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My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another imple

My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral. Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again. I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

orliesaurus 5y ago
Loved reading this post!
cudgy 5y ago
Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.
- cseleborg 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    This is a different kind of innovation. The issue is not every improvement will be to the consumer. Better weapons will enable you to kill better/faster/harder. Tech improves the "can", not the "should" - you still need politics to reign in control.
donavanm 5y ago
> They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move "down market." The new consumers want teh appearance of what they see as wealthy/elite/etc. But they frequently dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see this everywhere from houses to clothes.
forcry 5y ago
Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we have to assume that the same holds in other fields as well.. I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade. Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.
- toyg 5y ago
  > may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. That's an element, but another big element is specialist-subject education. If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life figuring out the best attributes of everything around you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be "just so". If you are somebody who's just made their money, and maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks alright, sold. More and more people are chained to their day job for longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in the world and buying stuff they don't know anything about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX century we've seen this happening for anything from clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects become more and more efficient and functional, eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose a cultural element.
- eloisius 5y ago
  I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of advertising and sponsored content. What worries me more is the receding availability of _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's among the most satisfying experiences in the world to feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better at) something through practice. To be able to select the materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable. McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low ceiling on the craftsmanship there.
Folcon 5y ago
Could you link to some screenshots? Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Screenshots of woodwork? Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am talking about are easy to find. Google image search 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps at the end. I don't really know when the change took place, but if you look at any house built at least since the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
  - Folcon 5y ago
    Ahh, so one continuous block of wood following the grain vs sliced together chunks that will bring to mind Frankenstein's monster. Hmm, I wonder if you can feel the difference when you rub your hand over it if it's just polished, probably not if painted. So perhaps people who want polished wood for their staircase might go for the older style even if it's more expensive? Yea, flubbed on the screenshots bit, was just thinking images of stairs and as I expected them to come from your computer my brain clearly went to screenshots instead of pictures =)...
iso1631 5y ago
> Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want. In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing. The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then. Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  > most people just want somewhere to live sure, except old houses sell for pretty high prices, implying there are plenty of people who want more than just a house. I think there is a big difference between people without a house, who want to get on the lower rung of the housing ladder, and escape the poverty of renting (where rent costs more than mortgage payments, without any equity) versus those that have a house and want something better. Cheap houses should be build (maybe even w/ government funding) to keep otherwise exploitative rentals competitive, but there should still be healthy competition & industry in higher quality housing.
mauvehaus 5y ago
There are, on the other hand, ways to combine the old and the new harmoniously. I'm building a cabinet on stand, and because there are drawers behind a door, the pulls need to be inset. Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e. unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than doing them by hand. I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of practice.
jacquesm 5y ago
I just ordered two all-wood staircases to replace the steel spiral monstrosity that was built into the house where I live from the beginning. It was unsafe, unstable and way too steep so they really had to go. But the stairwell is a weird shape, there is partial overlap with the front door and the direction of turn had to be reversed. Enter the master carpenter who spent a 1/2 hour to measure up the stairwell and who then proceeded to create two new complete stairs that fit to the millimeter and solved all of the weird problems in one fell swoop. It wasn't cheap, but given the challenges and the materials used, the fact that they will probably last another 60 years or so and that they look amazing I figure that it was well worth it. No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing this work today.
dagw 5y ago
Does no one care about how their house looks? I think people care more than ever how their house looks, and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions". I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to last. From an architecture point they aren't great "machines for living in". From an economic point they're neither frugal or a great investment. Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is because they care more than anything how their house look, and whether you or I like it they really want a house that looks like a McMansion.
profsnuggles 5y ago
I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc. Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000. When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time. The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training? A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match. The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory. I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that. There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.
michael1999 5y ago
Wait until you discover how well made old clothes were. It's this x100.

orliesaurus 5y ago

Loved reading this post!

cudgy 5y ago

Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.

cseleborg 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
- iso1631 5y ago
  I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
eloisius 5y ago
Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Chris2048 5y ago
  This is a different kind of innovation. The issue is not every improvement will be to the consumer. Better weapons will enable you to kill better/faster/harder. Tech improves the "can", not the "should" - you still need politics to reign in control.

donavanm 5y ago

> They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move "down market." The new consumers want teh appearance of what they see as wealthy/elite/etc. But they frequently dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see this everywhere from houses to clothes.

forcry 5y ago

Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we have to assume that the same holds in other fields as well.. I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade. Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.

toyg 5y ago
> may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. That's an element, but another big element is specialist-subject education. If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life figuring out the best attributes of everything around you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be "just so". If you are somebody who's just made their money, and maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks alright, sold. More and more people are chained to their day job for longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in the world and buying stuff they don't know anything about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX century we've seen this happening for anything from clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects become more and more efficient and functional, eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose a cultural element.
eloisius 5y ago
I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of advertising and sponsored content. What worries me more is the receding availability of _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's among the most satisfying experiences in the world to feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better at) something through practice. To be able to select the materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable. McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low ceiling on the craftsmanship there.

Folcon 5y ago

Could you link to some screenshots? Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.

eloisius 5y ago
Screenshots of woodwork? Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am talking about are easy to find. Google image search 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps at the end. I don't really know when the change took place, but if you look at any house built at least since the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
- Folcon 5y ago
  Ahh, so one continuous block of wood following the grain vs sliced together chunks that will bring to mind Frankenstein's monster. Hmm, I wonder if you can feel the difference when you rub your hand over it if it's just polished, probably not if painted. So perhaps people who want polished wood for their staircase might go for the older style even if it's more expensive? Yea, flubbed on the screenshots bit, was just thinking images of stairs and as I expected them to come from your computer my brain clearly went to screenshots instead of pictures =)...

iso1631 5y ago

> Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want. In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing. The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then. Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.

Chris2048 5y ago
> most people just want somewhere to live sure, except old houses sell for pretty high prices, implying there are plenty of people who want more than just a house. I think there is a big difference between people without a house, who want to get on the lower rung of the housing ladder, and escape the poverty of renting (where rent costs more than mortgage payments, without any equity) versus those that have a house and want something better. Cheap houses should be build (maybe even w/ government funding) to keep otherwise exploitative rentals competitive, but there should still be healthy competition & industry in higher quality housing.

mauvehaus 5y ago

There are, on the other hand, ways to combine the old and the new harmoniously. I'm building a cabinet on stand, and because there are drawers behind a door, the pulls need to be inset. Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e. unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than doing them by hand. I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of practice.

jacquesm 5y ago

I just ordered two all-wood staircases to replace the steel spiral monstrosity that was built into the house where I live from the beginning. It was unsafe, unstable and way too steep so they really had to go. But the stairwell is a weird shape, there is partial overlap with the front door and the direction of turn had to be reversed. Enter the master carpenter who spent a 1/2 hour to measure up the stairwell and who then proceeded to create two new complete stairs that fit to the millimeter and solved all of the weird problems in one fell swoop. It wasn't cheap, but given the challenges and the materials used, the fact that they will probably last another 60 years or so and that they look amazing I figure that it was well worth it. No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing this work today.

dagw 5y ago

Does no one care about how their house looks? I think people care more than ever how their house looks, and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions". I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to last. From an architecture point they aren't great "machines for living in". From an economic point they're neither frugal or a great investment. Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is because they care more than anything how their house look, and whether you or I like it they really want a house that looks like a McMansion.

profsnuggles 5y ago

I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc. Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000. When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time. The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training? A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match. The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory. I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that. There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.

michael1999 5y ago

Wait until you discover how well made old clothes were. It's this x100.