Craft Films

For your education and enjoyment, here are three short films of woodland crafts from British Pathe, a huge library of vintage films: This short English video shows the making of trugs.  I love the shot of the steam box.  What on earth is the thing made out...

As I mentioned in a previous post,  I've been searching for old wheelwright videos.  I only found a couple of interest, until I started searching for "Radmacher"  and other applicable German words.  Score!  It makes me wonder how many...

I'll be teaching a weelbarrow-making class with Peter Ross the blacksmith next month (there's still a couple spots left) and we'll be making the wheels too.  I know little about making wheels, but luckily Peter knows quite a bit, having worked at Colonial...

Curtis Buchanan called last week.  We talked of our class schedules, springpole lathes (we are both building one)  and the book Curtis is reading Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.  Curtis is persuasive; I have...

César's Bark Canoe, Bernard Gosselin, provided by the National Film Board of Canada A follower of this blog sent me the link to this video about a Native American making a canoe with a dozen tools and four materials: birch bark he strips from a large birch tree, cedar...

The Chairmaker and the Boys, , provided by the National Film Board of Canada Since my last post I found this fictional video from 1959 of a couple boys playing at Ernest Hart's mill and chair shop. The shop seems to have been cleaned out somewhat for the film,...

This well shot, if rather hokey video shows a post-and-rung chairmaker at work in his water powered shop. It looks like he also cards wool, weaves baskets, does some wagon wheel work, smiths... His lathe looks to be a pattermaker's lathe similar to mine, with a...