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Chet Bishop Super Member
Joined: 23 Mar 2007 Posts: 678 Location: Forest Grove, Oregon
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wm_crash Member
Joined: 24 Feb 2013 Posts: 140 Location: Wilmington, DE - USA
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Chet Bishop Super Member
Joined: 23 Mar 2007 Posts: 678 Location: Forest Grove, Oregon
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Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2014 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, I saw those...
You want to remember that what you are seeing is most likely a cottage industry (possibly not) and he may be eking out a reasonable living by his standards. I saw another lathe demo from somewhere in the middle east, using a bow-driven lathe, to make some sort of decorative turnings. The young man was sitting on the street, by himself, near what seemed to be his front stoop, and selecting billets from a little stack beside him. He held the lathe down with one foot as I recall, braced the gouge between two toes, ran the bow with one hand and the gouge with the other. He seemed happy and proud of his skill. Held the finished work up for the camera....
The company I work for has a plant in China...the people there line up on the street hoping for a job, working for (I think) about $0.25/hr. And that is literally the best job around. That is a living wage, there, and you can not only raise a family on it, but become (almost) middle class (if there is such a thing, there.)
Remember, too, that the reason Gibson (or was it Martin?) got in trouble a few years ago is that they were buiying ebony fingerboard blanks from India, and it turned out that there was a law (in India) that the "items" had to be "made in India". Evidently cutting them into appropriate sized blanks was not enough.
As it turned out, they had acted completely above board and in good faith; but their wood was seized in a raid, here in the US, and held for a long time, while their name was dragged in the media's mud. They finally got it all back, but the damage was pretty well done.
You are safer buying that $5 chinrest than to buy the ebony and make it yourself, evidently... beside the fact that that purchase supports a worker in Bangladesh, or somewhere.
Two sides to those stories... _________________ Chet Bishop
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