How are scissors made by hand?

Hand scissor-making is the trade of making a pair of scissors so that the two blades cut, cleanly, along their whole length. Each pair is forged or stamped from steel, hardened, ground, and then - the part that matters - “put together” by hand: the inside faces filed and the joint set so the blades touch at one travelling point as they close. I spent a morning at Ernest Wright in Sheffield, where the firm has made scissors since 1902, and the thing I had not understood until I watched it is that a good pair of scissors does not cut by two flat edges pressing together. It cuts by a moving contact, one point sliding down the blade, which is why a well-made pair shears and a cheap one chews.

A pressed pair of scissors is two flat blanks riveted together and sold to be thrown away when they go blunt. A hand-made pair is a piece of engineering. The two blades are deliberately not flat: each is given a slight curve inward along its length (the ride) and a slight twist (the set), so that as they close, the point where they touch travels from the joint to the tip. That single moving contact is what makes the cut. Get it wrong and the blades either gap open and fold the material, or bind shut and jam.

So hand scissor-making is not knife-making, though both are Sheffield steel trades and the words overlap. A knife has one edge and one bevel; a pair of scissors has two edges that must be made to agree with each other. And it is not assembly in the factory sense, because the agreement between the two blades cannot be stamped in - it is filed and set by a person, one pair at a time, by feel.

Sheffield gives the trade a vocabulary that is half technical and half local.

The putter-togetherer is the worker who assembles the pair - the skilled final hand. Putting together is the whole act of filing the inside faces, fitting the joint, and adjusting the ride and set until the blades cut true. Boning, or setting, is the bending of the finished blades to put in exactly the right curve, traditionally done over a smooth steel post. The ride is the inward curve that keeps the blades in contact; the set is the twist at the joint. Grinding puts the edge and the hollow on each blade; polishing finishes the faces. A pair is joined either with a screw or, on the older patterns, a hammered nick of a rivet.

It runs as a chain of separate skilled trades, which is how Sheffield always organised it. The blades begin as blanks - forged from bar steel or stamped from sheet - in the rough shape of the scissor halves, bows (the finger loops) and all. They are hardened and tempered so the edge will hold. Then the grinder takes each blade to the wheel and puts on the hollow-ground inside face and the cutting edge.

Then the pair reaches the putter-togetherer, and the real work begins. The two faces are filed flat and true, the joint is fitted, and the blades are boned to set the ride and the set. The putter closes the pair, watches where the blades meet, opens them, files or sets a fraction, and closes them again - until the contact point travels the full length and the cut is clean from joint to tip. Last comes polishing, and the finished pair is tested on cloth or paper by ear as much as by eye: a good pair has a sound.

The archive documented the trade at Ernest Wright, the Sheffield firm established in 1902 and one of the last places where scissors are still hand-finished as a working business rather than a demonstration. The morning there is one of the more populated entries in the archive precisely because the craft is a chain of hands: a putter-togetherer, Sam Aston-Clark; a grinder, Evan James; a polisher, Sabino Henda; and the scissor makers Neil Wilson, James Morton and Jonathan Reid, alongside the cutlers Phil Benton and Paul Weatherstone.

The archive has also documented Grace Horne, an independent Sheffield maker who designs and makes scissors and knives on her own terms - the other end of the trade from the historic firm, the single maker holding the whole chain of skills in two hands. Between them they are most of the living English answer to the question this page asks.

Heritage Crafts lists scissor-making among its endangered crafts. Sheffield made scissors for the world for two centuries; the trade collapsed under cheap imported pressings in the second half of the twentieth century, and the chain of specialist hands - grinders, putters, finishers - thinned to a handful. The skills that are hardest to replace are the ones held in feel: putting-together cannot be read off a drawing, and a grinder is made by years at the wheel.

What survives does so on the strength of the cut. A pair of hand-put-together scissors can be re-set and re-sharpened for decades, which is why tailors, embroiderers and barbers still seek them out. If you want to see the craft or learn where it is taught, the archive’s Learn a Craft directory points the way, and the full account of the Sheffield morning is the essay A Morning at Ernest Wright.

What is a putter-togetherer?
A putter-togetherer is the Sheffield trade name for the worker who assembles a pair of scissors: filing the inside faces of the two blades, setting the joint, and adjusting the curve so the blades touch at one moving point and cut along their whole length. It is the skilled final stage and the hardest to learn.

Why are hand-made scissors better than mass-produced ones?
A hand-put-together pair is set so the blades shear at a single travelling contact point rather than pressing flat against each other. That gives a clean cut along the full length of the blade and a pair that can be re-set and sharpened for decades, where a cheap pressed pair is effectively disposable.

Are scissors still made by hand in Sheffield?
Yes, but by very few people. Ernest Wright, founded in Sheffield in 1902, still makes hand-finished scissors, and a small number of independent makers work in the city. Heritage Crafts lists hand scissor-making among its endangered crafts.