Woodworking through the mind of an engineer
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
I'm not comfortable not knowing what to do; I've been building on a really stellar foundation for so long that when I need to do something outside of that universe - not situated over that foundation - I tend to flounder, get frustrated, and feel like the dumbest man alive.
Woodworking made me confront the fact that while I may be really good at building scalable systems and high quality code, that doesn't mean I'm the master at everything, and I'm *going* to find things I need to stretch to learn. It's made me get comfortable with making mistakes again (well, as comfortable as I can be, I reckon). It's also made me comfortable with realizing when I'm hitting my patience limit and walking away instead of banging my head against the wall for hours. A bit of distance, let my subconscious chew on it for a while, and revisit it later, rather than just trying to put my head down and shove my way through.
Long story short, you should all pick up woodworking, or metal working, or throw some pottery or paint or something. Get comfortable with being a rank amateur fuckup and revel in the process of learning instead of fabricating without a hitch. I know that I, for one, really needed it.
And then you see someone who is the master at everything in construction.[1]
> Also the structural integrity and endurance of those constructs seems a bit questionable.
Eh, I've seen shacks built worse in worse climate that are older than me.
Aside from some things being a bit weird (why those protruding concrete blocks for wood beams instead of just digging a hole for concrete + sticking beam deeper ? Humidity maybe ?) I don't really see an issue, it looks like it is in place that won't exactly experience hurricane winds
> This seems very staged to me anyway, with the result not matching to the process shown.
Well, it was probably like a week long build so some things were skipped
Other absurdities are when the pool is filled with thousands of gallons of water, one bucket trip at a time.
While she appears to have started the series herself, it's been covered by Xhihua and promoted by the Party. So it does have propaganda aspects.
Her work has scary aspects. The electrical wiring is unsafe. An uncovered knife switch for 220V? No fuses or circuit breakers? Ordinary wire out in the open, not nonmetallic armored? Generators with no voltage regulation? That's 1980s China, not 2020s China. Wiring accessories are cheap in China; price them on Alibaba.
HOOOO, boy. Are you wrong there. Major cities sure, and they're improving as a whole, but SO much of China's heavy-industrial and rural provinces are still run on and over systems that mentally invoke the <internally screaming> meme.
Guoer rewinds a lot of motors, most of which have a standard cast iron frame and field windings. She's regularly opening up old motors and finding burned-out windings. Badly burned out windings. Clearly, no motor protection circuit breakers were used.
She does use eye protection when angle grinding. She's a real artist with a angle grinder. She makes parts out of scrap sheet and tube with a angle grinder and a welder. I've seen people do worse with a whole machine shop available.
But I think showing helpers for target audience might've had reverse problem, people would assume just because some man shows up in the shots that they were the ones doing the hard part, even if they were in the end just "unskilled helpers", which sadly happens in many male-dominated industries where woman is automatically assumed to be less skilled or getting help.
> Generators with no voltage regulation? That's 1980s China, not 2020s China. Wiring accessories are cheap in China; price them on Alibaba.
cheap vs zero coz it was pulled off some junkyard probably
These are garden structures in the Japanese idiom. They look fine to me. She's clearly made them before. Why do you say the results don't match the processes?
If your gloves get caught by anything rotating at several thousand RPM, there's a huge chance that the material of the glove will catch on the working edge/face and continue to pull your hand/arms/whole body deeper and deeper.
You also don't have any sense of proprioception or kinesthesia with the glove itself, so it's even easier to accidentally do this, whilst thinking that you're well clear.
My mom was wearing gloves when using the table saw one day. She nicked a finger in the blade and it caught on the fabric and pulled her hand in, mangling her fingers pretty badly. Plastic surgeon did a pretty good job reassembling her, but one finger (the one that ended up with a severed tendon) still can't bend properly.
Like, preferably don't even use hands at all to push it in the first place
Learning a trade, even if it doesn't become a profession is something which is very under-rated.
I also started doing some wood work, I got myself a desktop CNC and some other basic woodworking tools.
haste makes waste, but even worse, it can make for blind people with breathing problems
Hand tools!
CNC? Table saw? What's that?
