alt Hacker NewsI wonder what percentage of wooden furniture is truly hand-crafted in whole chain. That is felled with hand-made tools by hand. Transportation maybe can be ignored. Then hand sawed without power tools. All other tools after that being hand made from ground up. Like saws, planes, sand paper, glues(most likely at least some parts are glued together wood)... Most likely vanishingly small number.
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zdragnar • today at 10:08 AM
Head out to Amish country, there's plenty to be found if you look for it. With that said, depending on the community, they may use tools powered by belt driven by or air compressed by non-electrical means. Each community decides where to draw the line of acceptable modern tech, so you'd need to ask how they build their products.
Anything “live edge” is often done by hand. Also true for end grain cutting boards, end grain anything really, and any furniture made with mostly burl and heartwood. Coffee tables are common.
The reason is that knotted wood is dangerously unwieldy to machine without a lot of additional preparation. End grain work is just hard to automate. Lots of gluing into a shape that can’t be planed easily and prone to exploding if one is careless.
If you want to peek in to the weird long tail, the guys over at Sawmill Creek love to one-up each other in a never ending contest to be the king of traditional wood working.