers in Quebec lament customers buying mass produced Taiwanese Jointers because they both flatten wood..

The price difference in precentage is not as extreme as quality cabinets to Ikea Cabinet.. but the dissapointment of the guys who used to make that General Jointer is pretty similar.

****

I am not meaning to be inflammatory.. only pointing out that this is not a cabinet customer specific problem.. this is our culture now. As another fella said, we want it now.. which means not saving up for the best machine possible, like our grandfathers did.. Paying for quality is not in our psyche now, unless it has a flashy label on it, proving its worth..


I am a hobby woodworker.. If I was going to open a cabinet shop, I would sell a brand.. To sell quality, you have to be able to tell the buyers friends that they bought quality.. If you could put a logo on a cabinet.. like a Mercedes tag on a car.. you could quickly become an ego purchase.. In todays society, the two best selling features are either price, or ego..

[Larry Edgerton]

I am a hobby woodworker.. If I was going to open a cabinet shop, I would sell a brand.. To sell quality, you have to be able to tell the buyers friends that they bought quality.. If you could put a logo on a cabinet.. like a Mercedes tag on a car.. you could quickly become an ego purchase.. In todays society, the two best selling features are either price, or ego..

That is something to think about.......

[Jimmy Coull]

Warranty not guarantee, that says it all. First of all, when something goes wrong with the Ikea cabinet, and it will because of either soft woods or being particle board, they will replace, or credit you for a percentage of what the cabinet costs.

Example: $100 cabinet - 10 years old/ 25 year warranty - so you get $60.
The new model now costs $150 so you are really getting back 40%.

Now, you have to hire a handyman/contractor type @ $40-80 to remove said cabinet and replace it. Thats two trips (one removing the cabinet for you to get your refund, and one to reinstall the cabinet) at a 4hr min. charge each, costing a total of $320-640. When it's done you find out that the new cabinet doesn't match and you have to live with this or buy a whole new set of cabinets. Did I mention that you have to pack up the cabinet, drive to the nearest Ikea, wait in line a customer service, get a new cabinet, and then drive home for a minimum of six hours spent by you.

So in the end, that one warranteed cabinet costs you at least;

$90 - your share of the cabinet not warranteed
$480 - Split the difference on handyman,contractor costs
$300 - six hours that you could have worked on somebody's teeth @$50/hr

$870 - total monetary cost, plus a lifetime nagging from your wife because you were too cheap to buy better cabinets and now she has to look, every day, at ones that don't match .

I call that a good deal !

[Michael Pyron]

There's two parts to custom work - the design and the craftsmanship. Sam Maloof gets big money for his stuff because of the design and not because of the craftsmanship. A lot of furniture makers can make a "Maloof" chair as well as Sam but people pay for Sam's signature.

You cannot compete with factory made furniture. If the factories wanted to, and people would pay for it, they could make the furniture out of solid wood and put excellent hardware on it.

But you can make a good living working with a client (certain clients) to design something unique for them. You can also make a good living making things that fit into unique spots (certain shapes and sizes).

I get all kinds of jobs - repair of old furniture, custom jobs, modification of existing furniture and cabinets, and I don't know what else. The individual craftsman needs to be knowledgeable, flexible and innovative to survive.

If you try to beat the big guys (like Ikea) you'll lose ever time. If you try to compete on price, you'll lose every time.

Mike

ages ago when I went to UCSC I got to see and sit in some Maloof chairs...I would never refer to his work as being a great design and that's it...you make it sound like his craftsmanship was lacking...I found his ability to use the inherent grain in the wood to his advantage to be the sign of a true artist/craftsman...

in short, I don't get where your statement comes from...

as far as the rest of this thread...whatever...the vast majority of wood working I see on a daily basis is cr@p...why?...because the customer wants volume (amount) for his buck and not quality...hell, most of the time the customer wouldn't know quality if he was hit up the back of the head with it...this of course is a general statement, we all know there are SOME customers who appreciate craftsmanship and understand it takes more time and are willing to pay for it...

the whole concept of craftsmanship dying is an economic concept driven by the consumer...right now we are in a deep recession/light depression and the customer base has dried up and blown away...the boom we tradesman have enjoyed over the last 15 years or so was because of so many people making huge profits off of the (fake) stock market, now that's over and won't return for many years...

craftsman will always struggle to stick out above the general tradesman and get paid decently for the work they produce...

