The problem of modelling and simulating traditional crafting actions is addressed, motivated by the goals of craft understanding, documentation, and training. First, the physical entities involved in crafting actions are identified, physically, and semantically characterised, including causing entities, conditions, properties, and objects, as well as the space and time in which they occur. Actions are semantically classified into a taxonomy of four classes according to their goals, which are shown to exhibit similarities in their operation principles and utilised tools. This classification is employed to simplify the create archetypal simulators, based on the Finite Element Method, by developing archetypal simulators for each class and specialising them in craft-specific actions. The approach is validated by specialising the proposed archetypes into indicative craft actions and predicting their results in simulation. The simulated actions are rendered in 3D to create visual demonstrations and can be integrated into game engines for training applications.