[OP]
Contributor
we cant compete. I cant get insurance, period, without dust collection. Full shop blow downs multiple times a year. Adequate footwear, guarding, on an on. I found this one as funny as it was hard to watch. Beach wear in the wood shop, taking the term "toe clamp" to a new level, and realizing how over complicated we make things sizing a complicated panel with a skil saw, and mostly by eye..
Perspective is a good thing.
https://youtu.be/Wz0Ai1hX7gg
Contributor
FWIW, over the last few decades living overseas we collected a few pieces of furniture from the Far East and Middle East that were built in shops like the video.
With the exception of a hand carved teak dining room set made in Chiang Mai, Thailand which was exceptional (and expensive, over $10K 30 years ago), most woodworkers would be embarrassed to display the joinery and particularly the finishes. The finished furniture is cute, and fun, and mostly functional, but also very crudely put together. You'd probably get a D or F in shop class for turning in such a project.
I just refinished a blanket chest made in Saudi Arabia where the initial builder applied all the hardware, then applied the stain and topcoat. I have a few more pieces like that. It looked like they didn't wipe down the stain, it accumulated in the nooks and crannies, but they stained it so dark it was almost opaque. It looked dirty, basically like crap within a few feet. Turns out there was some very beautiful, interesting wood underneath.
There are a few local guys selling similar quality work in the Texas where I live, from reclaimed lumber. Rough cut, rough finishes, looks like they threw together a chest of drawers in a weekend.
Oh ya, back to the beautifully crafted Teak dining room set from Chiang Mai: 7 of 8 of the chairs failed and now have embedded steel rods and epoxy holding the legs on. The wood was very brittle and the legs were attached with miters to the chair base. Kind of like table legs and aprons. Really bad design when someone scooted back on the chair on a carpet. After 30 years my wife tired of the set, so we sold it.
Mark McFarlane
Member
Well check out this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70ZPLjfE-KQ
No shoes, uses a table saw WITH NO TOP on it (yeah wide open blade). Unbelievable lack of safety shown in this vid. OSHA inspectors wouldnt even know where to beging.
Contributor
its okay he isnt wearing shoes the dress pants make up for it.
Contributor
You can't wear shoes when you use your toes as a clamp. @ 5:10 in the videoOriginally Posted by Joshua Bass
Mark McFarlane
Member
My help has been with me 2 years and I still have to remind him EVERYDAY to put on his glasses, lower the TS blade to just above the kerf, open blast gates, etc. One day I'm not gonna be there and he's gonna get bit.
-Lud
Contributor
I feel sorry for anyone just starting out in Woodworking. As they learn so many bad techniques from you tube. Even here in the United States of America there are too many guys making videos. Getting likes and subscribes is the goal. Copy cat karaoke woodworkers parroting the same stuff over and over.
There i said it i feel better now.
Last edited by Andrew Hughes; 10-07-2017 at 11:47 PM.
Aj
Member
I'd say they are very skilled to do what they did , how they did it and not get hurt!
Guest
You can't compete because you aren't willing to play the same game.
Move to some third world dump and exploit the natives.
It has crossed my mind every single time I pay my quarterly payroll taxes and the exorbitant amount of money I dole out for worker's comp.
Your other option is automation. The government cares slightly less about robots than it does your ability to remain solvent.
Member
When I was in India three years ago to visit my old Peace Corps village, a motor rickshaw driver took me on a tour of Mysore City. One of the places we stopped at was a furniture workshop. They were making garden swings, chairs, and tables. The major joinery work had been done somewhere else, so I didn't get to see if the factory conditions were like the ones in the video. The quality wasn't bad.
The particular workshop I was at, though, mostly did the inlay work. Fine woods in different colors were being used. The one concession to modern times was the use of white plastic instead of the now illegal ivory. A little old man was cutting out the shapes of the inlays with a little hand jigsaw, one of those bow-shaped ones. There was a large dining table being worked on in an outdoor courtyard, outside most likely because the indoor area was really dark and they needed to see what they were doing. Standing around the table top were eight men. (it was a really big table.) They were using hand chisels and mallets to carve out the recesses for the inlays. The shapes were just traced onto the wood.
The pieces that had had the inlay work glued in place were being sanded by hand by three young men in a very dark room. I got to see a few of the finished furniture pieces they had around the place. The quality was excellent, the joinery, the inlay work, and the finishing. Some of the work offsite was probably done on electrical power equipment, but the stuff I saw could have been done the same way a thousand years ago.
[OP]
Contributor
I suffer this same issue. You wouldn't believe how many times I have a guys who sneezes a lot if wood dust is in the air. We have very good dust collection for fines.. I will walk out of the office and she shop will be full of dust and someone either didn't open a blast gate or repositioned their work and when resuming sanding never kicked the vac back on.
It never ceases to amaze/irritate me.
Guest
The downside of working in an industry that has such tight margins that you are not able to pay a good enough wage to attract a better employee. For the most part we're mucking from the bottom off the gene pool. What's the max you can make on a bench in this industry? $35/hr? What's a first year apprentice worth? $15/hr and he's likely not even going to break even for you for two years?
I suffer with the same problems. Not paying attention, not caring about their health. I'm filtering over 10,000 cfm of air when everything is cranked up. But people don't purge filters in the downdraft regularly or think to check the tray, so it clogs up and isn't moving air like it should. "I didn't know" Really? It's written on a plaque right next to the power button.... Once plugged up, it's a massive pain to clean out.
Or packing a shaper FULL of chips because opening a gate is right up there with rocket science or brain surgery.
Widebelt gates? That switch, it's tricky.... I'm planning on putting a solenoid in off of the conveyor switch so it can't be forgotten.
I tell people my mantra; "what am I doing, and why am I doing it?" That should be repeating through your head constantly under my employ. I'm not paying you to screw up and we only get paid to build it once. It's a simple job, take a big piece of wood, cut it up and put it back together. Its the same crap ever single day. Wood, glue and nails. Just the shapes change a bit.
Not putting stuff away? ugh.... I'm not your mother. Make ready for the next guy.
Contributor
I tell people my mantra; "what am I doing, and why am I doing it?"
Martin that's a great Mantra, When I work full time in the roofing industry we were always short handed. Some guys were very hard workers but just couldn't keep it together.
This was the roofing company's mantra.
Aj
Contributor
I was in an auto parts factory in Sweden, a highly developed country. Many of the workers were wearing clogs - with steel toes! Really, they make steel toed clogs? Not a pair of safety glasses in sight, however, even on those working close enough to the robot welders that sparks regularly hit them. Good grief, people cared more about their toes, sort of, than their eyes.
At least this guy was wearing a color coordinated dust mask.
John
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