What is considered handmade?

[Brian Sommers]

I was talking to day with a furniture maker in town and he considered "hand" made anything where a power tool has not touched the wood from unfinished to finished product.

Is this correct?

In other words, if I make say, a wooden toy and use a scroll-saw and electric belt sander, etc to make it, can I label it "handmade in the USA" ?

[Mike Henderson]

That seems somewhat restrictive. If you buy lumber already sawn from the log, it was sawn using power tools. If it was S3S, then it was planed using power tools.

If you take the wood into your shop and saw it to length using a power tool, and/or plane it to thickness with a power tool, I see that as a continuation of the original preparation of the wood.

So where you draw the line between hand made and machine made is difficult. I would say that if the project is a one-off and you did all the work yourself, you would have a reasonable argument that it was hand-made. If you did the joinery by hand - say hand cut dovetails - you would add additional support to your argument that it was hand-made.

The other alternative is that you go into the forest and cut the tree down with an ax (or two man buck saw), cut the log into boards with a hand saw, flatten the board with hand planes, saw the wood with hand saws, and never use an electron in the making of the furniture. And I don't think that's reasonable or possible.

Mike

[Brian Henderson]

You can label it anything you want, there is no one out there who is going to stop you unless you're purposely trying to defraud someone. Don't worry about it, if you want to call it handmade, go for it.

[Bruce Page]

I agree with Mike. I equate machine made to production or factory made. One off's that I make in my shop using standard shop tools e.g. table saw, jointer, sander are still hand made IMO.
Welcome to Sawmill Creek.

[Mike Schuch]

Hand made is a completely meaningless term like organic. To me it means absolutely nothing!

[glenn bradley]

Welcome!

So the furniture maker in town gets out of his handmade bed when the rooster crows, walks into the forest with his stone axe and cuts down a tree . . .

There is no shortage of people who have to set some imaginary rules, restrictions or qualifications in order to bolster a poor self image or to make themselves feel special. While some consider CNC and laser work to be pretty much "George Jetson" woodworking (yes, there is a lot more to it than just pushing a button ), I don't think its necessary to draw a line in the sand and try to value the craft as a craft .

[Bruce Page]

Is there a difference between hand made and hand crafted? For some reason I consider one off's made using my CNC router to be hand crafted but I can't really explain the difference.

[Lee Schierer]

Hmmm, I have to use my hands for everything I build.

[Wade Lippman]

You can label it anything you want, there is no one out there who is going to stop you unless you're purposely trying to defraud someone. Don't worry about it, if you want to call it handmade, go for it.

You can't defraud anyone; the term has no particular meaning, so you are not making any kind of claim that can be false.

[Garth Almgren]

I agree with Mike. I equate machine made to production or factory made. One off's that I make in my shop using standard shop tools e.g. table saw, jointer, sander are still hand made IMO.

Same here. I draw the line at robots doing the work, or production lines where raw materials go in one end and a (mostly) finished product pops out the other end.

[Brian Holcombe]

I would expect it to include some aspect of hand work, that includes handwork done in a factory (that still does exist on a high level). As has been pointed out, unless you are controlling every aspect from sourcing the lumber on through then it's not entirely hand work.

There are people who do source their own lumber and actually take trees down by hand, but it's important to note that every task of something which is entirely hand made was a specialty in it's own right in the days when that sort of thing was commonplace, so being capable of every aspect of the work from harvesting the tree on through applying the finish is possible, but being expert in all of those processes is unlikely until the far end of ones career if at all. It's not unimportant to have an idea of how these tasks can effect the end product, but being reliant on others usually means one needs to concede to the machine in one aspect or another.

I think the term is so broadly applied that it is practically lost all meaning, and that is likely what the furniture maker in the original post was pointing out. It is a hollow term at this point so many have gone to greater lengths to describe exactly what hand made means in their process. I've seen videos produced by major manufacturers on down through individual craftsmen which detail the hand-made aspects of their products.

[Bill Space]

If a hand touches it in the manufacturing process, it is hand made. How could it be otherwise?

The hand that is holding the manual plane(or saw, or whatever)is not doing the work, the plane is. So that original guy's self definition of what hand made is, is flawed.

But it who really cares anyway? Except those who may be marketing the items...

[Brian Henderson]

You can't defraud anyone; the term has no particular meaning, so you are not making any kind of claim that can be false.

I just said that nobody is going to stop your labeling attempt unless it is a purposeful attempt to defraud, which, as you point out, can't happen in this case. I guess if you claimed that it was made out of exotic wood and it turned out to be made out of MDF, that would be fraud.

[Andrew Hughes]

Amazon has a new seller platform for Handmade stuff.I tryd to sign up but was rejected,I was too honest filling out the questions for a opportunity to sell on the new site.Any use of powertools will not get you in.
I doubt anyone would pay my asking price for one of my simple dovetail boxes if it were completely handmade.Very few people would appreciate the work or know what they are looking at.

[Peter Aeschliman]

But it who really cares anyway? Except those who may be marketing the items...

I think the people who care are either:

1) snobs with an elevated sense of self-importance, or
2) consumers who value the "intangible element" of non-factory made items and are willing to pay some premium for it

#1 is silly.

For #2, those kinds of consumers need to do their research before buying to get an accurate understanding of how the item was made. I start to get annoyed when manufacturers over-use the term in such a way that would mislead your average consumer into believing their goods are one-off, one of a kind item that involved lots of personal attention from a craftsman, when in fact they are made on an automated factory line in Malaysia. That's where it starts to feel dishonest, even if there isn't a legal definition of the term "hand made."

As always, buyer beware.