I have watched it, yah. Honestly, it was sorta fun, but I get more enjoyment from “maker” content on YouTube. The stuff I want to watch is relegated to B-roll on shows like that because they think everyone wants human stories so they spend all the screen time on the story about Mabel’s grandmother or whatever. Meanwhile the fascinating restoration work is shown as three fast cuts before another story of someone’s grandmother.
The same genre on YouTube is all the B-roll. For example, there’s an entire genre of machinist YouTube with millions of hours of content of just what the engineer fellow on Repair Shop does, and no grandma stories to sit through.
Yes - earlier on TRS was better and more focused on the detail of the actual repairs. These days that time has been cut and more devoted to middle-aged persons crying about their refurbished object.
I won’t trust my watch to the BBC @anon33176345 because I refuse to promise to cry. /s
For anyone in Canada The Repair Shop and its older season reruns air on “Makeful”. My wife and I are adicted to it and it has #1 priority on my DVR now.
When we were kids back in the 70s our neighbor repaired clocks. He had many clocks in the house, if you were outside in his driveway you could hear them all chiming on the hour, very cool.
Fast forward a bunch of years, he retired and moved to Florida and the wife and I inherited a couple cuckoo clocks from her mom.
I asked my parents if Mr. Neighbor was still repairing clocks. We contacted him in Florida and he said send them down. He used parts from both and restored one beautiful clock at no charge.
Fast forward several more years the clock that had been working for many years just stopped and would no longer run.
Do you see where this is going yet?
About a week later I asked my mom to contact him to see if he could look at it.
No can do he died the week our clock quit. We have not had it repaired.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. While there is a healthy community of custom knife makers, with skills and equipment that I’d argue generally surpass the makers of history (yes, even things like “samurai swords” and other bits that have been given mythic/legendary/not all all real properties in common culture), you’d generally be hard pressed to find someone with a retail shop (not online), and a lot of people do it part time because it’s hard to make a good living through craft.
I’m pretty good at making knives, and decent at making pottery, but TBH, I could make more selling scented soap (which requires a lot less skill) because of the decreased time to produce masses of product to sell (and the fact that it seems easier to find a number of individuals to buy a handmade soap for $5 each, than it is to find person to buy a $400 knife (that has more time/effort/skill invested in it than the equivalent dollar value of smelly soap…).
Most of these skilled crafts are a labor of love, and ones that unfortunately don’t pay well unless you’re in the tippy top tier of people in that field (i.e. you’re one of the famous “superstars” in the field).
Yes, exactly, and it’s true for all these hipster maker activities (woodworking, leather craft, blacksmithing, etc). There are a few business models that work, but selling piece work is not one of them. Things that work:
CNC manufacturing along with a strong brand targeting affluent hipsters. A classic example would be Grimsmo Knives. They aren’t better knives than you can buy from China for 1/10th of the price, but the branding and style appeal to people who are willing and able to throw $700 at a product like that.
Content production. You make the stuff, but don’t sell it (or don’t need to sell it). Instead, you make YouTube content, books, websites or all of the above about making the stuff. This is the most popular route, and within this there a dozen or so business models that work well.
That’s pretty much it. There’s no way to compete on price making things outside China at a small scale. You can’t even buy the steel here for what China will make and ship you a high quality finished knife for. There’s no contest. For the hours required to make such a knife by hand, the amount you’d have to charge here to make a living is a number nobody in their right mind would pay. You have to add value some other way, as in the above examples.
I make things in my spare time, and people often ask me if I will make more and sell them. The answer is “No, because I would have to charge you $3000 for it to get my hours covered, and Amazon will sell you the same thing for $18. Buying the materials alone costs me $400”. Making and selling items by hand? Not even close to a viable business, even if you did want to condemn yourself to a life of piecework factory-line drudgery.
People often go into it thinking, “well, people will pay a little more for a handmade item!”. Yes, they will- but not 16,000% more. Chinese manufacturing has ruined peoples’ value perception. They think everything should cost $20 and are mad at you if if doesn’t.
People also go into it thinking they can have some special unique idea that is so good that people will pay for it. A good friend of mine did this- he came up with a unique kind of desk toy that nobody had ever seen. He sold 20 or so of them, was starting to build a business, and then China saw it on Instagram and copied it. You can now buy his toy everywhere for $20 and there’s nothing he can do about it. His nascent business was dead overnight. There’s no way to win on any of these avenues.
If there are only 2 schools that offer training for hourology, then I think the the School of Jewellery, Birmingham could totally drop the “, Birmingham” part from their name.
On that note, I bought my dad a vintage Vostock watch not last year but the year before, and it arrived in about 5 days from Ukraine, just in time for Christmas. Stuff I’d ordered first class in the UK didn’t arrive til after the new year.
Brummies wouldn’t be happy. There’s quite a lot of historical civic pride to go through there. For a significant period of time, Birmingham basically made the best stuff in the world, the fastest and the cheapest.
