Has anyone found any good non-American-continent woodworking YouTube channels?
Nothing against the Americans/Canadians etc, but this is one area where regional differences make a pretty huge difference in terms of wood and products available. If, like me, you’re in the UK and looking for vaguely specific details regarding woodwork online, you’re going to find an awful lot of American content and very little local stuff (a blog opportunity there perhaps).
A good recent example of this effect for me was when I was looking up pine stains. You will find constant references to something called “pre-stain conditioner” online; this basically doesn’t exist in the UK. Everyone online is insistent that you need it, and you can just about buy it here (it’s expensive), but it turns out it’s pretty irrelevant. In the UK our pine is typically a different variety, and so therefore has a different composition, and our terminology is different here too; wood stain in the UK is, I think, “wood dye” in the USA? Please correct me if you know better 🙂
For reference I use this stain: https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/product/manns-pine-wood…, which makes no mention of pre-stain conditioner, and I’ve had very good results with it so far.
Before the pandemic hit, I had planned a trip to Europe that included a stop in Porto based almost entirely on enjoying this channel.
I agree i really like that channel too. Look no excuses necessary not to visit Porto. Its one of the nicest european citie!
Thanks for the Badger Workshop link, I’ve spent the last two days watching loads of his videos. What a nice chap.
Paul Sellers have moved back to the UK. In addition to his website [0] and blog there’s plenty in his YouTube channel.
And my feeling is that Europeans in general don’t insist on staining everything like Americans do. Or maybe it’s just us in Scandinavia that actually think the bright natural color of birch, but even pine, is quite beautiful.
[0] https://paulsellers.com/
The one thing I find (as a UK woodworker) when watching US or Canadian channels is (a) they all seem to have massive workshops, like size-of-a-barn massive, and (b) they have machines for everything. I could not tackle many of the projects they do because of limited space, which restricts the machines I can accommodate.
Paul Sellers definitely understands that many UK woodworkers are in their garage or garden shed and keeps that in mind for his projects, and uses predominantly hand tools. I’m not saying I don’t like the North American channels, and Matthias is a true hacker as well as a woodworker, but it’s a different world.
Just to add my own recommendation: Alain Vaillancourt does some excellent stuff, from his vast workshop located somewhere in the New World:
Paul Sellers dimensioned his filming studio to mimic a small garage for a common UK woodworker.
I learnt to carve spoons from a few Swedish guys so I have a lot of love for a simple linseed-oil finish 🙂 Can’t get any nice, bright, linseed-oil paint in the UK though, which is a bit of a bummer.
I ended up using stain for this current project as the room called for dark wood, but the only two real-wood options for skirting boards in the UK are pine or oak, which are both light woods, so I opted to stain pine for it.
And thank you! Someone at work mentioned his videos recently and I completely forgot the name.
Most of the fine woodworking folks I follow in the US don’t typically use stain much.
Stain is a tool like any other. It can be used garishly and tastelessly or it can be used to complement a piece. See also: carvings, inlay, brasses, or pretty much anything else used for anything beyond holding the piece together.
It is. From a fine woodworking perspective, however, it very often runs counter to purpose when the goal is to take advantage of the natural beauty inherent in the medium.
That’s only a goal though. Taking advantage of the natural beauty of the wood is not always the only goal, primary goal, or even a goal at all.
I am super confused right now. I tried to be very careful in my wording to avoid being hyperbolic or all inclusive. Am I giving that impression at all?
Eh, I dunno. I don’t take issue with your reply. I suspect some people might read “from a fine woodworking perspective” as snobbery or a no-true-Scotsman that I’m not seeing?
From my standpoint as a woodworker, everybody’s money’s equally green and if somebody wants a piece stained something garish, it doesn’t cost me any more than if they want it in a natural color. Although, as a mentor of mine once said: “You don’t have to sign everything you build”.
I’ll let you know if that perspective changes if I ever have so much work coming in that I have to turn jobs down 🙂
In “counter to purpose when the goal is” kedean interpreted “when” as meaning “given” rather than meaning “if”
Wood dye and wood stain are different in the US, here is a good article on the differences:
You can make your own wood conditioner by mixing 70% varnish with 30% mineral spirits or a 60/40 of Denatured alcohol and shellac.
You only need a conditioner if you are staining a soft, sap wood such as American yellow pine. We have a pine here called slash pine that is similar in properties to your pine, but it is virtually extinct. It does not need pre-stain conditioning because it is a harder pine, and it was mostly harvested from old growth forests.
Point being it is really not, the specific wood, it is the characteristics of the wood, mainly hardness, porousness, sapling harvest or heartwood harvest and oiliness.
If you have a soft, pours, sap wood harvested, with little oil content it is going to need conditioning. If you have something like Ipe, hard as a rock, oily and a tight grain, you will not need it and most likely need a dye to actually stain it.
Your wood conditioner recipe sounds like sanding sealer to me. Is wood conditioner a new name for an old product?
pretty much, they just use a lot of petroleum distillates and alkalies to accomplish the same task, in the newer stuff.
I watch a ton of woodworking channels on youtube, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen anyone use prestain conditioner. If anything, they all seem to love single coat stains.
There’s quite a lot of non-US/CA woodworking channels out there, though.
Paska Makes, Australia
Woodshop Junkies, South Africa
Paoson Woodworking, Spain
JSK-koubou, Japan
Laura Kampf, Germany
Crimson Guitars, UK (Mostly luthier projects, but Ben does some crazy stuff that I think woodworkers could find inspirational in general)
Dekay’s Crafts, Korea
Get Hands Dirty, Portugal
Resin Timber, Lithuania
I’ve seen plenty of others – these are just some of the ones that I subscribe to.
> JSK-koubou, Japan
Damn that man for working so incredibly neat and tidy. No stains on his virginal birch-ply, ever — not even a smudge. Sawdust seems to bend to his will, and all cuts and holes drilled are surely accurate to the micrometer.
His workspace is as clean as an operating theatre.
Yeah… That’s not ever going to happen in my shed.
He’s insanely talented.
His recent router table build is also awesome – I’m planning on purchasing a copy of the plans and building it when I get a bit more free time.
The accuracy he gets from the most basic of tools is astonishing really. Knows his stuff and tells it well.
+1 for Matt Estlea. I find his content very watchable, and I like that he explains the theory before showing you how.
Regarding finishes, I highly, highly recommend the book Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner. Flexner applies a very no-nonsense scientific approach which greatly demystifies the process. For example he explains what that pre-stain conditioner actually is (chemically), what it achieves (with photos), and exactly when you would want to use it. There is a lot of marketing and folklore around wood finishing which makes it a lot more confusing than it is, and this book helps cut through all of that.
The other transatlantic issue I notice is space. North American content tends to assume “shop” space on a scale that’s much less likely to be available to the average UK person.
oh for sure. “here is my shop space, some spare room” thats the size of my entire house. And on the table top gaming front, very envious of US households i see with their similarly sized D&D room with a floor space that rivals my entire ground floor.
And the wood supply is always so cheap and plentiful!
“Yeah, here I’m making a simple spice rack out of some purple heart and cocobolo I just had lying around.”
I’m pretty pleased already if I can get my hands on a few scant planks of walnut at a passable price here in the Netherlands.
“I love wandering around my local wood yard and I’ve just come back with these lovely panels for making a jewellery box, and this great piece of yew I’m going to turn into a longbow.”
Every sawmill/timber merchant/whatever near me basically sells fences and roof trusses.
This is largely the case in the US as well. Most lumber yards principally sell building materials (dimensional lumber, plywood, and other “engineered wood products”). Finding lumber other than dimensional SPF for one of a small handful of species already milled (but poorly) usually requires a trip to a specialist vendor.
For example: Home Depot (which is a national chain of home improvement stores) generally stocks pine, red oak, some yellow poplar (which is not actually a poplar, but I digress), and sometimes something they’ll call mahogany (which almost certainly isn’t Swietenia anything) . That is about as good as you’ll find unless you go somewhere that specializes in hardwood lumber. Unfortunately, some of those don’t do retail sales.
For US readers in the northeast, Highland Hardwoods and Northland Forest Products both do retail sales. Northland is more focused on North American wood, though they stock FSC certified mahogany. They’re about 10 minutes from each other about an hour and 15 minutes from Boston (usual traffic caveats apply), where I suspect a lot of people from HN at this time are located.
