What I think is great about the maker movement is that it has reintroduced the idea of woodworking to a new generation of people. When I started back in the late 60s early 70s fine woodworking had nearly died. There were so few people practicing it and pursuing it that a lot of the techniques a lot of the skills a lot of the ethics were in danger of going away forever. Well I was worried for a while 10 or 15 years ago that a whole generation was deciding it was not interested again. There weren't many young people that appeared to be taking an interest in woodworking. Now with the maker movement, there are. A certain percentage of them are taking it really seriously and moving to the next step of becoming serious woodworkers, and I'm very encouraged by that. One of the interesting technologies that's out there is this 3d printing. They're starting to come up with combinations of wood fiber and resin that allow even more or less wooden things to be made with digital printing.
Woodworking is a subtractive process. You take a chunk of wood and you take parts of it away until you ultimately get to what you want. But with 3d printing its an additive process so you can start in the middle of a piece and you add on to it on as you go. So you can accomplish things in the middle of a piece that you could barely accomplish in woodworking because you can't get to it.
And so there are things there things that can be done with 3d printing that that in the hands of the right clever person will will revolutionize some of what we look at. Some of the finest furniture ever ever made was made you know with the benefit of machines. So I feel the same way about the CNC machine. It's probably a two-edged sword. It's going to be misused and over relied on but it's also being used to incredibly clever ends by very creative people. They're not just good for repetition. They're good for They're good for all kinds of intricate work that that would take someone months and months and months to accomplish otherwise. I have subbed work out to CNC machines now and again. I had to do two hundred and sixteen large acanthus leaf carvings for the Hermitage and I had them roughed out on the CNC machine. And then I just finished up put the hand surface carved every every square inch of every one of those By hand in the end.
But I had them all roughed out so all I had to do was make the finishing cuts by hand on em. The way I feel about a CNC machine is that is that it's no different than when the table saw first appeared on the scene. I'm sure that when the table saw first appeared on the scene back around 1800 all the cabinet makers who were accustomed to using hand tools to accomplish every job they said oh, that's just going to be the death knell of fine woodworking.
You know and of course it wasn't. I've used YouTube for how to do things that especially with the lathe. I'm not a novice to the lathe, but I'm certainly not as accomplished on the lathe as I might be in other in other realms. I like to watch the YouTube videos s on on turning on the lathe. I learned a lot from it. There are a lot of things that you can't you can't really visualize by reading. If you've ever tried to read a detailed description of carving an acanthus leaf, It's like walking barefoot across hot coals or trying to chew a corncob. It's miserable to read and you don't get anything out of it.
Whereas if you watch someone do that, you can see you can see the whole process. Reading how to do that just doesn't translate it just just doesn't work, but you when you watch somebody do it you can understand what they're you can understand what they're doing it and replicate it. The people who commit it to YouTube are doing a great service, it's terrific..