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allotmentgirl
Regular Member


82 Posts
Posted -  27/02/2010  :  22:28
Has anybody been watching Mastercrafts on BBC2 with Monty Don? It is so nice to see the old crafts being kept alive.I particularly liked the episode about making the chairs out of green wood. I love to see good workmanship. It's a shame we don't buy Handcrafted furniture /articles that have been made and meant to last a lifetime,it would help keep these skills alive if we did buy them instead of this rubbish from Ikea that will be in a skip in 5 years time. It's a shame that we feel the need for new this, new that all the time, I would much rather pay  more for something thats been well made and have it for 20 years or more..
Last week I saved a lovely 1920/30s cupboard from someones back yard that was going to be burnt on their fire and I love it.
Anyone else seen Mastercrafts?


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blokman
Senior Member


1120 Posts
Posted - 10/03/2010 : 08:51
Anybody remember Ron Carter the blacksmith over at Simonstone, it was a programme about him, some thirty odd years ago that encouraged my interest in blacksmithing.....
His trademark I seem to remember was a rams head and a Lancashire rose in iron.
Not sure if one of his sons took over the business, I gave them an old power hammer that I got out of a local mills fitting shop.


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Tizer
VIP Member


5150 Posts
Posted - 10/03/2010 : 11:44
"..when there was a frost about he always brought the iron he needed for the next day into the forge overnight"

Perhaps it seemed to work better not because the iron had different physical properties but because bringing iron at 0 degrees C into the forge cooled the air and this adversely affected either the process or the blacksmith!


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belle
VIP Member


6502 Posts
Posted - 10/03/2010 : 12:00
Now, in the dim and distant recesses of my rather overgrown mind, I seem to remember that metal can snap if it gets cold enough...i don't remember anything technicla or sciantific about why, just that it can!Tizer, enlighten us!


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 10/03/2010 : 16:30
Belle, the colder a metal is the more brittle. Logically bringing it in shouldn't make any difference and Jimmy agreed about that but he said it worked better and he was a wonderful smith.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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Tizer
VIP Member


5150 Posts
Posted - 10/03/2010 : 20:05
Stanley knows much more about metal than I do, although I must admit I've just started reading `Metals and Man', a Pelican book first published in 1946 and bought for £1 recently!


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 11/03/2010 : 06:13
Metal is addictive.... My old friend, the late Arthur Entwistle could tell the difference between metals blindfolded. I once tested him by mixing a bar of Stellite among some similar bars of mild steel. He identified the Stellite blindfold, now how is that possible, I even put some stainless in to try to fool him but it didn't work.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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belle
VIP Member


6502 Posts
Posted - 11/03/2010 : 09:55
familiarity? you high light one of the most magical things about human beings..they can deepen their relationships with all sorts of sensory experiences untill they are almost supernatural...as I get older I realise more and more how the sense of touch has played one of the biggest roles in my life, even a large part in laying down my memories.. we are feafully and wonderfully made, to quote that book that Frank does not believe in.


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marilyn
VIP Member


5007 Posts
Posted - 11/03/2010 : 10:47
I cannot stand the touch/feel/contact with a couple of surfaces. Velvet is one of them. As soon as I detect velvet anywhere near me I can't breathe. The other is a type of metal, but I don't know what it is called. When my son lived at home, he bought himself a bed made of it and I had trouble breathing when I changed the sheets each week. I could just manage it so long as I didn't touch the metal. I would often wander into my son's room to see him and he would say 'Sit on the bed and chat a while, Mum.' I had to confess my aversion to whatever it was that his bed was made of and after that it became a family joke to drag me in there and rub me against the metal. The metal was black and kind of 'brushed' but not the usual solid metal that brass beds etc are made out of. It was really creepy stuff.


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bcopley
Regular Member


69 Posts
Posted - 15/03/2010 : 21:17
Watched the Master Craft people learning to weave and suprised at what the stuff sells for in London today. In the '50 I think I worked all week running 4 looms on piecework and took home £7 a week. Ah well - the good old days.


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belle
VIP Member


6502 Posts
Posted - 15/03/2010 : 23:19
Yes I really enjoyed the weaving programme but would have like to see more about the actual process of threading up the loom ...compared to the detail they showed in the wood turning and the glass making, i felt they rather skipped that bit and concentrated too much on the finished articles...I came to the conclusion it must be much harder than the other crafts, which doesn't surprise me, we are so easily losing these intricate skills that allowed working men and women to achieve tasks that many "Educated" would struggle to master.