I have to search for ‘exotic lumber’ to find places selling anything more than construction grade stuff. Otherwise, yeah, all dimensional lumber, plywood, mdf, etc.
>And the wood supply is always so cheap and plentiful!
On the other hand, I always see Europeans complaining that American houses are made out of wood and aren’t designed to last like good concrete or brick European houses… Well now you know why. No need to double the cost of materials for most houses.
I wanted to make a very basic cabinet for my bathroom. It basically required two long planks, yet the price of these two planks was more than buying a ready made cabinet from ikea.
One thing to keep in mind is that wood is more expensive the larger it is. Learning to assemble large panels from smaller scrap — either decoratively with rails holding smaller panels or by just gluing everything together into one big flat panel — can let you trade time for money in your projects.
Smaller pieces will typically cost less at the lumber yard, and it also makes it easier to work with salvaged wood — you no longer need to find big pieces to salvage, you can salvage a lot of little pieces and build them up.
Also note that salvage isn’t just dumpster diving — at auctions and sales you can find large things people made for particular purposes that no one wants, and break them down for raw materials. I’ve picked up a couple hundred dollars of dimensional lumber for a $5 bid before because it was in the form of a 9 foot tall viewing platform for refereeing volleyball games.
That should clue you in as to how cheap the panels ikea uses. If you want to be part of the throw away culture buy ikea. If you want it to be usable for the next 300 years spend the money on real wood.
The price of walnut here in the UK right now is insaaaane. I think France can often have it for a decent price but you really have to know a guy who knows a guy who seems to have his own mill.
If anyone is saying cocobolo is cheap here in the US, they must be making a lot more money than I am, and I can afford a Sawstop and Festool workshop. I’ve got 7-8 shops where I can buy exotic wood locally, and none of them stock it on a regular basis. Online, about the cheapest I can find it for is $50/board foot, which is way outside of my budget for use in any real quantity.
I ended up doing all the skirting boards for my office spread between both the office itself and the room next door, just to have enough space 😀
I do actually have that rare privilege of having a “workshop” space (a solid shed), but as I’m in Wales it is of course up some extremely slippery stone steps, currently leaking quite dramatically, and full of crap I’ve chucked out of the house but can’t take to the tip during lockdown measures.
I’ve stained wood (USA) for decades and never used a pre-stain conditioner. This is the first I’ve heard of it. One article says:
“A wood conditioner is basically a wood finish reduced to a very thin consistency.”
Sounds like a money-making product to use on very porous wood that has water-damage (rotted?) or has been repeatedly treated with solvents, leaving only weak wood fibers. I usually replace such wood.
There are also products for “rejuvenating” rotted wood:
I suppose these have their place but I have been lucky enough to not need them.
I’ve used pre-stain conditioner when applying a dark oil-based stain to pine. It does seem to help even out the finish with soft woods. It is pretty useless on harder woods though, and since I don’t typically use pine or stain I have maybe used it once or twice.
They’re good for woods that are blotchy when stained with the stains normally available in US hardware stores, namely birch and pine.
I share your pains. That an the fact that a lot of tools here (portugal) cost twice as much as they cost in the US and we have way lower wages.
For finishes I just realized I have to do my own offline R&D the to learn what works well with the brands I have here. Started doing my own wipe on poly (it’s harder than it looks when most brands don’t even refer the finish is polyurethane). Also my finishing techniques tend to be a lot slower than what you see on youtube, which I guess makes sense, since I’m not on a schedule, don’t need to be profitable but want my pieces to look as good as possible.
Staining pine and to some extent pine in general is not something that you see in American woodworking outside of early beginner work.
Which is a shame really, as the sustainability of it is quite a merit. I opted to use it for all the wood in my office as I could get a finish I was happy with, whilst also not spending an absolute fortune on wood (posh woods are very expensive in the UK right now). Unfinished, as I’m redoing the door architrave soon, but here’s a photo for reference: https://i.imgur.com/OHzUPfb.jpg
Our options here generally seem to be pine or oak, from normal stores. At more specialist stores you might be able to pick up some stuff like sycamore and walnut, but it’s a bit hit-and-miss as to what dimensions are available.
Is the pine you use soft? Southern Pine is too soft for a desk or most parts of an office. You could write on it and the letters would be visible in the wood.
It’s great for framing but I’ve been hesitant to use it for my beginner woodworking stuff.
A blotter/desk pad is a great solution to this problem. I built my wife a pandemic desk, and pine was what I could get locally. I have no illusions that it’ll hold up as well as, say, oak or ash, but it’s done alright over the last couple of months.
She also prefers rollerball or gel ink pens to regular ballpoints. As they require less pressure, that’s likely helping.
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Hah yes pine is pretty infamous for denting easily. I actually received a pine desk surface today that I’m staining/oiling. It’s nicer quality pine than what I used for the skirting boards by far and seems pretty tough so far. I could probably give it a properly tough surface by using a two-part plastic finish (like the sort of stuff they use for bar-tops), but I’ve never used it so I’m sticking with Danish oil for this, as I can always sand it back and refinish it if it gets truly dire.
I like working with pine, particularly because it’s cheap enough that you can make mistakes when learning and not feel too bad. But it is much more variable than other woods, I find, and the species vary by country.
I’ve actually done some side by side tests with stains using conditioner vs not. I wouldn’t call it necessary by any means. Depends on the stain and the wood but sometimes I did feel the result was noticeably better, sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference.
Parent commenter might specifically be talking about yellow/white pine, which is notorious for splotchy staining and yellowing over time, which conditioner can mitigate a bit.
If you’re working with oaks or hardwoods, I agree with you.
Rex Krueger is American, but he makes a lot of traditional English projects and uses hand tools.
Peter Millard and the 10-minute workshop is based out of the UK and I find him very watchable.
Matthias Wandel’s channel is a true YouTube goldmine. My favorites of his are the DIY woodworking machinery videos, featuring things like making a table saw from scratch, without a table saw.
Seconded. I highly recommend watching the back catalogue.
Also fascinating are the many videos about making and using pantorouters, a very versatile machine of his own invention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_72hOY2vPg (see video description, and there are older videos of different models too).
He sells plans for many things he’s made on his website.
It feels churlish to point it out, but occasionally he delves into new areas and makes some dreadful beginner mistakes by trying to invent solutions from scratch without any knowledge or apparent interest in conventional wisdom. For me this takes the engineering approach too far. Prefer when he understands traditional solutions and explores scope for improvement / reinvention.
There’s some other YouTube channels I liked but after watching for a little while I noticed the same thing. I want to learn the right way to woodwork not how an engineer or a very clever person would invent a solution for an already solved problem.
He’s got a pretty nice ribbon saw though!
Also:
“Actually, I did use a table saw to square up some of the pieces.”
Woodworking is a hobby I really enjoy, but I’ve found nearly every public figure in the community to be pretentious and exclusionary (I don’t actively watch Matthias’ youtube channel, I just know him as the “wooden band saw guy”, so I’m not applying this to him), much more so than other hobbies I’ve tried, programming included. Seems like everyone who is a “real” woodworker has a giant dedicated shop space filled with Sawstop and Festool brand everything, massive planers and jointers, a wall of expensive hand planes, and an elaborate dust extraction system. Going into a Woodcraft or specialty lumber yard for the first time sucks because some old white guy makes you feel dumb. Am I a “real” woodworker if I just have part of a basement/garage and a few Ryobi tools? Am I a “real” woodworker if I make things out of pine instead of black walnut? What if I use pocket screws or rabbet joints instead of hand cut dovetails? Steve Ramsey’s Woodworking for Mere Mortals youtube channel and his online courses (costs money, but quite affordable, IMO) are the best resources I’ve ever found for lowering the barrier to entry. I would have given up long ago if it weren’t for his stuff.
>Going into a Woodcraft or specialty lumber yard for the first time sucks because some old white guy makes you feel dumb.
I’ve found people to be generally really helpful and patient. My experience is that they really love newbies coming by – there’s fewer and fewer people doing woodworking, so the chance of getting a long term repeat customer is a pretty big deal.
I’m sorry you’ve had poor experiences like that. I’ve not been involved in the community for an extended period of time, and have found people to be generally incredibly helpful and patient.
You should check out Paul Sellers’ videos and blog. To me he is the opposite of what you describe, preferring hand tools over machines. He describes himself as a lifestyle woodworker rather than someone trying to create results as efficiently as possible.
