What Defines "Hand Built"?!

[Paul Marossy]

I'm doing a little prototyping work for a company that sells "hand built" pedals. They sent me a sample to go by, and I looked inside of it and it's all SMD and everything is PCB mounted. If I had bought their product for myself I would have been annoyed that it says that it's hand made, but it's not really.  

[DougH]

Assembled by robots: not hand built.
Not assembled by robots: hand built.

[Paul Marossy]

I think it's misleading to say it's "hand built". A more accurate term would be "hand assembled". A wave soldering picker-placer machine is a robot.

[John Lyons]

But did someone build the robot by hand? 

[Govmnt_Lacky]

IMHO....

If at ANY TIME during the process, a robot is used for soldering, assembly, etc. then the unit is no longer "hand made."

[Paul Marossy]

IMHO....

If at ANY TIME during the process, a robot is used for soldering, assembly, etc. then the unit is no longer "hand made."

I guess that's my position, too.

[StereoKills]

I assemble SMD circuit boards by hand all the time. Just because it's SMD doesn't mean somebody didn't place each component on the board and solder them on one at a time.

Granted it is much more likely that a fab house assembled them if the parts are all SMD, but does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being hand built by a tech.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

I assemble SMD circuit boards by hand all the time. Just because it's SMD doesn't mean somebody didn't place each component on the board and solder them on one at a time.

Granted it is much more likely that a fab house assembled them if the parts are all SMD, but does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being hand built by a tech.

I agree whole heartedly Stereo however, you can DEFINITELY tell the difference between a hand-soldered SMT board and one that is done by robotics 

[StereoKills]

Agreed. Although I have seen some hand soldered SMD stuff that could make you check twice it was so nice.

[Paul Marossy]

The SMD components on the board in this product is not done by hand, it's obviously done by machine. Besides, why would they do SMD by hand in a commercial product? That doesn't save them any time.

[R.G.]

Sigh.

I regard the term "hand built" in advertising as being the equivalent of "I think I can hoodwink you into being happier with the product and any little oddities it has if I convince you it was carefully hand assembled by a bearded, gray Swiss watchmaker over a period of days." Near as I can tell, that is the intent.

Then there is the issue of what, if anything, hand built means. Did the maker refine the copper ore and silicon? Or did they buy robot-made parts and hook them together. Do robots have hands? What is a hand? The word "Manufactured" has its roots in the Latin words for "made by hand" in any case.

And you can bet that if someone is looking for a strict definition of "hand made", "assembled by hand" and so on, they're looking for how close to the line they can get without actually lying in their advertising.

That's one reason the company I work for makes no bones about it. We make our stuff in a factory, in China; we explicitly do not use true bypass, and I can elucidate the reasons. We change things for engineering and durability reasons, and can list them. We produced a line of pedals designed specifically to be as inexpensive as possible without removing the sound qualities of the circuit, and tell people that. It makes me feel cleaner. 

[Paul Marossy]

I wish that all companies could have the same standards as yours RG.

[culturejam]

Seems like a massive grey area to me.

Is "hand built" the same as "hand assembled" ?? Who knows? Depends on who you ask?

It seems that the final assembly of pretty much all pedals is going to have to be at least somewhat by hand, even if all the parts are on-board and wave soldered. I guess there are machines that could tighten nuts and adjust knobs onto the shafts, etc, but I would imagine that kind of technology isn't really needed for pedal manufacturing.

My personal opinion is that if the on-board parts were soldered mechanically in some fashion, it's not really hand built. That is, if the builder orders the PCBs pre-stuffed, it's not really hand built. Granted, I don't especially put a whole lot of importance on that. I'm far more interested in something being "well built".

Now there's also the whole "hand wired" marketing tag as well. I suppose that means any off-board wiring was done by a human. But I suspect it's more of a catch-phrase than anything else.


Side note: I actually appreciate the design work that goes into making a pedal that has board-mounted pots and jacks. It requires a lot more work in the design phase than having everything off-board. And it saves time during assembly, which means lower labor cost per unit. And that, in *theory*, should lead to a lower retail price on the pedal. That doesn't always happen in the boutique world, however.

[Paul Marossy]

I've done assembly work for two boutique companies when I was involuntarily unemployed from 3/2009 to 7/2010. One of them sent me hand-stuffed PCBS and I finished everything from there. For the other company, I stuffed the PCBs and did everything else by hand, including drilling the enclosures.

Those are examples of truly hand made products.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Once again... IMHO-

Assembled, or the term assembled to me, is a PART OF built. What I mean is this:

You can assemble a wall. You can assemble cabinets. You can assemble a shower door.....

You can BUILD a HOUSE!

[Mark Hammer]

This debate has also taken place many times over at the pickup-makers forum: if I use a motor-based aparatus and electronic counter, and simply move the wire back and forth on the coil with my hand, is it "hand-wound"?

The problem is that we're discussing a multi-step fabrication process, any step of which could be mechanized or done by hand.  The descriptor "hand-made" suggests that ALL steps were done by hand, when perhaps only some of them were.  And if only some of them were, were they the most critical steps with respect to final product quality, or merely the ones that were cheaper to do by hand than to mechanize?

So, if everything else was mechanized in some fashion, and only one step could be "hand-made", what would be the most important to you:
- hand-painting the chassis?
- soldering the wiring?
- selecting components from the bin for consistent values
- soldering the components?
- etching the board?
- testing the pedal for quality control?

[DougH]

I regard the term "hand built" in advertising as being the equivalent of "I think I can hoodwink you into being happier with the product and any little oddities it has if I convince you it was carefully hand assembled by a bearded, gray Swiss watchmaker over a period of days."

I usually get the image of that bearded guy when I see the word "craft" used in marketing adspeak. And I think the pukiest of all the pukey ad words is "hand crafted".

"Crafted"- Okay, I get it. You mean like this?:

[Paul Marossy]

This debate has also taken place many times over at the pickup-makers forum: if I use a motor-based aparatus and electronic counter, and simply move the wire back and forth on the coil with my hand, is it "hand-wound"?

The problem is that we're discussing a multi-step fabrication process, any step of which could be mechanized or done by hand.  The descriptor "hand-made" suggests that ALL steps were done by hand, when perhaps only some of them were.  And if only some of them were, were they the most critical steps with respect to final product quality, or merely the ones that were cheaper to do by hand than to mechanize?

So, if everything else was mechanized in some fashion, and only one step could be "hand-made", what would be the most important to you:
- hand-painting the chassis?
- soldering the wiring?
- selecting components from the bin for consistent values
- soldering the components?
- etching the board?
- testing the pedal for quality control?

Those are good points.

[Hides-His-Eyes]

It's kinda stupid though. Even if you only place/solder through hole pots and offboard wiring, on an SMD board in a CNCed enclosure that went through a silk screen machine, there's no fundamental reason that wouldn't count. I doubt there's very much on the market that couldn't try to assert a claim of being hand made.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

A counter point:

If I solicit on this forum for someone to send me a broken Fuzz Face.... (granted this is a different scenario however, the parts of the whole were not built directly by my hands)

I then, open the box to see that a wire was burned up between the Input jack and the stomp switch...

I carefully and meticulously "hand wire" that particular connection and solder it into place....

Can I then call that a "hand assembled" pedal?

I ask because only a SMALL PORTION of the final product was done by hand. Would you take that into account when pricing it?