VINTAGE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 354/ 06 Jan 2024 10:04

For 30+ years now I’ve been dabbling in the digital arts in music, in graphics and indeed  programming itself. Digital offers enormous advantages in speed of production, editability and economy of experiment – no wasting paint and canvas, no twanging of strings or blowing on hard reeds. But for several years I’ve felt an increasing pull back toward the physical, and to judge by the content on YouTube I’m by not alone. 

If forced to change professions I’d probably want to become a luthier, repairing and fettling fine guitars (I wasn’t good enough at school woodwork to actually make them). My first job would be to reset the neck angle on my beautiful red 1963 Hofner Verithin, currently unplayable, which would make it worth around £1000. But the money is only part of the pull  I, and many others, feel towards restoring vintage objects: there’s profound satisfaction in the process and accomplishment too. Old cars, motorbikes, musical instruments, toys and more can become more valuable (sometimes staggeringly so) with age. Most computers on the other hand become fit only for the skip.

OK there’s a small community who cleverly deploy the marvellous little Raspberry Pi board to emulate and hence resurrect a handful of desirable vintage computers like the Sinclair Spectrum or Apple Mac 1, but these merely illustrate the problem. The speed of progress in the IT industry makes its past vanish. TTL chips that are no longer made, lost storage media (8” floppy sir, you’ll be lucky), operating systems, applications but most of all vanished esoteric knowledge. People who restore old cars or motorbikes can club together to have spares made by small metal-work shops. People who restore violins or guitars can do it themselves with planes and chisels. But fabricating lost chips or etching PCBs to restore an old computer isn’t feasible, and is also pointless if you can emulate them so effectively in software.   

Wearing my other, social science, hat I’m a fan of the French sociologist Luc Boltanski who has studied the way that objects acquire value. In a 2014 paper ‘The Economic Life of Things’ he and Arnaud Esquerre outlined three-stages in the ageing of manufactured goods, from milk bottles to motor scooters. In the first stage objects get used and their price is determined by the cost of materials, energy and labour needed to make them; in the second stage people start to collect certain used objects – beer-mats, stamps, bayonets, whatever – and value them by rarity. The third stage, the asset, sees the most rare and sought-after objects become too valuable to use – think Swiss watches, old master paintings, Ferraris:  they’re purchased by the rich as stores of value, thought to be safer than money or shares. Boltanski and Esquerre analyse these stages along axes like disposability, uniqueness and portability and though they did include laptops and smartphones, it was only in the first stage.

However 2014 is a decade ago now, a long time in IT, and that decade saw YouTube rise from merely distributing amateur videos to a source of substantial income for lots of people, by making videos about precisely what I’m talking about here. Videos about restoring everything from coffee grinders to aeroplanes, do-it-yourself videos from metal-work and carpentry to dangerous chemistry, and reviews of all kinds of objects. Many of the objects involved belong in the collectable class, while some, like Gilmour, Clapton or Cobain’s guitars, are £1m+ assets. Comparatively few videos involve restoring computers, maybe because soldering is far less photogenic than carving or sand-blasting or blowing things up. 

I’ve spent a frightening amount of time watching YouTube videos in recent years. My favourites include ChemicalForce, a man with an almost comic Russian accent who obtains dangerous chemicals, mixes them and choreographs the resulting explosions in slow motion and gorgeous colour with balletic skill; Hand Tool Rescue (stop that sniggering) who discovers and restores marvellous 19th and early 20th-century engineering tools; and any number of blacksmiths who bash wrought iron into beautiful utensils (my father worked in the Sheffield steel industry). 

I also sporadically watch The Trogly’s Guitar Show, a daily vlog-style channel by a nerdy Texan who makes big bucks dealing online in modern Gibson and Fender guitars, buys and sells from other online sites, thinks nothing of splurging $5000 on a promising one. My favourite of all though is a genial, bearded Canadian chap called Ted Woodford who maintains and restores vintage guitars. After watching him do several dozen neck resets I feel, or perhaps delude myself, that I could do one myself on my Hofner. Virtual worlds and exotic AI-generated scenes are beginning to feel thin compared to the real chisels, spanners and explosions on YouTube, even though both only happen on my screen. 

[ Dick Pountain fancies himself as a blacksmith as well as a luthier]