[Peter Quinn]

Ya know, as an engineer, I've realized that the going assumption is that whenever something fails it's the engineer's fault, but when it's a success it's either the architect, designer, or scientist who gets the credit

Not always, but in this case, yes, it was in fact an engineering flaw, not my assumption. The designers and architects designed the building to look a certain way and create a certain traffic flow. From there, engineers designed it to work and bear load. Here's the design, how much steel, how much concrete, what kind of fasteners, etc. Pretty complex structure, lots of stuff going on. Did fine for a few years. Lots of smart people took a close look at the designs and plans for years after the initial failure, and BINGO, the building was designed to hold a static collection of books and NO people. It would not suffer a catastrophic failure but just enough fractional movement to shed its skin. Guess they figured they never went to the library during college, why would anybody else? I know decent framers that can build a stick frame house without an architect or an engineer. But when things get complicated with long spans, cathedral ceilings and cantilevers, in come the mechanical engineers, and with peoples lives on the line they had better know what they are doing and be paying attention.

In the case of my foray into IKEA cabinets, that junk was designed to hold next to nothing, and will definitely hold what it was designed for. Not an engineering flaw, just a very cheap, very low quality product.

[Larry Edgerton]

Librarys are a fairly common building to have structural problems. It is the crossed objectives of the engineer and the librarian. An engineer designs for a specific weight in live/dead loads, and the librarians job is to aquire as many books as can be crammed in the building.

I have this addage that I use that engineers should borrow when dealing with librarians.......

When in doubt, build it stout.

[Brian Effinger]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Kerley
Ya know, as an engineer, I've realized that the going assumption is that whenever something fails it's the engineer's fault, but when it's a success it's either the architect, designer, or scientist who gets the credit
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Not Not always, but in this case, yes, it was in fact an engineering flaw, not my assumption. The designers and architects designed the building to look a certain way and create a certain traffic flow. From there, engineers designed it to work and bear load. Here's the design, how much steel, how much concrete, what kind of fasteners, etc. Pretty complex structure, lots of stuff going on. Did fine for a few years. Lots of smart people took a close look at the designs and plans for years after the initial failure, and BINGO, the building was designed to hold a static collection of books and NO people. It would not suffer a catastrophic failure but just enough fractional movement to shed its skin. Guess they figured they never went to the library during college, why would anybody else? I know decent framers that can build a stick frame house without an architect or an engineer. But when things get complicated with long spans, cathedral ceilings and cantilevers, in come the mechanical engineers, and with peoples lives on the line they had better know what they are doing and be paying attention.

Actually it sounds like the architect was at fault, because it is usually the architect that is the lead on a project of this size, and must work closely with and oversee the engineering team. The design of any building should come from the collaboration of all members of the design team, from the architects, to the engineers, to even the owner (they need to supply the projects criteria or "program"). And btw, I am an architect.

Oh, and Brian, I'm going to have to remember that! Yup, that successful design.... all me. No one else!

When in doubt, build it stout.

I'm going to have to remember that quote too.

[Dave Avery]

Couple of clarifications

I was frusterated at the time of the original post, and so I was not clear on "Box Store" I consider any store that does not own a saw and is selling Merilet or Krapmaid or the equivilant a "Box Store" as all they offer is a computor program and a salesman.

A large part of my business is trimming homes one step over McMansions, and so I install a lot of this junk. I am routinely seeing cabinets from these or similar particle board vendors from 50-100K. This is what frusterates me. I could build them for less, make a good living, and the customer would get a far better product but I don't have time to do the work and blow smoke up their dress. These I can compete with, and in fact I can build modest kitchens in the 10k range. But no one asks. The Boxes have done their work, and we are considered too expensive without actually asking.

The misconception about our end products I find amazing. Apparently IKEA invented some kind of metal drawer slide while I was carving out that mantle with my stone ax! Who knew?

This is bad enough but when someone tells me basically that I am inconsequential because I am going to be dead in 20 years I do get a little rattled. I must have typed 5 or so replys that I deleted as too inflamatory, and then just moved on.

My whole point though is not if we compete on price, that is immaterial.

