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You can make a living as a carpenter, and the work is often glorious, but like lots of industries wealth is often built on the exploitation of labor. Unions hav

You can make a living as a carpenter, and the work is often glorious, but like lots of industries wealth is often built on the exploitation of labor. Unions have been gutted over the last 100 years, so if you want to run an honest business and earn a good income you need to do high-end work. But who are you working for? The upper classes. Of course these lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. are not specifically to blame, many are kind and decent human beings. But we're all living in the same system, and to put it in HN terms, we need to wipe and reinstall the OS. Seeing more women in the trade (seems like a lot more in the last five years) does give me some sense of a positive change. As far as I can tell contractors are still quite ethnically/racially segregated though.

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MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I remember watching a presentation on a high-end woodworker who just happened to be the son of a celebrity. He was working quite a bit with vacuum formed pieces that would sell for several thousand dollars in the 90s, with enough capital outlay from his father's money that he could build a dozen or so items at a time. It was then that I realized that the ability to make a living from crafting high-quality, modern furniture was probably a pipe dream for me simply because it would take me decades to gather the resources that this guy got for free, and by that time I'd be decades behind in relevant experience.
- mariusmg 4y ago
  This is the stuff that "hurts" the most. The realization that not everyone starts from the same place and most of us are way back from starting line. And no matter how hard you work there isn't a way to recover that "lost distance".
- mauvehaus 4y ago
  I'm a furniture maker. I come to the field with a lot of privilege having worked software for some years previously (but not earning FAANG retire early money), and having a spouse whose job provides considerable stability and health insurance. You don't need high end vacuum forming equipment to make beautiful, high-end furniture. There are certainly styles for which that would be required, but through human history, people built furniture not only without that equipment, but also wholly without power tools. You can built modern-looking work using very traditional techniques. I would go out on a limb and claim that stuff that requires truly modern equipment looks "weird", even to a modern eye because we have thousands of years of a furniture record of stuff put together using the same basic techniques. A joined chair looks like a joined chair whether it's some frilly French thing or some staid and severe English thing. A staked chair looks like a staked chair whether it's some high-style Windsor or a milking stool. A Thonet rocking chair looks f*cking wild because it departs from thousands of years of practice of how people make chairs. It still looks wild, over 150 years after its introduction. Even a Maloof rocker is made with fairly well-established techniques. I don't say that to take anything away from his design, but to illustrate that you can build very contemporary furniture without making a wild departure from the practice and tools that have served furniture makers for a very long time. Edited to add: I think I could have become a very good carpenter, but I went into furniture because you find older people still working as furniture makers, and damn few working as carpenters.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    I understand, but at the time I was extremely interested in those sorts of vac-formed items. In the same way, I was fascinated with the free-form houses that consisted of metal mesh being covered with concrete. I was simply a kid who wanted to live in a future I designed. My 7x great grandfather was a french master carpenter by way of Germany built the first iteration of the modern St Louis Cathedral and Ursuline Convents in New Orleans and once found pirate treasure stuffed into the wall of a man's house while attempting to remodel, lol.
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MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I remember watching a presentation on a high-end woodworker who just happened to be the son of a celebrity. He was working quite a bit with vacuum formed pieces that would sell for several thousand dollars in the 90s, with enough capital outlay from his father's money that he could build a dozen or so items at a time. It was then that I realized that the ability to make a living from crafting high-quality, modern furniture was probably a pipe dream for me simply because it would take me decades to gather the resources that this guy got for free, and by that time I'd be decades behind in relevant experience.

mariusmg 4y ago
This is the stuff that "hurts" the most. The realization that not everyone starts from the same place and most of us are way back from starting line. And no matter how hard you work there isn't a way to recover that "lost distance".
mauvehaus 4y ago
I'm a furniture maker. I come to the field with a lot of privilege having worked software for some years previously (but not earning FAANG retire early money), and having a spouse whose job provides considerable stability and health insurance. You don't need high end vacuum forming equipment to make beautiful, high-end furniture. There are certainly styles for which that would be required, but through human history, people built furniture not only without that equipment, but also wholly without power tools. You can built modern-looking work using very traditional techniques. I would go out on a limb and claim that stuff that requires truly modern equipment looks "weird", even to a modern eye because we have thousands of years of a furniture record of stuff put together using the same basic techniques. A joined chair looks like a joined chair whether it's some frilly French thing or some staid and severe English thing. A staked chair looks like a staked chair whether it's some high-style Windsor or a milking stool. A Thonet rocking chair looks f*cking wild because it departs from thousands of years of practice of how people make chairs. It still looks wild, over 150 years after its introduction. Even a Maloof rocker is made with fairly well-established techniques. I don't say that to take anything away from his design, but to illustrate that you can build very contemporary furniture without making a wild departure from the practice and tools that have served furniture makers for a very long time. Edited to add: I think I could have become a very good carpenter, but I went into furniture because you find older people still working as furniture makers, and damn few working as carpenters.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  I understand, but at the time I was extremely interested in those sorts of vac-formed items. In the same way, I was fascinated with the free-form houses that consisted of metal mesh being covered with concrete. I was simply a kid who wanted to live in a future I designed. My 7x great grandfather was a french master carpenter by way of Germany built the first iteration of the modern St Louis Cathedral and Ursuline Convents in New Orleans and once found pirate treasure stuffed into the wall of a man's house while attempting to remodel, lol.

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