hand- made?

[junker]

Lol ok, ok, so I have now been edumacated in what hand- made truly is lol

[Bentiron1946]

Arrow heads that I find in the desert and potsherds for sure are hand made. Well they did use tools but not real fancy ones. I guess that it is a thorny issue and more so for some then others.:cool:

[junker]

Lol I think I hit a raw nerve on some ppl with this question lol

[Charlotte]

Lol I think I hit a raw nerve on some ppl with this question lol

Well it is a tender place with a lot of crafts people. I get depressed when I see some truely clever and innovative designs mass produced in factories by cheap labor to inferior quality standards. I see it in pottery, iron work and even in textiles.
For years, and I think to the present time, buyers would haunt crafts shows buy up designs and take them back to the home factory.
Next season Pier One or similiar would have thirty of the item on the shelf for 2 cents on the dollar.

[Bentiron1946]

copying is not just a craft artists problem but a fine art problem too. A number of years back when the works of Fredrick Remington and Charles Russell had their copyrights expiring the owners of these works and others had the works copied in the East ready for sale to the public as true authentic Remington's and Russell's. Yes they had all of the foundry marks and such but they were not from the foundries that these two men used. The prices were not cheap either until much later. The result of this was to lower the price of all Remington and Russell bronzes until appraisers could determine the "real" from the "fake" bronzes. A sculptor that I knew, now deceased, had her early work copied in the east too. She tried legal action but they had changed things every so slightly like misspelling her name, leaving a finger off of a hand. It is tough out there with pirates about.

Perhaps rather then saying our work is hand made perhaps we should say "hand wrought" as we are in the "wrought".

[Ten Hammers]

OK my second 5

Edited August 18, 2009 by Ten Hammers

[Bentiron1946]

Well you go to Home Depot and buy wrought copper fittings to fix up your plumbing, got a problem with that being wrought? Wrought means to be beaten or shaped by tools and that is what a smith does so his or hers stuff is not hand made as in a basket maker, bead stringer or quilt maker. We don't hand make it, we wrought it. We should still use the term with great pride since we use our hands to direct our tools to beat our steel into an object that is WROUGHT!

Edited August 18, 2009 by Bentiron1946

[junker]

lol ok so this thread is going way better than i thought it would... really striking up usefull debate. so let me throw a little wrench in the works. since the craftsmen all seem to know what it means to be hand made or wrought, how do you explain the difference to a customer? where do you explain to a client that the line between and made and not goes?

[Ten Hammers]

I give up and will not darken the thread more. OK P.S.

Wrought iron is a product it is not a process. Wrought iron is a raw material used to produce finished goods. Done

Edited August 18, 2009 by Ten Hammers

[Francis Trez Cole]

my $.02 Wrought is steel that was produced before the use of Bessimer furnace. that is when we got consistency in steel production and were able to build the empire state building.

[ThomasPowers]

Well there have been changes in mindsets over time; handmade was not always considered *better* save for specifics, (eg hand spun warp was preferable in the early industrial revolution as opposed to machine spun; later the preference reversed).

Also the guild system of europe wasn't always trying to improve methods. There is a great bit in "A History of Western Technology", Klemm, MIT Press, about a "red metal turner" in renaissance Nuremberg who kept inventing better metal lathes and getting squashed by the local guild---they bought a couple of them and had them destroyed, forbid him from making more and finally forbid him leaving the city! (IIRC) The goal of the guild was stability not innovation.

A lot of our viewpoints on craft come from the Arts and Crafts movement around 1900 when there was a "revolt" against the "soulless" products and jobs created by the large factories extolling the virtues of the hand wrought item (v A past tense and a past participle of work. adj: 1. Put together; created: a carefully wrought plan. 2. Shaped by hammering with tools. Used chiefly of metals or metalwork. 3. Made delicately or elaborately.)

One of the side effects of the A&C movements was the belief that hand made items should show that they are handmade by leaving in some of the tooling marks people used to work so hard to erase. Taken to the ludicrous we now have items artificially dinged up by machines to try to imitate the hammer marks of hand work. (or slubby yarns people like to think are indicative of medieval work when in reality in medieval times an 8 year old girl would have been beaten for doing such poor quality spinning...)

Another interesting aspect of the A&C movement was the encouragement for *everyone* to try their hands at making stuff by hand rather than leaving it to the specialists.

In these parts craigslist often had listings for rot iron and even rotten iron and many times they are correct!

[nuge]

–verb
1. Archaic except in some senses. a pt. and pp. of work.
–adjective
2. worked.
3. elaborated; embellished.
4. not rough or crude.
5. produced or shaped by beating with a hammer, as iron or silver articles.

[Frosty]

Wrought as a word can be different things, Noun, verb, adjective.

To say something was wrought as in "Look what you have wrought!," is to say look what you have made, caused, etc. the results of something someone has done.

