My father, Arthur Guise, who has died aged 86, was a silversmith and fine metalworker, as well as an accomplished engineer, inventor, woodworker and collector.

His death was a shock to his family - we were sure he would see his 90s. He often told us he still felt not 86, but 26, and into his 70s he regularly trekked in the Himalayas, with an unquenchable thirst for its natural and human geography. He was the family showman who enjoyed regaling our gatherings with tales and jokes (often lewd), latterly on holidays at a remote farmhouse in Swaledale – surely the finest of all the Yorkshire Dales.

Arthur was born into a large working-class farming family in the coalmining village of Methley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The youngest of five children of Eva and Francis Guise, tenant farmers there, Arthur put his educational opportunities to good use. He attended Castleford grammar school, the first in his family to go to a grammar, and won a coveted place at the Royal College of Art in London. He enjoyed cycling around Highgate and Hatton Garden in the days when traffic was light and helmets were what policemen wore.

Following a brief spell overseeing a craft project in Keswick, he returned to Leeds College of Art in the 1960s as a lecturer. His students remained friends over his lifetime and were inspired by his honest and direct manner – if Arthur thought it was good then it really was. He spent more than 20 years there before taking a sabbatical from 1977 until 1979 in Kota Bharu, Malaysia, heading a craft centre. These were some of the happiest times of his life.

When he returned from Malaysia he took early retirement, but continued to work on engineering commissions and jewellery. The fully working small-scale steam engine, the lounge furniture, the pendulum clock, the customised sound-system and countless remodellings of household items or fun-with-physics toys are just a few of the legacies he will leave behind. Collections of his meat-mincers and cameras are worthy contenders for an entire episode of Antiques Roadshow.

His marriage to Judith Hedley, a fellow silversmith whom he met at Leeds College of Art in 1955, ended in divorce. He is survived by two daughters – my sister, Alice, and me.