What it costs to make a thing by hand

Twice a year somebody works out the silver price, multiplies it by the weight on a listing, and asks me why the difference is so large. It is a fair question asked in good faith and it deserves a real answer rather than a defensive one.

Start with the metal

Take the 120 mm raised bowl in vessels and bowls. It weighs 246 g finished and it is listed at £1,120.

To end at 246 g I start with about 282 g of sheet, cut as a 170 mm disc, because the blank has to be bigger than the finished form and the rim gets trued back afterwards. Sterling sheet costs a good deal more per gram than the raw metal price, because somebody has alloyed it, rolled it and cut it. Silver has sat a little over a pound a gram for a while now and sheet runs nearer a pound and a half, so the metal on that bowl is about £409, of which roughly £32 comes back as trimmings through the process in the note on scrap and lemel.

So the metal is about a third of the price. Everything else is time, and the things time needs.

The hours

That bowl is about twenty two hours at the bench, spread over a week because of annealing cycles and because raising for eight hours straight produces bad work and a bad wrist.

Cutting and truing the disc is an hour. Sinking is two. Raising is eleven or twelve across sixteen courses, with an anneal and a pickle between each. Planishing is four, and planishing badly is how you waste all of the previous eleven. Finishing, the foot, and the final true is another three or four.

Then there is hallmarking, which is a packing job, a postage cost, a fee and about ten days of waiting, described in the note on hallmarks.

The parts nobody bills for

Correspondence. Drawings. Photographing a piece properly. Packing something so it survives a courier. Keeping a set of stakes flat and polished, because a pitted stake prints its pits into every piece you make on it. Rent, insurance, gas, electricity, consumables, and the abrasives that get used up on every single job.

And failure. Not every piece works. When one splits at course fourteen it is not a lost afternoon, it is a lost week, and the metal goes back in the tin. Over a year that has to be somewhere in the pricing or the workshop closes.

What the sums come to

Take the £1,120. Metal net of trimmings is £377. Hallmarking, packing and insured postage is about £48. That leaves £695 against twenty two hours, which is £31 an hour before any overhead at all.

Take rent, insurance, tools, consumables and the failure rate out of that and the number that actually reaches me is between £17 and £21 an hour, in a trade that takes several years to become competent in. It is a living. It is not a comfortable one, and I am not complaining about it, because I chose it clearly.

Why I do not discount

Because there is nothing to discount from. There is no margin built in to be haggled off, and a discount would come directly out of the hourly rate above. What I can do is change the specification. A satin finish instead of a mirror saves real hours. A smaller bowl saves more. A batch of six spoons costs less per spoon than one spoon does, because the setup is shared.

If a budget is fixed, say so at the start, on the commissions page or in the first email, and I will tell you honestly what is possible inside it. Usually something is. Sometimes the honest answer is that what you want costs more than you want to spend, and I would rather say that in week one than in week six.

What you are actually buying

Not a bowl. A bowl is available for eleven pounds and it works perfectly well. You are buying an object that one person made from a flat disc, that will outlast everyone reading this, and that can be repaired rather than replaced for as long as somebody knows how, which is what the restoration page is for.

That is the case. If it does not persuade you, the pressed spoon in the drawer is genuinely fine and I am not going to pretend otherwise.