A basic woodworking tool is a good 50+ year old hand saw that can sharpened by hand. I have like four. I actually ground the teeth off completely on some of them and created a new set of teeth from a completely smooth straight metal edge. Very satisfying!
This is what I learned it from (well this and a many of the other videos on his channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTqZTGPPRj0&list=PLqyeNiM0BJ...
What's a planer? Who's got money to buy that or space to put it. Or the dust extraction you'd want?
Buy an actual 50+ year old hand plane or two! I have 3 and each one has something that's broken. Be it a handle, a screw that's not original etc.
Dunno about the US or other countries, but here in Canada https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/hand-tools can also be good to buy new if you are so inclined. I have a mix of new tools from them and old tools from Ebay that I restored.
Edit: this was meant as a bit of tip of the hat to anyone who can sharpen a crosscut panel saw, not snark.
And yes, I started by building Paul's workbench actually. I built the version that uses regular old 2x4s and 2x6x glued together. He also has a version using plywood. I built it using only hand tools I bought off Ebay and the "work bench" I used to build that was just some old Ikea table I had. You might use a couple of cheap saw horses and a sheet of plywood. Heck you can make the saw horses using just 2x4s and hand tools without any "bench" and go from there. https://paulsellers.com/paul-sellers-workbench-plans/ and his first video literally starts with "How do you make a work bench when you don't have a work bench to make it on. Here you are on your knees ...". But there's also a video on his channel where he actually makes on of these in his back yard like I mentioned.
And yes, I bought files, both to get rid of the existing, bad, teeth and cut in the new teeth. Also a tooth setting tool for the left/right 'bending'. I only did that once I had his work bench finished and a vise mounted to it. No "saw vice" (whatever that is) needed. FWIW, I've only had to sharpen my rip cut saws so far though. Cross cut will be harder, yes. Looking forward to it!
Also I see you meant your reply in a good way, i.e. yes, I'm way down the rabbet hole. I do have a manual router from Lee Valley ;)
Something I totally forgot until your reply made me remember. Paul Sellers actually made a piece for the president of the USA. He used to live in Texas.
https://paulsellers.com/2020/11/a-white-house-design/
That's not what we're talking about here tho if you ask me ;) The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery. And do it badly lol! I sympathize a lot with the OP here, i.e. in software, I make a boo boo and I force push a `git commit -a --amend` and (almost) nobody is gonna notice. In any case I squash it all before merging, whatever may have happened "in between" in the course of "getting there". This is quite different when physical things are concerned. It's much, much harder to hide your mistakes when woodworking. It needs more knowledge and skill to hide the mishap when cutting that dove tail :)
It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish. You can't tell in the end how a cut was made or how a board was processed, you are going to eliminate any evidence with a scraper or by sanding!
Unless you are making very square hyper-modern furniture out of planks you need so many specialized hand tools. Even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes. A Stanley hand plane costs about $150 each if bought new, and will probably still be almost unusable without a few hours of setup. A knockoff Indian plane will cost $70, but it's quite possible that no amount of effort or setup will make it usable. You need at least 3 different hand planes to plane a rough board. An electric planer costs $300 to $500, it makes absolutely no sense to buy $500 of hand planes unless you specifically want to spend 500x the effort and time.
At that point, why do you even allow yourself a set of planes? Why not literally sand the board like they did in Mesopotamia with another board and a bucket of sand? Why allow yourself a Stanley type cast iron plane, why not limit yourself to a 1700's style wood plane and a poor iron that can barely keep an edge? Why not limit yourself to a bronze hatchet? It's beyond arbitrary to decide that there is some kind of magic in choosing the most modern thing you possibly can that isn't motorized, something that can only be manufactured using the same sorts of technology that you are avoiding by using it. They were never flattening cast iron planes by hand, they aren't rolling the steel for the plane irons by hand, and they never did. They do it with giant machines in giant mechanized factories. These planes were only ever bought because the kinds of mechanization they had available in the factory wasn't available in the locations people needed to shape wood at that time.