I guess woodworkers fall into one of 2 groups: Those that are into it primarily because they enjoy the process and those that enjoy the results. I’m mostly interested in the results. I like the process, it’s a hobby after all, but I want to take the shortest path to complete my project. I tried using a handsaw before I ever picked up a power tool and getting a square cut is way harder than it looks! When you try and fail to cut a joint with a handsaw over and over it can be pretty demotivating. Power tools gave me some quick success that motivated me to keep building. The only hand saw I have right now is a small flush trim saw.
imo you are a real woodworker if you build something, regardless of the tools you utilize. “A Tool is Only as Good as its Use”
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of finding perfect tool to accomplish a task, be it in software realm or woodworking realm, only to realize I lost sight of the end goal in search for THE tool.
Thanks for pointer to Mere Mortals channel!
Pocket holes are one of those non-intimidating techniques that have kept me in the game too. I was pretty impressed by Kreg’s mission: https://www.kregtool.com/about-us/mission.aspx props to them and any one else leveling the field for novices.
“Kreg products are designed to make wood projects less intimidating, to build confidence, and inspire success.” I’ve been very satisfied by their pocket hole jig
Pocket holes are so controversial in the woodworking world and I think it’s a form of gatekeeping. I love my pocket hole jig. It’s so much quicker to put together a cabinet box using pocket holes instead of setting up the dado stack and cutting rabbet joints.
I see no reason to not use pocket holes for something like cabinet carcasses or other projects where your primary goal is making something square, especially if it’s not going to be readily visible.
Anyone who would argue that pocket holes are unacceptable for cabinet work is someone I would argue you should ignore.
There are snobs in every hobby. Don’t let it get you down. I’ve been “woodworking” for 3 years now and I’m still holding my projects together with bubble gum and paper clips. But I’ve built a handful of things that get used.
Hilariously, around like the third sentence of this I thought to myself “I bet this guy would like Steve Ramsey”. He really is head-and-shoulders above anyone else making content in the hobby.
I’m gonna sound like a paid shill if I praise him anymore than I already have but there’s no way I’d be building my own cabinets if I didn’t try making his BMW (basic mobile workbench) back in 2017.
Hi Matthias!! Huge admirer here in Providence, RI. Your site is extremely helpful, but would you recommend seeking a master to learn from? I feel I’d progress faster as an apprentice than as a YouTube learner. My goal is to do dining tables, bed headboards, fancy boxes, currently I’m just doing picture frames.
Also, that pantarouter is incredible, kudos! When you routed 3 dowels I was very impressed. How did you envision the machine?
Being an apprentice is probably bretter, yes. But I have no idea where you would find a master who wants an apprentice, let alone a master at all.
I recently went to a woodworking show in the mid-Atlantic region. There were some masters there teaching classes who seemed very concerned about traditional woodworking skills dying out – from the average age of attendees I can see why – and some of them take on apprentices still. A show like that would be a good place to look.
Parts of Europe (including DE) and many parts of Asia / Japan still have a strong master/apprentice culture.
Hi fellow geek/woodworker from Providence. RISD has lots of woodworking related classes that you can take without being a full time student.
Hi Matthias, fellow woodworker here who shares a love of toolmaking and problem solving.
Have you ever felt constrained by your selection of tools? It appears to me you rely mostly on woodworking tools for your projects. In my own experience I’ve frequently felt that if I had the capability to mill or turn materials to exact dimensions I could more easily produce better quality tools.
It seems to me that your style of work would naturally lead, at least in part, to using machining tools and metal as material. I’m curious why your path hasn’t lead you to transition here.
Thanks!
I’d love to know how much you make on your software… I imagine much more than the youtube ad revenue. This seems like a great formula for success- youtube content provides free advertising for your side project. EEVBlog does the same thing with his meters..
I did buy your gear template generator and tried it on the laser cutter. It’s cheaper than the solidworks add-on that does the same thing 🙂
Which is more successful, your plans or your software?
The software is a good chunk of the revenue, but youtube makes more than the sw. But when others talk about how much they make on youtube, it’s alwas more than me per view. Biggest revenue contributor is plan sales.
Hey Matthias! I know this is off topic for the thread but thanks for jhead! I used it for years in order to sync up the exif times from friend’s cameras when we traveled together. I was pleasantly surprised to see your name when looking at the man page.
Love your channel. All the best with your new little one!
I’m subscribed to your channels and it’s pretty much the only thing I watch on YT (besides some other channels you recommended like Jeremy Fielding).
Is there any tool / machinery design in your head that you’ve been unable to execute yet due to time / space / $$$ constraints?
+1 for your thoughts on patents.
Mostly time constraint. Have been thinking about building a gear cutting machine using a table saw or angle grinder as the cutter. Sort of a single purpose CNC machine.
Hi Matthias. I’m a guy who recently discovered a love for building things with wood. I don’t have any family who are experienced in this area, do you think think this is something that a person can learn to do from home with practice, or is in-person instruction an invaluable component?
Lots of woodworking youtubers have had no background in it. Its evident that they are learning it as they go, but it also shows that it’s possible without schooling or a teacher.
How do you feel about your most popular videos on YT being mice-related? 🙂 Did that catch you by surprise? Bother you at all? I guess not, since you seem to enjoy making those fun videos.
Matthias it’s so good to see you here! I consider your videos my gateway drug into woodworking. What do you think is an essential skill a woodworker should that is not usually mentioned?
Oh hai there,
no question but some praises, not only your wood related material (pun slightly intended) but also the video editing, it’s very well balanced and extremely relaxing. A joy to watch..
May you sand for long
Hey Matthias,
Long time admirer of your work. I’m curious how you manage the massive amount of content on the site. Is your website plain HTML and CSS? Or are you using some kind of cms?
Cheers,
Ben
Hey Matthias,
Recently got a new tabletop saw. What are the essentials jigs I should build first?
I don’t think this is a correct analogy, as I like wood working and program for a living.
I would say it would be more of “what types of extensions or addons should I use”, which in itself, is less than cut and dry, since a lot depends on what you want to build.
However for table saws, you’ll want a sled and zero clearance plates (for different blades and angles) for sure. Should you make a tenon jig, among other things, will depend on what you hope to build.
I miss the Techshop era, and access to CNC woodworking tools.
Now that the documents from the TechShop bankruptcy are out, it’s clear that the gym-type business model did not work at all. The business was kept going by finding new investors to pay for growth. It never paid for itself from membership fees.
Well, Human Made in SF has most of the old TechShop machines, and they charge $250 a month, plus they got subsidies under some job training program. TechShop was at $100, then $125, then, as “TheShop.build” (which, we find out in the bankruptcy litigation, was more closely associated with the original operation than previously believed) at $150. This is the SF bay area, though, and the real estate and labor costs dominated. The equipment wasn’t really a big fraction of the cost.
There are smaller nonprofit shops and hacker spaces, but they tend to have fewer and smaller machines and not enough working room. The surviving spaces are more into the college prep education business – it’s where you send your kid to get their STEM ticket punched for college. Lots of kids working through the same canned projects. Some at the construction paper and scissors level, like advanced kindergarten.
The fundamental problem with the gym model (pay by the month, come as often as you want) is that people who sign up for shop spaces show up too much. Some are there every day for most of the day, doing work. Gyms rely on only a small fraction of members showing up at any one time. At one point, TechShop had ten laser cutters cutting out Etsy stuff from opening til closing, and the laser cutters were booked weeks ahead. Then Etsy allowed outsourcing manufacturing, that stopped, and the Etsy crowd dropped their memberships.
Thanks, ah, that’s an interesting insight re: usage patterns vs normal gyms, it makes a lot of sense to me that you might not have as many people holding the membership sort of aspirationally wrt attendance the same way you do at a fitness gym.
I don’t get it. CNC machines for wood are cheap. Rigidity requirements are fairly low. Some people even built their own CNC machines out of wood. Even a 3 axis CNC mill that does aluminum is reasonably cheap but you’ll have to assemble the kit yourself. If you want to do steel then you might as well give up.
A minimax bandsaw costs about $2-3000. A sawstop around $3000. A jointer/planer combo another $5000. So you’re all in for a complete woodworking setup for $10,000. But then you need a couple hundred square feet to put them in with sufficient room around them to store wood, maneuver and perform assembly. At $100/sf for a garage area, you are hitting $20,000. You generally can’t just add 200 or 500 sf to your house, and moving is expensive. The space is more expensive than the actual tools that fill it.
