Mike Sales wrote: ↑14 Aug 2022, 9:33am
bikes4two wrote: ↑14 Aug 2022, 9:17am
The term bodger is often unfairly used in a pejorative sense.
I believe the word comes from the chair bodgers who turned chair legs in the woods on an improvised pole lathe. Skilled men.
Chair Bodger- retired- Reg Tilbury Flowers Bottom -1974 Stuart King image.jpg
That's correct. I've "bodged" a ladderback chair or two myself, hopefully to a high standard.
The term "bodger" became a term for "maker of the poorly-made using sub-standard tools and techniques" because of that capitalism. There were once many very good chair makers in various coppice woods about the nation. A cottage industry. Along came "entrepreneurs" who managed, by one nefarious means and another, to establish a process by which they got the country folk to adopt production-line approaches, in which one fellow made nowt but the back-slats, the side rungs, the legs or whatever. These were then assembled into whole chairs.
As entrepreneurs do, they drove down standards of materials and skills to increase the production-rate and their profits. Piece work meant it became difficult to make chairs and such to high standards as the rate-per-prt was a pittance. The chairs emerging from such "enterprises" got very poor indeed, quality-wise. The entrepreneurs (as owners & managers everywhere do) blamed the producers rather than their nasty capitalist money-making techniques. The "bodgers" came to mean: those who produce sub-standard chairs; then: those who produce any form of sub-standard goods.
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Happily, good bodging techniques and producers still exist. Some will teach any of us how to make a chair from a tree. The results can be very satisfying indeed.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Mike+Abbot+ch ... &ia=images
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