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 16/03/2010 : 06:13
I watched it and was struck by the simplicity of the loom gaiting and cloth construction when you compare it with the industry I knew. If you think about complicated Jacquards and ribbon weaving it was like three dimensional chess. One of the things I learned when looking into the industry was how transferrable the skills were. Look at the ex-textile workers who converted with ease to highly skilled jobs in the aero-engine industry, the number of union secretaries who learned their craft calculating prices for different cloth constructions and mill managers who went into war service and were ideal men for management of logistics. No wonder that people entirely new to weaving had problems getting their heads round relatively simple tasks. And they never touched on spinning, yarn preparation, dyeing and finishing. It was a very complicated industry.

I'm looking forward to the stonemasons.


Stanley Challenger Graham




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belle
VIP Member


6502 Posts
Posted - 16/03/2010 : 08:56
Yes me too, those were the two that really caught my attention, weaving and stonemasonry...had a delightful mother's day going round a graveyard to find out whether my great great great grandfather was back on his feet ( the headstone was one of those lowered by the council) and just marvelled at the carving on some of the stones..the church was not open but the porch had a rather odd carving in it's wall... possibly a masonic symbol, and it made sense of why this particular graveyard had such ornate memorials. My favourite was an Art nouveau one , and as I had the youngest of the family with me, I made sure they knew that's what I wanted!!! (too expensive, perhaps I should get some tips from next weeks prog and make one myself!)
My old ancestor had been righted, but he is lonely looking all the way over here when the rest are in Nelson or Haworth. Probably came to take the waters..obviously didn't work. Or maybe it was his sneaky way of getting back to Yorkshire to be buried, he was born in Haworth after all. I contacted the council to see if i could be popped in with him when the time came, why waste money...but his second wife, who became an incredibly rich widow, having married not one but two "self made men"and out lived both of them, was in with him...not surprisingly no one had felt the need to pay a stonemason to add her name.

Edited by - belle on 16/03/2010 08:59:00 AM


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thomo
Barlick Born Old Salt


2021 Posts
Posted - 16/03/2010 : 18:21
I am much interested in the bits above about metals, as I have spent quite a lot of my life working with them, I spent a week with the Blacksmiths at West Marton when I was at school and told to go back and see them when I was fifteen. These men did all of the wrought ironwork for Gledstone Hall, however the horse bit put me off, I had seen the injuries. Prior to going to sea I worked as a "bench fitter" and machinist in aerospace and general engineering. Then the Navy as an engineer. Here you start off  making things by hand and only graduate to the machines once you have proved that you are proficient with your hands. After the Navy I went back to aerospace, turning and  milling, then to boatbuilding which is a combination of blacksmithing, sheet metalwork and general engineering. A lot was learned, like you can tell a metal by its smell, much as you can with wood. Another similarity here is that metal has a grain, again much like wood. There are indeed metals that can cause an alergic reaction, one is titanium, a splinter of which can go bad in your hand at an amazing speed, yet it is used in surgery. Steel will not crack however low the temperature if it is not under load, but put a stress on it and it can shear. One thing is certain, if you can create something from metal that is admired and at the same time useful, then be very proud of it. 


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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 17/03/2010 : 06:27
That would be Hoggarth and his apprentice Jimmy Thompson Peter. There used to be a case of shoes done as an apprentice piece by Hoggarth in I think it was the Forester's pub above Trawden? I saw it about 40 years ago after Jimmy told me about it. I have an idea the landlord was related to Hoggarth. If the anvil is still in the forge at Marton it deserves looking after, it isn't the normal English steel-faced anvil, it's Swedish and is solid steel, very rare. There are two anvils in the forge but if you didn't know where the second was you'd never find it. It's buried in the floor near the hearth and was used as a solid base to 'jump' the end of a hot bar on. This is where you need a thicker section on the end of a bar. You get it to working heat in the fire and then drop it end on onto the buried anvil, this compresses the metal at the end of the bar and it swells up. Hoggarth made a tool for making square holes in the cross bars and he also made the foot-opertaed hammer which does away with the need for a striker. A clever smith and Jimmy learned well off him.

On a different scale, Sheffield Forgemasters are going to install a 15,000 ton forging press so they can make forgings for the casing of nuclear reactors which at the moment can only be made in Japan. Wonderful!


Stanley Challenger Graham




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wendyf
Senior Member


1439 Posts
Posted - 17/03/2010 : 08:02
You would be safe working as a blacksmith now Thomo, as shoeing horses is no longer part of the job. Farriers are a breed apart, they still have to be able to make different shoes from scratch, especially for remedial farriery, but most horses are shod with "bought in" shoes.
My retired old boys only get a foot trim these days, but there was always something special and timeless ( but a bit smelly) about the moment that a red hot shoe was applied to the hoof.


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