Those are all extremely high end tools though! By comparison, you can probably find a used Unisaw for $500, a used 14″ bandsaw for $400, a used 8″ jointer for $500-$800 and a used 12″ planer for similar if you look around. Yeah, that’s a small jointer and planer depending on what you’re trying to build, but the point remains that you don’t need to spend $10,000 to get started.
And I know somebody is going to point out that the Unisaw is less safe than the SawStop, but the SawStop is only going to save you from cutting yourself. It won’t save you from kickback; you still need to know how to use the saw safely. The technology isn’t a substitute for training.
If you can find a local makerspace that has a woodshop, you can trade capex for opex, get access to far bigger and better tools than you’d likely buy starting out, not have to pay for the space to put them in, and likely be able to get training in how to use them safely and effectively.
If you want to have a space intensive hobby then you have to be able to afford the space. This requires either being rich or being somewhere space is cheap or some middle ground between the two. All hobbies have opportunity costs. If you have high culture related hobbies then you are probably going to want to be in a major city which comes with its own trade-offs.
I do metalworking. One of my good friends does woodworking. We both live in
If you have the land, building a large shed or pole barn isn’t expensive. You can get a nice workshop for under $10,000 installed. Heck, constructing a large shed isn’t that difficult. You can do most of the work yourself and outsource the electric.
I loved Techshop, I learned so much. The way they aggressively pushed people to invest in their last 2 years was a huge red flag for me though.
Yeah. I lucked into something where they (foolishly) offered me all of the classes I could take in three months, so of course I hoovered each class but three up, but I paid attention to the instructors. I spent some time asking them how they liked teaching the classes and watched them pretty carefully, so when I found out that instructors weren’t getting paid, I wasn’t too surprised.
I extended for a couple of months to finish up some projects, but that heavy push at the end is usually the sign of a Membership Death Spiral (if you look at it upside down, it’s a pyramid). The folks I quietly warned did not listen and ended up having paid for something they’d never get. I heard of someone at another Techshop who donated some enormous, expensive milling machine to them in exchange for a lifetime membership. Whew.
Still miss it.
The main thing I miss from Techshop is access to a laser cutter. There are an incredible variety of amazing, extremely professional-looking things you can build quickly from craft-grade plywood, a laser cutter, some wood glue, and your favorite wood finish.
Access to a laser cutter is probably also one of the easier things to find, since they’re easy to run compared to many other machines.
Any leads to one in the bay area? I have several friends with access to one which is fine for one-off jobs, but I don’t want to keep bugging them to have to use them regularly. I’d rather have some kind of pay-per-hour system where I can access the building and cutter directly and not feel bad about using it regularly, and without having to interrupt friends’ work schedules.
Ideally it should be less than techshop’s steep $170 a month since I really only need a laser cutter, and maybe for only about 3-5 hours a month.
There is a very surprising statement on his “Gear Template Generator” page (https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/index.html):
> I recommend printing the gears with an ink jet printer. Even cheap ink jet printers print very scale accurate but Not all laser printers are accurate.
Does anybody know whether that’s still the case, and why?
Laser printers project the image onto a drum using a laser and a spinning mirror. There can easily be issues with the scale accuracy. Ink jet printers conventionally move the head along a linear rail with a timing belt and stepper or servo motors; that better guarantees the precision as the pully diameter and step size or encoder resolution are the items determining precision.
The light source isn’t that much of an issue the problem is that you are projecting on a curved surface (even tho you are projecting a line at the time) and at an angle.
Basically photolithographic printers can have the same issues as you have with projectors where the image can be skewed or morphed so if you are printing say a square you might not get 4 90 degree corners or perfectly straight lines, the size of the print can also vary depending on the distance between the projector and the drum if it’s not exactly the same as the printer thinks it is the size will change and it varies it would cause perspective shift skewing.
With ink jet alignment errors would maintain the shape and size but the shape might not be aligned perfectly to the page so your errors would only be positional or rotational with photolithography you have perspective and projection transformation errors.
Photolithography printers for engineering/architecture have builtin auto alignment to correct for this.
While the errors even for most home printers are very small if you print something like a gear it’s enough to cause wobbling and fit issues.
That said for wood gears if you cut them by hand I would imagine the tolerance errors from cutting would be worse than from printing unless you are very skilled.
Good point. The LEDs lighting would eliminate horizontal distortion, and if it’s a color laser prointer, the vertical scaling has to be just right too or the colors won’t register.
According to Matthias, this is because inkjet printers require accuracy since print heads for black and different colors, or even each color are spaced differently.
So for the alignment to stick (anyone else remember when you had to manually align inkjets?) they have to move very consistently across the page.
Matthias is one of the all time greats of YouTube woodworking. I’ve been following his channel for probably close to 10 years.
He does have an HN account and may show up here if he notices enough inbound traffic from this submission.
Very nice.
Woodworking has been a hobby of mine off and on my entire adult life. Two things stand out as having a big impact on woodworking in the past 15 years or so, related to this post:
1) The large-scale adoption of Sketchup as a drafting/designing tool. If you go to any woodworking forum you’ll find lots of people talking about it, and it has raised the skill level of a lot of people who are new to woodworking considerably, just by making it a “computer friendly” hobby and making more complex designs possible for people without a high amount of basic knowledge.
2) The social aspect of the internet generally, results in a lot of knowledge about paints, finishes, equipment, and methods being shared. Before the internet, fine woodworking was still something that could only feasibly be learned by apprenticeship. These days, you see people buying historic homes that need a lot of work, for example, and “just figuring it out.”
PS: for anyone else who might try playing with wood, the answer to how close your measurements should be to make mortises fit JUST right is 5 thousandths ;).
I agree, SketchUp (and woodgears) was a big part of how I was able to pick up woodworking as a kid.
I don’t have much love for the product as it is now however. I would prefer the free SketchUp from 10 years ago to the current free tier (web app).
Does anyone know if any good open source SketchUp-like tools?
https://www.openscad.org/ Its not SchetchUp no – but its an immensely powerful tool if you like building parameterized models. Combined with https://pypi.org/project/openpyscad/ you can program your next project in Python 🙂
You write your project in you code editor of choice, auto-run on save, and set the OpenSCAD viewer to ato-load on file changes. So you have the immediate feedback of a ‘visual’ tool, all text driven, git managed and you are probably already familiar with most of the tools.
Yea this approach is not for everyone I’m sure.
This is great! I’ve been messing around with OpenSCAD and a Clojure script that generates an ergonomic keyboard for 3D printing: https://github.com/ibnuda/dactyl-keyboard/tree/refaktor
The Clojure – OpenSCAD script is amazing but also extremely slow (and I’m no good with Clojure even after staring at it for hours).
The Python OpenSCAD link seems way faster and that suggested workflow is great!
Happy to read this. It’ll save me many hours. Seeing code getting converted into 3D renderings that you can actually 3D print (or woodwork) into real life is super cool.
Oh yes. I think a sw dev looking at CAD will really like OpenSCAD. Atleast I did. The only things I found lacking was a measure tool and a cutlist generator. Sure, you can write the code with OpenSCAD to echo dimensions but having a measure tool can be really useful. No need to elaborate on cutlist.
And I put my plans in git too!
If you want this, just go straight to FreeCAD and invest the time to learn it. It includes an OpenSCAD module but the interactive shape editing beats OpenSCAD for nearly everything (it’s faster and more interactive).
I very much doubt a GUI interface is going to be faster than a text interface, in fact it will be the opposite. And then I’m wired to this one interface and have to poke around on lines with a mouse like its 1992. No thanks.
Also I can’t easily compose or build composite objects, where is a one-line loop in Python. And how do I deal with libraries of components ? Dunno, seems like a step back to me.
Have not tried it though – perhaps you are right.
I think you should do a little more reading, first. In particular, GUI design of 3D structures is almost always “Faster” than text-based, for multiple reasons. What I meant was that FreeCAD renders the reuslts of complex operations faster (for exmaple I often have to wait many minutes just to render a basic CSG tree in OpenSCAD). More importantly, FreeCAD is just a GUI for a Python object model that permits simple construction of complex objects (probably not a single line). See https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Manual:A_gentle_introduction#Man… for more about the Python API.
