Originally Posted by
John Coloccia
Cosman's got his thing. I have some of his videos. They're quite good, actually. I think he's a great teacher. Where I draw the line, generally speaking, is criticizing one method over another. I run across this in the guitar world BIG time. I've started using CNC to help in the shop. There are lots of people out there that think you just stick in a piece of wood, push a button, and out pops a guitar. Well, even if that's how it worked, so what? It's still my design. My ergonomics. My sound. That ISN'T how it works, btw. It's more like you get some rough parts that still need a lot of handwork, fitting, etc...not a whole lot different than pushing a router around one of my templates, only it does the pushing and I can be off doing other things that really benefit from hand work.
But there are endless discussions about the guitar sounding dead and lifeless if a CNC machine touches it. What nonsense...just absolute nonsense. These are the same people that complain that high end, boutique guitars cost many thousands of dollars. Well, if I put 100+ hours and $600 in materials and hardware into a guitar, guess what...you can't have it for $1000.
I've generally been fortunate that most people in the real world really don't care about any of this nonsense. They don't care if it's a guitar from 4 years ago when it really truly was mostly built by hand, or one from 2 years ago when I started getting better with jigs and did a lot on bandsaws, routers and tablesaws, or one this year that will be mostly roughed on the CNC with final neck/body contours done by hand. In my world, I'm 100% about end results and I consider all of these other concerns to be academic, at best.
That said, the more you do something, and the better you get at it, the easier it is to accomplish with less specialized tools, and that's a good thing. I'd be in big trouble if I constantly had to make jigs and fixtures for things that today I can just grab a knife, or a chisel, and just quickly do by hand and by eye. I don't see that as being a goal, though. It's just something that happens. I think we'd loose a lot of beginners if they had to master hand tool skills before actually building something. I think people should just build however it is they can.