If you want to fetishize the process or experience the history of woodworking like a worker at Colonial Williamsburg, or you are Amish, then by all means concentrate on the tools and the process, and by all means your personal experience and the value you find is fine, but don't tell people there is something lesser about the tools they use to build the things they want to build. I promise you, all those thousands of workers who spent their days sweating over their work without air conditioning or power tools would throw those hand tools directly into the trash if they had a choice to use modern tools. Which they largely did when those more modern tools became available. I am certain they would find it funny and ridiculous, if not unbelievable, that anyone would ever decide there is something spiritual and desirable in doing the sorts of physical labor they went to great lengths to minimize and which over time wore out their bodies. It's no different than insisting on digging a ditch for fiber optic cable by hand because it requires so much more time, skill, and mastery of various kinds of shovels.
This is not true. The YouTuber Rex Kreuger[0] has a series where he explains how to get started woodworking with mostly hand tools, making very much not-modern furniture with relatively cheap tools. While he does advocate buying and restoring tools from second-hand sellers, he also does a lot of his work with relatively new tools (such as this video[1] about using a disposable DeWalt saw for joinery) and shows how to use limited tools in historical ways to make a large variety of cuts, applicable to any woodworking you'd want to do. In fact, he specifically says that he only uses 3 planes for the vast majority of the work he does, and that should be enough to make fine furniture.
> Stop gate-keeping woodworking.
I would argue that demanding an investment of many hundreds of dollars and large amounts of floor space (that a router and table saw would require) is more gatekeeping than recommending hand tools.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQBz4QHn7u4
Another thing Rex does is try to make the tools himself (sometimes this is a disaster, like his lathe, but even then you learn a lot about what makes a lathe the way it is). He is above all practical, and when he says you can make furniture with some cheap tools he isn't claiming it's better or demonstrates more "mastery", it's just a way you can get started cheap. I think if you can make a tool by hand from garbage or whatever, and then you can use that tool to build other things, that is somehow very different from just bragging about how you use hand tools 'because mastery and time'. Buying a plane that was made in a huge industrial factory around the time of WW1 and then using it 100 years later to act cool is very different than being able to demonstrate that you can 'get by' without spending thousands of dollars. How to build the tools and how they work and building those tools by hand from scratch is also interesting in itself.
I think it depends what you mean by 'fine' furniture. He has shown how to make some very simple colonial stools and boxes using simple techniques and hand tools. But more to the point, he is interested specifically in the history of woodworking and understanding how craftsmen were able to make things with the limitations they were under. If you want to help preserve that history I support it, but there isn't anything special about doing woodworking that way, any more than there is anything special in doing anything in an archaic way. By all means if you have more fun doing work by hand then do it by hand, what I take issue with is the claim that it is somehow closer to some ideal and other ways of doing things are not as desirable somehow.
Watching that guy in Australia build up from being naked in the forest to smelting iron tools is incredibly interesting and valuable, but I don't recommend it as a strategy, and there's no shame in not.
Anyway, my point was that a router and a table saw can take the place of hundreds of hand tools. If you look at a cabinet makers tools before power tools you will see dozens and dozens and dozens of planes for all the patterns they will want to cut. Cutting a panel for a cabinet door is amazingly complicated without a table saw and requires many specialized tools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo). Doing the same thing with a router and a table saw requires skill but doesn't require any other tools (maybe some chisels and of course clamps). I'm not saying "there does not exist furniture you can make with 3 tools", I'm saying modern tools take the place of hundreds of hand tools that would cost far more than their modern (more general) replacements. Besides, you can't buy those tools anymore and they haven't been made for over 50 (80?) years, you would have to find antiques. So yes, you can make some stuff, but you can't make a lot of things with hand tools anymore because the tools aren't made and can't be found reliably for any price. Where would you find this pattern again: https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 or these: https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 Even if you cut a pattern in an iron and manage to temper it you would have to cut the same pattern into the wood, I have no idea how you do that or it requires a negative of the iron? Do you cut them at the same time using some kind of jig to keep everything perfectly aligned? It would be interesting to know how they are made, but I don't want one, and I certainly don't want 50. I don't want another one to cut rabbets, and I don't want any of the rest of them. You can collect a few hundred of these things or have a router table and a carbide bit set that costs about $100 and you can buy at any big box store or on amazon.