What’s nice is that since it’s a true Python API, you have total control over everything, including iterating over named edges of the object, which openscad can’t do at all.
I spend many hours a day poking at lines with a mouse, and it’s really more productive than typing a few things, rendering to make sure the result is what you want, etc etc.
I’ve been really curious about whether there’s a Sketchup-like application that has simple digital woodworking tools.
Bring in a couple 4×8 sheets, cut taking blade width in to consideration, join, test whether the edges are flush, etc.
Maybe even import plans, then give you a cut list that maximizes the wood you want to use. (Will I need 6x or 7x 8’shelving pieces? Ok, 7, but oh right, it’s reminding me to get and extra one to allow for mistakes.)
This doesn’t do exactly what you’re asking for, but I’ve had good success with Cut List Optimizer [0]. You still have to tally up the list of each board you need in your project, but it will tell you the most efficient way to cut your materials.
[0] https://www.cutlistoptimizer.com/
Not exactly what you asked for but there are a few tools that take an SVG of shapes and outputs an SVG with the shapes packed more efficiently, including space for kerf, etc. svgnest and deepnest.io.
Solvespace is a FLOSS CAD program you may be interested in. There hasn’t been a release in a while, but development has been steady on github.
I recently needed a tool like this … and sadly concluded that there’s no clear winner in the free software world.
Sketch-up’s non-Linux presence is a pain, but can be worked around – the web version’s useless for me, but again you can download the last .exe version they released still, from the official page (albeit they’ve hidden it).
FreeCAD and LibreCAD are worth diving into just because they’re going to be around for a while, and at least one of them seems to be well supported.
Blender’s another option, and though it doesn’t align feature-wise quite as well, and has a steeper learning curve – learning it is going to be useful forever, and for a wider range of use cases.
Are you me? They really shit the bed with the way they’ve steered the product. When I think about Sketchup these days, it’s more, “What shall I learn next to replace it?”. Man it has served me well, it’s a real shame. I’m thinking Blender. It’s considerably more complicated, but the things you can do with it are considerably more expansive.
Fusion 360 is a good option. CAD and CAM in one package. It is more complex than SketchUp but still accessible to someone that is not a drafter.
Fusion / Solidworks always feels so clumsy to me when trying to design a woodworking project like a table or something. It works, but it somehow feels like the wrong tool for the job.
Maybe it’s better for more complex woodworking projects that aren’t just composed of simple rectangles. It’s certainly great for mechanical design and other use cases with smaller, more complicated geometry.
As someone who has made a couple woodworking designs in sketchup, but knows nothing more, I’m curious as to what the more expansive things you can do in Blender are. I fully believe sketchup has some limitations, but I haven’t hit them yet in my basic designs.
Care to elaborate?
Not the parent, but if Sketchup is like a simple hand saw, Blender is a massive workshop filled with a whole array of advanced power tools [0]. For example you could go from a blank screen to creating, rigging and texturing a 3D character to a photo-realistic movie featuring the character, targeted at different display devices.
[0] https://www.blender.org/features/
so much this, I was always able to draw simple projects in minutes. I tried fusion360 for a few minutes and figured that I would need to invest some serious time to get productive with it. I settled for the limited web version of sketchup, but it is a step back from the desktop sketchup of a decade or so ago. In some way it’s kind of a relief that it’s not me, there really isn’t a proper alternative to sketchup of yore. Anyone looking for a startup idea here?
I’m still using the last free Sketchup, with some ancient plugins that only work with that version :(.
Of all of Google’s completely selfish moves in terms of turning their backs on viable products, selling off Sketchup seems to be pretty high on the list of worst offenders.
The open source tools I’ve seen aren’t great unfortunately. An alternative to sketchup is Fusion 360. Autodesk has a free hobbyist license.
I’m just starting the hobby and found Sketchup to be cumbersome and too big of a learning curve. I have been using graph paper and pencil to do 2d drawings, side, top, etc. to get the idea down.
I found a channel from the UK of a cabinet maker [0] that uses Graphic for mac – simple, easy and I can do the same style drawings.
Maybe Sketchup is more helpful when you have complicated joinery or need to sell plans online.
Sketchup isn’t too bad, ime. It’s a lot easier than other cad programs. It’s important to find a tutorial because it has some idiosyncrasies which you aren’t going to happen upon solving. But overall the program is well documented and easy to use once you learn.
After about 3 projects on Sketchup, I’m now proficient enough to crank out simple furniture in a few minutes. That 15 minutes spent modeling things in sketchup pays dividends when it comes time for cutting and assembly.
+1 your second observation. We bought a hundred year old house a few years ago. In that time I’ve gone from “knowing how to hang a picture” to full owner-builder, enclosing a garage, and lots of projects in between, all from YouTube.
Hmmm, why SketchUp and not OnShape? When I talked about getting into 3d printing I had two people independently recommend OnShape to me.
I wonder if anyone knows of any resources for people who want to maximize the woodworking they can do in an average-sized city apartment. We don’t have the space to for a real woodshop. But what we can do is dedicate a sizable closet to tools, try to get as far as we can without the big stuff, and live with woodworking involving a significant “set up a temporary shop in the middle of the living room” and then tear it down phase. I’ve been doing this for small projects, improvising and making do, and would love to hear stories of how others have managed.
The standard advice for this if you want to woodwork as a hobby (not for utility, that is): learn to use handtools. Paul Sellers is a good youtuber for this (and there are many others). The r/woodworking subreddit is also quite active and has good starting resources. Dust control for power tools is much harder, so if you’re limited to working in your living space, it can be a problem.
I’ll add to this: unless you have a lot of money, hand tools are going to not only be the quiet option, but the best option overall.
I recently bought a Craftsman bench jointer, and tried to flatten some walnut for furniture making with it. I went over and over the jointer with it, and it still wasn’t flat. I tried various techniques found on YouTube, read until my eyes crossed, and still couldn’t get the walnut flattened. Granted, maybe my particular jointer is bad, but I had limited walnut stock and didn’t want to continue grating on the pieces I needed until they were too thin and unusable.
So, I threw my hands in the air and just went at it with a hand plane. It was a bit of work to get the pieces flat and square, but planing is kind of enjoyable. You’re also not creating a ton of sawdust – just nice, silky shavings. On top of that, the surface of the wood looks great when hand planed vs. sanded or machined in other ways.
Also, if you are using an electric saw in your apartment in the middle of the city at any time of day, you are probably a bad neighbor.
I think a lot of the question is going to be, is your goal to work with wood and make things in general, or do you have specific sorts of things you want to make?
There is really no limit to what you can make by skillfully assembling small pieces of wood into large panels, but it’s a lot easier to make inlaid wood boxes in an apartment than bookshelves and desks.
A lot of the woodworking you see is furniture making, which typically involves a lot of dimensional lumber and large wood panels which are easiest worked with table saws, planers, joiners and routers, and a large shop and lots of machinery is a boon.
But inlay, woodcarving and even scrollsaw work can be done with smaller pieces of wood and little or no power tools.
I use power tools only during working hours and try to never go over a cumulative hour of use per day. In Berlin at least I think it’s fine, this city has a DIY-ish culture, lots of apartments have homemade furniture, and the sound of electric tools is a common one.
You know your neighborhood and neighbors and apartment construction better than I do, but the caution is always that not everyone keeps the same working hours — night shift sleeps during the day, small children and infants nap throughout the day, etc.
Just do it. I bought a table saw to make a living room table for my rental apartment. It was a Sears 2 HP one, where you could take the legs off, so I often used it right on the floor.
These days they have much better “job site” table saws that are fold-up portable.
If you are in a city, there are probably several rent-a-shops in your area that function much like co-working spaces – basically a wood-focused makerspace. A friend of mine used one:
– you go in and pay for some hands on time with the shop master to learn the rules and prove you can use the tools safely.
– Once you’re vetted, you can rent non-master shop-time at a much lower hourly rate.
– If you encounter a problem, can rent an hour of master time to get advice and help.
– They had spaces where you could leave items being glued, etc. Store your in-progress work with a sign that has your contact info – they’ll reach out if you leave it there too long.
I helped my friend with the glue up as he built a pair of end tables. Was a pretty cool space.
Discoverability is a bit tough, but seems it could be ideal for your use case.
