Cabinet build

[ian maybury]

Hi Brian. I hadn't been following, but worked through the thread just now. Lovely work, and while i'm a mixed hand and power person a nice reminder of just what hand tools are capable of.

The thoughts it really brings out for me are (a) there's no substitute for the right tools properly set up (one wrong move and it's oops/it's not necessarily a low cost route - no wonder high end cabinetry was rare enough back in the day), and (b) there's so much of what is actually design involved in the making - the combination of the design of the piece and the choice of material and methods are really a single planning task, even though they often tend to get thought of separately. ( c) It's easy to forget the quality of work that's possible with hand tools - in the right hands, and applied with the right mindset.

It's scary how far the mentality that underpins the consumer/box store version of tools and DIY is from this. A visiting (and not very practical) brother in law the other week left my fairly ordinary workshop shaking his head after being walked though a series of hand tools and machines and how they worked and were set up - the complexity/precision involved in everything blew his mind.

There's more than a bit of a tendency in these days of specialisation too (in the broader house and contents context) for designers to at times to not have a very practical grasp of function and build/construction - never mind the immersion in the user situation that's necessary to properly understand requirements. The various schools (architectural etc) often don't emphasise especially the practicalities to any significant degree at all. So many marketing/business types think manufacturing is just something that happens - old hat. Maybe we need a system of life long progression - where our designers work their way up through the various disciplines.

The Japanese predictably enough have in some quarters tended to not just value, but also to set out to implement this sort of thing properly….