The term "Wrought Iron" is a noun referring to a specific material, nearly pure iron with silicous inclusions. It also means "Made Iron" and as it was the first called this it enjoys precedence, no other material may properly be called Wrought Iron.

The term refers to how the material was manufactured, not what was done to it afterwards so saying because I forged this steel into something it's now wrought iron, is incorrect.

A person could indeed say something like, "I wrought this fire set," no problem you could also say, "this fire set was wrought," and be on solid ground. You run the risk of confusing a potential customer and running them off but you wouldn't be incorrect.

But unless it's made from wrought iron as defined by it's metallurgy and process of manufacture you can't call it "wrought iron" and be correct. And certainly not ethically.

FWIW.

Frosty

[ThomasPowers]

Wrought iron is not steel. Wrought iron is a composite material consisting of usually a clean low carbon iron with ferrous silicates dispersed throughout it as stringers of spicules.

Wrought iron *was* the material however the name became equivalent with the products just like if you go to a linen department nothing in it is made from linen, its all cotton or poly cotton these days; but it used to be all made from linen!

Thomas who has smelted wrought iron from ore using the direct process.

Ahh using that reasoning you can't be called Frosty because that was used for something else's name first...

Edited August 18, 2009 by ThomasPowers

[Bentiron1946]

Well I think that any metal can be wrought. The word wrought in its most archaic form means "to work". Therefore what a smith does is work or wrought metal with tools not by hand. It is not his hand that does it. His or her hand is only involved as a holder of the tool that works or wroughts the metal. Therefore if we want to get away from the clumsy public that wants a hand made fire poker or stake turner we need to educate them. We don't hand make anything we are masters of the tool. We wrought metal. There are blacksmiths, whitesmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, pewtersmiths, coppersmith, et cetera and we all wrought metal or if you prefer work metal. Wrought iron is merely another way of saying "worked iron". It came out of the furnace and was worked by tools of diverse kind and manner into a useful form by men. It was called wrought iron because it was worked. Now let us come into the twenty-first century and make something, say a gate. You go to your local steel supplier and buy all of the necessary materials to make said gate and return to your shop. You forge all of the necessary sections, punch the holes, make the tenons and finally have a fully fabricated gate. What is it called, hand made or hand wrought? As has been jokingly said before did you forge it with your bare hands, twist the red hot steel with your bare hands or did you according to the definition of wrought use tools to hammer and form the steel? Therefore it is a wrought steel gate, not only that but a HAND WROUGHT STEEL GATE. Therefore I say unto you go forth and educate the ignorant public just what we wroughters of metal do.
(The last time I went shopping with the wife she bought a 100% linen pant suit. I don't know why it wrinkles so bad.)

Edited August 18, 2009 by Bentiron1946

[ThomasPowers]

(bet she didn't buy it in the Linens department! as to why it wrinkles so bad it's a function of the material just like iron/steel rusts, linen wrinkles!) As you can probably tell I am married to a Spinster (for 25 years as of Aug 5th!) We are a Steel-Wool couple.

Edited August 18, 2009 by ThomasPowers

[double_edge2]

i have only ever had 1 enquiry as to the product/ "wrought iron" or soft iron, and am familiar with both applications of the word wrought. as to the method of achieving a desired finish to please a customer, if they ask, i am happy to show or explain, every gadget, tool, trick, or even a bit i couldn't do and who i used to get it done. dont want a client feeling they've been wrought.

[Francis Trez Cole]

I am feeling wrought with all the philsophical imput. Here in florida they do wrought aluminium. Aluminium tube with cast finnials welded to it. talk about the 21 centeury.

[matt87]

I am feeling wrought with all the philsophical imput. Here in florida they do wrought aluminium. Aluminium tube with cast finnials welded to it. talk about the 21 centeury.

I'd have thought they would be using aluminum in florida

Perhaps to throw a spanner in the works here, but perhaps 'wrought' iron was so defined as it could be wrought/forged, whereas 'cast' iron (unlike 'wrought' iron) could be cast but not forged.

[Frosty]

Ahh using that reasoning you can't be called Frosty because that was used for something else's name first...

I claim inheritance rights. He stole it from us!

Frosty

[Bentiron1946]

I think I'm all wrought up about this!:D

[double_edge2]

yep....a couple of mobs here sell the pre made mechanno type ally decorative stuff that you can buy and stick together. .........bit of an ironic wrought i reckon.....

[ThomasPowers]

Ahh another post from the man who used to be called Frosty. a prince amongst smiths!

[Frosty]

Ahh another post from the man who used to be called Frosty. a prince amongst smiths!

Alright Thomas, if you insist I will change my name to a simple universal hand gesture.

Just for you.

I

[ThomasPowers]

wasn't that supposed to be mIm ?