This is good for functional stuff. For fine furniture, please subscribe to Fine Woodworking digital which gets you access to the back catalog of magazine articles and video workshops. Fine woodworking features articles and workpieces by professional woodworkers while the editing of those articles is done by professional writers to make it accessible to amateur woodworkers. It is an amazing resource – please help support it.
Thank you for saying this. I’m the woodshop steward at NovaLabs and I can’t tell you how under appreciated FWW is. People bring in half baked plans some YouTube/Instagram influencer all too often. Most if the time they don’t even have a cutsheet.
A bit unrelated, but I discovered “The Woodwrights Shop” has the most recent ten seasons available on pbs.org. Something very satisfying about his approach to woodworking.
Thanks for this, it brings back many childhood memories. Can’t believe the show is still running.
Think of Roy Underhill as the Cliff Stoll of woodworking instead of klein bottles. Imagine Roy waxing philosophical about klein bottles then reproducing an oaken klein bottle he found buried under a barn that one time. Working frantically, nearly but not quite done in 25 minutes flat, but! with five minutes devoted to showing off that one of a kind klein bottle plane a friend just happened to have given him as a gift ten years ago, because showing off that one oddball tool was the entire point of this whole episode.
Roy’s the best kind of nerd. He REALLY loves what he does and how he does it, and makes it so contagious that I kinda want to take up woodworking just so I have an excuse to attend one of his classes.
I love digging out a saw every now and then. I just built 20x bamboo cages for filling out canvas tomato pot bags, to support plants up to 6’ high.
The first ones look awful. The last ones look ok. I rated myself on how strong they are, how quickly I built them, and how few steps they took rather than on how good they looked.
It felt analogous to iterative hacking in a scripting language. Oh how I’d love a workshop in which to do some actual quality work as opposed to random hacking!
The most frustrating thing about this hobby in the YouTube age is every “DIY” video employing a full shop with $8,000 worth of tools. How is this different from professional woodworking? Where are the resources for beginners?
> How is this different from professional woodworking?
Professional wood-shop costs easily>$100K 🙂
Number one cost factor, IMHO, is space for a shop.
You need enough room to store and handle lumber.
If you have that, you can start with hand tools (saws, chisels, planes) for let’s say ~300$.
This will in-principle allow you to do everything.
People have done this for ages, this way.
Power tools make woodworking much faster. I would start with a jig saw, drill press, circular hand saw. This will be another ~800.
The first expensive mile stone is the table-saw.
This will be the most used tool in your shop.
Everything gets better when you have access to a good table saw. I have spent 1.2K on mine.
Next upgrades are miter-saw, band saw, planer, jointer. They need a lot of space and are not cheap.
This is were you enter the more professional realm.
To get high quality versions of all that tools will cost a lot of money.
Oftentimes ebay has used tools for small money.
E.g. I bought 15 hand planes for ~100 EUR last year and 50EUR for a used drill press.
Happy woodworking!
Decent “job site” tablesaws are in the $600 USD range. And there are plenty of designs out there for building a work bench that can incorporate one..
Several resources for manual woodworking, now, if you’re thinking about power tool woodworking, then, I agree, you’ll have to spend money… there’s no way around it, at least not with nice and quality tools.
Now, if you want to venture on manual woodworking, several resources from the following masters:
– James Krenov (in memoriam)
– Paul Sellers, a Lifestyle Woodwoker
– James Wright, Wood by Wright
– Mike Siemsen
– Rob Cosman
– Frank Klausz
– Shawn L. Graham, Worth The Effort
– Roy Underhill
– Joshua Farnsworth, Wood and Shop
– James Hamilton, aka Stumpy Nubs
– Matthew Cremona
– Jay Bates
– Shannon Rogers
– Simon James
– Rex Krueger
– Lemongrasspicker hacks through projects on his balcony.
– Mr chickadee silently uses hand tools on his homestead.
There is a large woodworking subculture that uses only (or at least mostly) hand tools. While new good hand tools can be expensive, you can get good stuff at a more moderate cost on eBay.
See e.g. Paul Sellers or Chris Schwartz.
Sure, you’re not going to set up a furniture factory that can compete with IKEA on price using hand tools, but who cares? You’re doing it for your own enjoyment. And hand tools are enjoyable to use, much less noise and dust than machine tools.
+1, I’m in the same camp. Check out a Hungarian woodworker building a chest in 1955:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0gQ9M45G8
I wonder how many tools an average contemporary hobbyist/industry worker would need to build that same thing.
I’m from Estonia, and I recall a local master stating that in the 1930s a typical farmer had to do a lot of woodworking for his own use. And often they only had five(!) tools: a knife, a saw, a wide chisel, a narrower chisel, an axe. Most even didn’t have a plane. This is all the equipment they used to even make furniture.
Unplugged woodworkers of HN might find the book “Estonian woodworking” [1] interesting (it’s a true classic of Estonian etnography, translated to English without permission in the 1960s and circulated as hand copies back then; these days published in English by Chris Schwartz). Or build a Roman Workbench (=Estonian workbench 🙂 [2].
Doubt anyone would save much money on hand tools. Going all hand tools is more of a luxury – those hand planes and speciality saws are not cheap and an absolute nightmare to maintain.
Any woodworker is going to need a collection of both. Things like a good chisel set are going to be essential no matter what.
The basic power tools like a circular saw and a table saw aren’t all that expensive either. Even cheaper if you buy them second hand. Add in a drill press, a jigsaw, router, sander and that’s pretty much the basic ensemble. With good sales, all of it can come around to 1-1.5k
The real expensive stuff is when people buy useless festool crap when they can make a jig.
The basics of hand tools can be had for a pittance. A #4, #5, and #7 or #8 Bailey style plane can be had for $50-$100 apiece on eBay and they’ll last forever. They new Stanley Sweetheart chisels are a steal at ~$20 a piece if you buy a set on sale. If that’s too much, the US-made Buck Brothers chisels are about $10 a piece at Home Depot. You want the ones with the clear yellow handles.
It’s worth buying your first dovetail saw and/or tenon saw new so you know what it should cut like, but you can buy subsequent saws used and sharpen them yourself.
The expensive bits are the sharpening stuff and the layout tools. For sharpening, I spent $200 on the set of 220/1000 4000/8000 Norton water stones, and $40 on a used grinder. You can get by with a grinder, a $15 oil stone, and a strop.
Layout tools are pricey because they start overlapping machinist tools and come with commensurate accuracy. You don’t need a square accurate to .001″ over a foot for woodworking, but your options are pretty much that or one accurate to .030″ over a foot, which is emphatically not good enough for woodworking. But depending on how you work, you need those tools for machine work anyway.
You don’t need to spend a fortune on most of the hand tools. Whether or not you find the maintenance a nightmare or not is mostly a matter of committing to learning and practicing until it’s second nature.
You can definitely spend unlimited money on hand tools, but you don’t have to. You get very far with just a few tools that you either buy second hand or buy new but avoid the the most expensive brands as well as the cheapest ones.
Most importantly, with hand tools you don’t have to have a big permanent wood shop. The tools don’t take as much space, and most importantly, you don’t have to set up dust collection etc.
“… most importantly, you don’t have to set up dust collection etc …”
Also, you can work in complete silence.
You can saw and pare the dovetails and drill and pare the mortises. This is how you do woodworking living in an apartment with a baby :).
Maintenance on power tools isn’t great outside of the most expensive options though, like makita, stihl, etc.
When I was getting my woodshop going I was hitting up estate sales/auctions. There was one I auction I scored a nearly brand new SawStop table saw, Dewault planer, and ShopFox joiner (kinda crap) for under 600 dollars. All the stuff was pretty much brand new.
I have hit the point where I have more tools than space.
Woodworking is very flexible in how much you spend. Most of the expensive tools are time optimizations, you can get by just fine without them but it will be a bit slower.
Also, in woodworking you always want that one more tool.
A lot of these tools aren’t even time optimizations at the hobbyist level.
There’s been so many times I’ve had to saw say a meter of plywood, by the time I’ve gotten out the circular saw, plugged it in, taken the extra safety precautions such a power tool needs, sawed the wood, then spent more time afterwards cleaning up.
All to realize that I’ve spent maybe 5-10 minutes in total (almost entirely setup time) making a cut with a powertool I could have just made in 2-3 minutes max of very leisurely sawing with the handsaw I already had at hand right next to me
The problem is – and I’m not saying this lightly – that many people don’t actually know how to use hand tools properly and would not be able to – for instance – make a straight and perpendicular cut in a sheet of plywood using a handsaw.