My point is that the idea of the value of owning a quality object is disappearing, and that is the root of our problem. Its not about design, many of us here can out design some punk with a keyboard, and we don't use fillers. Its the basic premise of what quality is that is under fire, and lets face it folks, that is our bread and butter, the desire to have something of traditional value. Without that concept, I fear that we will indeed be on the endangered species list.

Larry,

It's not enough to be a high end craftsman. If you can't market and sell (they are two different things) the value that you offer, then you'll be relegated to installing particle board cabinets. People are not going to recognize what you offer unless you make it VERY clear to them.

[David Perata]

I don't make kitchen cabinets but learned a lesson in clock making. I made some Shaker wall clocks a couple of years ago from scratch, i.e., pine boards milled for parts. They turned out beautiful. I took one to some local furniture stores to see what they would charge for them. They compared them to cheap imports and my custom efforts were worth to them about a hundred bucks.

Now, I did sell sixteen of the clocks at $650 each to a person for impressive Christmas gifts. But the lesson is that the public has been so dumbed down by cheap imports that most folks don't know the difference between Chineese imports and real craftsmanship. And they don't care, and why should they? If they don't know the difference they don't see it and it isn't a factor with them. We have become consumers of the knock-offs from the originals.

My hat goes off to you guys who custom make cabinets. I feel that for craftsmen today to find a nitch in the market place, you have to have a product that nobody else makes. A piece of furniture, for example, that is original. The clientele would be higher scale income folks who can appreciate and afford such things. I'm not implying that in life it is vitally important to have so-called "taste" in esthetic things, but to make a living, it seems to me that you have to go where the money and the markets are, and people who do know the difference between quality and cheap imitations.

[Jamie Cowan]

The dentist's POV reminds me of a story a friend told me. She, a novelist, was at a party where a surgeon said, "So you're a writer? That's fascinating. I've always thought I'd like to take six months off and write a book." My friend responded, "That's so funny--I've always thought I'd like to take six months off to become a surgeon." Some people have no idea what other people have to go through to do what they do. Like writing a book and getting published are as easy as breathing. On the other hand, there is a local doctor who happens to be quite a skilled woodworker--I'm not trying to paint (or even oil and wax) dentists and doctors as all being clueless about the world around them.

On the other hand, the guy who built the kitchen cabinets in the house I grew up in was a real hack. The drawers never worked right, and the doors never closed.

[Leo Zick]

another engineer here, who can appreciate both arguments.

BUT

i think a more fair comparison would be ikea vs semi-custom.

i havent toyed with ikea kitchens, but most of their stuff is a step up from what i think everyone assumes. pottery barn, basset, these types of places tend to build decent items. they are fairly durable, look good, etc. i bought a bedroom set from basset, it looks very very nice, but is still veneered over some soft wood (at least not particleboard).

personally, if i had to choose ikea over semi custom, it would probaby be ikea. now, if i had the $ to purchase what you folks here produce, it wouldnt be a comparison.

the way i see it, we have several levels:
-walmart, etc
-ikea
-semi custom
-thomasville, basset, etc
-full custom

the problem is, at the semi custom level, the lower quality kraftmaid type stuff could be just as suspect as anything else.

[george wilson]

I cannot think of a single maker of factory furniture whose designers I wouldn't throw out into the streets at once if I was suddenly running the place. What a mishmash of crap they toss together these days. I personally call Ethan Allen "Heathen Allen". That's my opinion.

Wilkesborn,and North Wilkesboro,N.Carolina were big furniture v=factory towns in the 60's. The president of 1 company was telling me about a meeting with some New Englander. He kept saynig "Modn" furniture.The President coulden't grasp what he was talking about. Finally he realized the guy was talikng about MODREN furniture!!!

[Rick Fisher]

Any of you guys do tennant improvements instead of cabinets ?

Someone mentioned a dentist.. Building service counters and cabinets for retail stores has to be lucrative.. there is no "cookie cutter design".

I just had 100 feet of lighting display done for a store. the Fella charged me $9000 plus materials.. It took him 3 weeks.. Him and a helper..

It was basically rows of 8' high doors with endless 1/2" grooves routed in them, for light fixtures to attach to..

He painted and installed the product. Seems to me he made money on this project.