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?
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!
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
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.
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].
[1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/woodworking-in-estonia
[2]: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2019/07/24/free-download-roman...
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.
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.
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.
Also, you can work in complete silence.
Unless you're mortising or chopping dovetails...
I would also suggest watching Steve Ramsey [1], he puts a lot of effort to explain simple and beginner stuff. I believe he still has a PDF in his website about filling a workshop for under 1000 USD.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFPLFyxkhzc [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin
I have hit the point where I have more tools than space.
His channel is specifically for beginners on a budget.
Also, in woodworking you always want that one more tool.
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
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.
But in general, among hobbies, woodworking is pretty gear-intensive. Even if you try to avoid it.
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.
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).
And you can move down market and get something with a 100-1000 hour service life for half or a quarter of the price.
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.
Not that hand tools can't get just about as expensive as power tools.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it's the best of the best the average homeowner shouldn't own it. (It's not a good value for them)
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.
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.
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 4x8 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.
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.
[2] http://www.northfieldwoodworking.com/pricelist/pricelist.htm
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.
http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/detail.aspx?id=700
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.
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.
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.
I mostly lurk on owwm, but I've found it to be a very knowledgable and supportive community when I've had questions.
:-D
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 :-/
If anyone can recommend UK equivalents to some of these brands I'd be very grateful!
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.