In those cases the circular saw has a better chance of delivering the goods. Of course it can also be a shortcut to the ER…
Saw, set of chisels, tape measure, good clawhammer, drillpress, drills, white glue, good set of screwdrivers.
Then some time and materials to bootstrap your way into making clamps, a workbench, miter box and so on and before you know it you have a working woodshop for relatively little money.
I’m of the same mind, and tire of the noisy power tools. I’m more likely to reach for my pull saw than unbox and set up the circular saw. I _think_ I’ve learned how to do it right; online instruction, Jacques?
You might like to look at Paul Sellers’ videos? He can get a lot done with hand saws, marking tools, and chisels.
But in general, among hobbies, woodworking is pretty gear-intensive. Even if you try to avoid it.
Rex Krueger is worth checking out too. The series he’s been making now is all about getting started with real woodworking using minimal inexpensive tools. There’s some craft-historical topics too especially in his approach to workbenches: he first makes a simple low bench in an old Roman style (inspired by Christopher Schwartz’s research) and later an English workbench with a big leg vise. Both relatively easy constructions from cheap softwood with ingenuity and definite pragmatism.
It’s just too easy that any hobby becomes spending hours drooling over equipment you want to buy rather than actually doing stuff (whether it is woodworking or playing the guitar). This is one reason I really like Paul Sellers: You don’t need so much.
Paul videos are great but he usually works with prepared stock and mostly focus on the final steps of the projects.
Actually, he doesn’t have much “project videos” except for the “workbench” series.
You will find that problems arise when you need to prep stock. You can totally do it with hand tools, as it’s been done for centuries, but it’s hard work.
What I do very often is that I adapt my projects to the wood I get my hands on. But otherwise, I have to admit that ripsawing by hand isn’t that fun. If I would get one machine for my workshop it would be a bandsaw (and maybe a drillpress).
If you want a functioning shop, and you were limited to four initial options:
1) prohibitively expensive power tools
2) prohibitively expensive hand tools
3) cheap hand tools
4) cheap power tools
…I’d go for cheap power tools every time. You could get more tools than you’ll ever need for $1-2k buying cheap but usable brands. They probably wouldn’t stand up to more than DIY use, but they will work, and you’ll learn what items you really value. For example, I now know that I use my cheap table saw enough that I could justify a more expensive one, however I’ll never buy an expensive scroll saw.
I think it’s bad advice to start with good hand tools unless you have a high tolerance for manual labour or are apprenticing under someone in a fine woodworking area (e.g. luthiery).
The “prosumer” market has done wonders for tool availability. Companies no longer make stuff that lasts a lifetime, but the trade-off is that you can get the same tools a professional would use for much cheaper. Turns out, even pros don’t need tools that last a lifetime because they so often get lost, stolen, or dropped off a roof and need replacing after a few years anyway.
And you can move down market and get something with a 100-1000 hour service life for half or a quarter of the price.
There are a few youtubers dedicated to low cost woodworking rex kruger and “woodworking for mere mortals” are good resources. “home made modern” and “modern builds” also tend to be light on the tools needed.
On a broad sense I think the most important tools if you want to go the power tools route, are:
a table saw, a tracksaw (or just a circular saw and a jig, if you’re ok with loosing some precision), a router, a drill, an impact driver and a random orbit sander.
Then one or two hand saws a chisel a hammer, wood glue and some clamps.
Table saw is the most expensive and probably one of the most dangerous machines if not operated correctly but I really which I didn’t took that long to invest in it. You can do a lot with it that is very difficult otherwise.
Than I would say the best is to start with simple projects so you can keep frustration/success levels in a good balance. and then slowly move to more complex ones.
You can get by with a $250 table saw, $150 miter saw, $100 drill press, a cordless drill, and about $100 in drills and other hand tools. That’s enough to make fairly complicated stuff quickly. I’d love to have a jointer and planer, but it looks like cheap ones aren’t worth it.
You don’t need every tool. There are multiple ways to get the same job done. There are some things I’d consider essentials. A table saw, drill, some decent chisels, and maybe a #5 plane. And you can get pretty far with that. You can get started for
Check out “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” from Lost Art Press. It’s basically an intro to hand tool woodworking through building a tool chest and what you need to fill it.
Not that hand tools can’t get just about as expensive as power tools.
I’ve been eyeing that book for about a year now. Really should just go through and buy it.
$8,000 is actually really cheap for a hobby like woodworking. In reality, if you’re watching even a remotely large DIY channel on Youtube, outside of ones specifically targeting those that are budget conscious or those that specialize in hand tooling, it’s probably closer to $30,000 or $40,000. All the SawStop, Festool, etc. stuff you see is all quite expensive. Freestanding jointers and planers, drill presses, router tables with lifts, bandsaws, drum sanders, dominos…. Even just the lighting in a shop, especially one that’s on a YT channel, could be thousands of dollars.
But, here’s the thing: Most of those tools are about saving time. You don’t need a $2000 planer, you can use $200-$300 in hand planes. You don’t need a $4500 table saw, you can do nearly everything with a $200 circular saw and straight edge. You don’t need a $750 rotex hand sander and a $2000 drum sander, you can use paper and sanding blocks. You don’t need a jointer, you can buy pre milled lumber. Depending on what you’re working on, you might not need things like a bandsaw or drill press. A handheld router can be turned into a plunge router with some work, you can use jigs instead of a router table, etc. etc. etc.
Once you learn how to use a handful of tools – and there’s lots of youtube videos on that – and understand how and where they can be used, you can start translating from all the fancy stuff you see in the YT shop to what you have on hand. It’ll just take longer.
The other aspect of it is… yeah, a lot of people that just do it as a hobby are also spending nearly that much. A lot of the DIY guys are also doing projects that have similar requirements on accuracy/repeatability, etc., that you would see from people doing furniture level woodworking. People doing that for a hobby and using powered tools are going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars, generally.
If time was no constraint, you could do basically everything in woodworking with a few different hand saws, hand planes, hand chisels, a mallet, some gouges, sandpaper, and high precision marking and layout tools. And a lot of clamps. You need a ton of clamps if you ever use glue to join material.
As for a beginner resource on a limited budget – Steve Ramsey’s Woodworking for Mere Mortals is great.
“Time” is not the only constraint, “effort” is as important. Woodworking features many health altering hazards, from the obvious cuts to dust poisoning, and what is rarely discussed: joints and back pain, due to repetitive movements, heavy lifting and bad posture.
Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty.
My personal approach has been to learn how to do everything by hand, from felling frees to making doll house furnitures. What I enjoy doing, I do with hand tools, the rest I do with power tools.
It takes time to build muscles, posture and risk awareness.
>Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty.
This is a very important point.
For anyone interested in woodworking or just starting out, I’ll expand on this a bit:
Some of the dangers are quite obvious: Spinning blades that are sharp enough to cut wood are sharp enough to cut you. SawStops are nice for protecting you from this at the table saw, but they don’t make a bandsaw, router, etc. etc. etc.
Some are fairly obvious if you’ve got a solid physics background and are thinking about it, but might not occur to you: Kickback from the table saw, ejecting a piece of wood at you at high speeds. Similar concerns with a router. Lathes are great at turning pieces of wood into deadly projectiles.
Some are non-obvious: Lots of people take angle grinders and use them to power carve wood. This isn’t super scary if you follow general safety practices and are using reasonable discs on your angle grinder, but there’s also some out there that are basically miniature round chainsaws, and angle grinders can kick back in ways that aren’t super intuitive if you’re not experienced with them. Couple those together, and if the teeth of the chainsaw disc catch on you, the tool will basically ride along your body in the direction of the rotation. This has resulted in them climbing up people’s chests, necks, etc.
And there’s the long term stuff. Dust is huge. If you use power tools, you must invest in respiration and dust collection – the long term use of them without it will kill you.
In general, with hand tools, if you screw up and injure yourself, that’s the end of it. You probably won’t keep going and further injure yourself beyond whatever you did initially. This can still be scary – your chisels need to be sharp, and if you do something really dumb, this can still result in something fairly severe. But power tools (with exceptions like the SawStop) don’t know if you got hurt. They don’t care. They just keep going.
Skill is the major constraint. Some powertools can make up for lack of skill as well as lack of time.
