Woodworking Industry Moving Back To Custom Crafting
There is a slow movement bringing some people back to the basics of working with their hands in the woodworking industry, designing and building custom furniture and cabinets and more homeowners shy away from the commercially engineered products. Before the invention and use of power tools proliferated the woodworking industry, every piece was designed and built by hand, with every little detail carved into the piece, representing an individual furniture builder's talent.
The production woodworking industry today allows people to make a selection of furniture and cabinets built in a factory and installed in their home. The concept of individual woodworkers being involved in the home and constructing quality, custom cabinets that are truly built into the home nearly became a lost art, with the exception of a few persons who truly like working with their hands. In the past, education in woodworking was the result of working side by side with an experienced woodworker to learn the trade along with the appropriate use of the tools.
Today, the woodworking industry essentially focuses on the engineering of furniture for mass production with several thousand piece of furniture that look exactly alike as they are produced by computer guided equipment, with little input from those operating the equipment. The woodworking industry has moved into the era of one-size-fits-all and those wanting custom-built items have to search for an artist that can design one of a kind pieces for their home.
Woodworker Requires Special Understanding Of Wood
Persons working in the woodworking industry have more than just the knowledge of how to design and build something from scratch. They have also been taught what types of lumber works best for different pieces of furniture, or for building cabinets. They are interested in the grain in the wood and how it will look when it is stained a different color and how to make the grain meet smoothly at the inside and outside corners.
How the grain flows through the wood makes a marked difference in the appearance of any piece of furniture or cabinet. The older woodworking industry workers understand how to make the wood's grain work in the design of the piece and how it can be used to add strength to anything they build. For these workers the woodworking industry is more than sawdust glued together to achieve maximum strength, they understand how to work the wood for the best advantage in appearance and durability for whatever they are putting together.
