This Friday is the last day to claim the $5 off coupon for our latest online course, The Makers’ Marks: An In-depth Study of Handmade Furniture. If you’re a subscriber to the M&T Daily Dispatch, you will find the coupon code under the “membership” tab or in many of the recent posts about the course, such as this one. If you’re not yet a subscriber to the Dispatch, why not use this opportunity to try it out? It’s $5 per month to get a $5 coupon good for each of our four courses. Signing up will unlock all of our previous posts there so you can begin to wade through the videos, photos, and discussions we post each day. There’s...
This episode was recorded on the heels of the first annual Apprenticeship Program Summit gathering. Alumni from the first four terms were invited to the M&T headquarters to share ideas, feast, and make shavings together. In this episode, Joshua and Mike reflect on the weekend-long happenings: the antiques examinations, the woods walk, the house timber restoration, and even the campfire songs. Countless memories were made over this weekend, and the convivial nature of craft was at the heart of it all.
SHOW NOTES:
The M&T Apprenticeship Program (Sign up for the wait list!)
Issue Thirteen
The “House By Hand” Project – http://housebyhand.com
The Makers’ Marks
The M&T Daily Dispatch
My shop power is a mix of human power, photovoltaic panels, and fossil fuel. In deciding how big our off-grid system should be, I have tried to keep in mind Schumacher’s words in his chapter entitled “Peace and Permanence.” When wondering whether universal prosperity is possible, he asks, “Is there enough to go around?” He points out that the modern economist has no concept of enough. “There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says ‘Halt! We have enough’? There is none.” My system has 500 watts (.5 kW) of solar panel capacity. From this I power lights in the shop and my home, a freezer, a small table saw, charge batteries for...
Where then can the workmanships of risk and certainty be found? Neither are strictly time- bound, that’s for sure. Not only can free workmanship with hand-guided tools be found today, but its antithesis, the workmanship of certainty, has been around from antiquity. “The workmanship of certainty has been in occasional use in undeveloped and embryonic forms since the Middle Ages.” This concurs with Jonathan Thornton’s observation that “the aim of the careful worker in the European tradition was to reduce variation by skill and increasingly, by ever more complex tools.” Pye explains that the most common reasons for employing the workmanship of certainty are speed or accuracy – both especially important for quantity production. In Pye’s thought, it’s an oversimplification...