I think hand tools require less skill to get started safely, from my experience teaching kids and grown ups.
For getting started, I would probably agree on most things
But something like a domino will give you what is essentially a mortise and floating tenon joint that is far easier to do for a beginner than trying to accurately chisel it out themselves.
I think that most anything you’d use a router for is also way easier, skill wise, than doing it by hand as well.
You may be interested in Matthias’ videos where he makes his own tools, such as a table saw or a bandsaw.
It just enrages me everytime I see a festools used. (It’s the biggest brand on ask this old house) They’re really expensive.
Why does it cause you rage? It causes me jealousy!
When I used to do Theatre carpentry, I regularly used Festool equipment (that wasn’t mine). It was an education in how careful thought to your product design can make something much better to use. I have an Evolution Sliding Chopsaw at home. It cost £200 and it’s great. The Festool Kapex is just better in a lot of small ways – the mechanism for adjusting angle is quick and precise, the laser lines mark out kerf width accurately, the airflow has been designed so that dust extraction works well etc.. It’s 10 times the price though, so obviously not worth it for me at home.
They may be the best of the best. But when you see a guy with a youtube channel with it. It kind of defeats the whole deal of “i could do this too”
If it’s the best of the best the average homeowner shouldn’t own it. (It’s not a good value for them)
Festool has started sponsoring TOH, but they used the tools before that. The track saw, domino, sanders, and dust extractors are very well built tools. The amount of dust from my Dewalt 5″ ROS was night and day compared to the 125mm Rotex. The domino makes joinery much faster, and has become an essential part of my workflow.
My beef with TOH is now that all the houses are so expensive and the work is so custom or complicated that it is not relatable.
They make nice tools. It’s debatable whether a lot of them are worth the money.
Some of their stuff is nearly indispensable in a high volume or time constrained shop, though. The domino’s only real competition comes from mafell, and it’s similarly priced. Triton and some others have tried to compete with some dowel joiners, but they don’t work nearly as well.
Collecting machines from craigslist is a necessary part of the hobby, imo.
A 1,000 dollar Powermatic tablesaw is functionally immortal. It will always be worth 1,000 dollars, so you buy it and use it until you don’t need it, then sell it to someone else for what you paid for it.
When I last had a big shop full of stuff at home, my machine and cost list was…
1) Used Powermatic 66 table saw ($1000)
2) A used Woodmaster 18″ planer ($1200)
3) A router table I spec’d to my local machine shop which attached as a replacement wing on the Powermatic 66 to share its fence ($500)
4) A used Grizzly 8″ jointer ($500)
5) An “American Sawmill Machinery Unipoint” miter saw from the 1950s ($300) (^)
6) A General International mortiser ($1000)
7) Couple of routers, one big one and one 1.5hp one ($600)
(^) This was the best machine I ever had, sold it for $500 when I was done with it. Imagine a miter saw that’s all cast iron rather than aluminum and plastic that can cut invisible miter joints.
So not 8,000, more like 4,000-5,000 if you buy a bunch of used stuff. I can’t think of a reason to buy new woodworking machines, when there are so many used machines floating around craigslist or exfactory on any given day.
Any of these machines could be lesser/smaller alternatives, which would not limit the quality of output but rather just limit the size of raw materials you could use and perhaps slightly increase waste. For instance there’s no reason you can’t cut small pieces on a small table saw and break down 4×8 sheets of ply with a Skil saw. The only thing the big cast iron saw gives you is the ability to skip the Skil saw and minimize waste, really.
Similarly, anything that I did on my custom built router table (or a shaper) could be done with a hand router and jigs, it’ll just take more time to build the jigs. About 80% of woodworking is learning ‘clever tricks’ and learning how to conceptualize jigs to accomplish repetitive tasks accurately. Machines can do it for money but your brain can do it for cheap, just a matter of learning how.
Look at this dude: https://youtu.be/RYzgP_Ucs1I
Doesn’t have a shaper but he has raised panels at the end of the day ;).
I mean, I’ve stumbled across guys that make a living building wooden windows, doors, and cabinet doors with a small army of used Powermatic 2A tenoners (no longer being made, you can only buy them used). They’re not required to build a cabinet door, though, they just reduce it to unskilled labor simplicity.
That’s a nice fuckin’ miter saw[1] for $300! At that price you practically stole it, and you pretty much gave it away while making a $200 profit. The list price for a new one is $16,700. And no, that is not a typo [2]. If you ever have another one you’d like to sell at that price, please contact me 🙂
For those not in the know, Northfield makes only industrial tools. There’s a reason you don’t see their stuff at your local home improvement store. Or your local Woodcraft/Rockler.
Tannewitz, incidentally also still exits and is still making the GHE.
Sadly Oliver, once one of the greats, is now another badge stuck on the same castings coming out of the same foundries as Powermatic, Grizzly, and everybody else.
[1] Actually, it might be the nicest miter saw mere money can buy.
It was fantastic! In every way superior to the modern plastic/aluminum variants.
American Sawmill Co was the original Unipoint designer. Their models in the 1950s were the holy grail… a single phase, 110v saw that two guys could carry around, but was made of all cast parts so still had the accuracy of the modern Northfield variants.
Northfield bought the company in the late 1950s iirc.
Small single phase ones no longer exist, you can only get the big ones. They are still ubiquitous in roof framing shops. No one has come up with a better design than the unipoint in the last 7-8 decades.
I’ve stumbled on that guy and other similar people in many google searches. I think there’s a privileged spot reserved in the afterlife for those guys.
There are a lot of old machine designs that weren’t commercially successful, but are absolutely still relevant and useful. See my other comment about Powermatic 2A tenoners. If I had my pick of a shop wherever I lived, I would always have no less than two of those machines, even though Powermatic stopped making them years ago.
For another example, check out blogs and videos of window and door making machines from the late 1800s. Anyone who has ever built a wooden window can explain precisely why they are the most complex things in any building with wooden parts. Those machines from over 120 years ago were far superior to anything purpose built for window making today.
Well, I had been thinking about an original round-top DeWalt RAS for when I have shop space of my own, but now I have something else to trawl craigslist for. What a nice machine; thank you for sharing the history.
When I saw it on Craigslist I immediately drove out of state to get it. I can tell you that most of these rare birds gravitate to the owmm.org (old woodworking machinery) forum. They even have a surrogate system in place where they help each other buy machines local to another user and then settle up at scheduled meetups.
A guy on there bought mine when I eventually sold it.
I replaced a Delta RAS with it, that I never got aligned properly.
The problem with long arm RASs is they tend to have inaccuracy along the arm itself. The bigger it is the less likely that is, but throwing mass at it is a poor solution. Having a shorter movement footprint is without question the better design. All of the bearings that guide the movement of a unipoint are within inches of each other and fixed in space. The bearings on a long arm RAS have all of that movement distance to get out of alignment.
Good luck! There are a few floating around out there.
That is super informative. Thank you.
I mostly lurk on owwm, but I’ve found it to be a very knowledgable and supportive community when I’ve had questions.
“I have a 10″ Forrest chopmaster but unfortunately I made the mistake of starting a cut on a steel plate without checking which blade was in the saw”
😀
Did something similar with a hollow chisel mortiser. The head was hitting the fence, so I didn’t set the depth stop. Which was fine, until I moved the table to cut another mortise in a location where the head didn’t hit the fence. Turns out you can’t cut square holes in cast iron with a hollow chisel and auger bit :-/
This is a route I’d love to go down, but for someone who’s newer at this it’s hard to know which are the solid immortal ones, and which ones are probably already broken.
If anyone can recommend UK equivalents to some of these brands I’d be very grateful!
Generally, older is better and if you can put a phase converter in (to use 3 phase motors on residential single phase power) you will find better deals.
Reason being, industrial businesses will sell off used machines way cheap when they upgrade or replace. Their stuff is a cut above the home use stuff like what I listed above.
5 horsepower is the upper end of what you can get from a single phase 220v motor. 3 phase motors can well exceed that limit.
Otherwise, these machines are really very simple. Most of their mass is cast parts which don’t wear or break. The wear items are just bearings and belts which can be replaced. The only thing to be careful of is bent derive shafts on the motors. Take a dial indicator and measure the run out of the motor shaft on a used machine. If it doesn’t wobble and the motor runs ok you’re fine, buy it and polish it up.
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