>If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools.
>[T]here is something very satisfying of doing a rabbit plane or using a low angle block plane that isn't felt when sanding.
>The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time.
No one is denying that for the actual profession of carpentry, furniture-making, etc. a power tool is a superior option. Those commenters were sharing subjective experiences of satisfaction in learning a manual skill (and there I will have to disagree with you; I think using a hammer and chisel or hand saw to cut a straight edge is more physically difficult and demanding than doing the same with a table saw). A professional cabinet maker is not a hobbyist, and needs those power tools, and in previous eras those many planes, to make a living. But that's not relevant to gatekeeping; for someone just getting started, it would be much easier to buy a small set of hand tools rather than everything that would be required for full automation.
>He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in.
He also is very tepid on the idea of a Saw Stop for a beginning hobbyist [0]. I would argue he rents the commercial building more as a studio space; he only looked into it after quitting "woodworking" as a profession and deciding to go all-in on YouTube. Before that, he was working out of his basement, as I'm sure you know.
https://www.rexkrueger.com/articles/2020/11/30/the-riddle-of...
Doing woodworking with neolithic tools, with 1700's era tools, with WW1 era tools, or with modern power tools satisfies all of these requirements. It takes time, it requires skill and mastery in all cases. OP is saying that woodworking with power tools doesn't qualify in this regard, which is false and I find very annoying and I consider gate-keeping.
I'm not saying Rex is recommending a Saw Stop, I'm saying when he has to get work done he uses whatever tool he thinks is the right one for the job.
> I think using a hammer and chisel or hand saw to cut a straight edge is more physically difficult and demanding than doing the same with a table saw
Well of course it is. Building things from wood isn't the same as the steps to do it. You can chew the wood with your teeth and if you are skilled you will end up with a piece of furniture that will last generations, or you can use a table saw and build something that falls apart in an hour. And vice-versa. Woodworking is building things out of wood. Being better at woodworking means you build better things of the wood, not being more impressive when people watch the video of how it was made, which doesn't exist and nobody wants to see. If you are a professional you also have to worry about building good things efficiently (in time and other resources like materials and wear on tools). If you are not a professional you are free to be inefficient but that just means you are measured entirely by the end result. If one way or the other is a more fun path for you to take then of course do it that way, whether it's power tools or not, but if your goal is just to spend time sweating over wood without worrying about the quality of the final product we fundamentally don't agree on what the point is. Crawling is more physically demanding than walking, and crab walking is harder than crawling, and rolling is harder and more physically demanding than crab walking, and dragging yourself by your teeth without using your arms or legs is harder still. Why do you still walk?
To quote Kenny Powers, “I play real sports. Not trying to be the best at exercising.”
To build something as 'simple' as a stool or a table you have to understand how the wood will move, how the forces will be applied to the piece in years (hopefully decades) of use and how it will wear or weather, how to make it so that wearing doesn't degrade or ruin the piece, how to build it to be strong when resisting those forces but not overbuilding it so that it is needlessly heavy or wastes wood or is ugly as a result. You have to make something that will be attractive and somewhat stylish, at least to someone's idea of what is attractive and stylish. Woodworking isn't cutting a straight cut, it's building furniture that serves it's owner for a very long time and is loved and passed on through time. It's building the things that Rex finds and shows us why they have held up and are still being used 100 or 200 years later, and that people will want to have in their possession at all. Who cares how you cut the boards? How is that even a consideration? Do it how you want, it couldn't matter less and nobody should care (and nobody does).
>Who cares how you cut the boards?
Everyone who enjoys the feeling of satisfaction in shaping wood with more limited tools. The kind of hobbyist who does this for fun. People, presumably, like the OP given his other comments. No, they are not "playing real sports" - they're having fun. And again, for that express and specific purpose, recommending hand tools over heavy automation makes sense. The expectation or even recommendation that a hobbyist should invest a thousand dollars into a table saw, router, planer, dust collector, etc. acts as much more serious gatekeeping in that it makes the practice of woodworking seem a lot more formidable than it is.
In addition to all the baseline skills that you pointed out that everyone who shapes wood will have to learn, the OP is also recommending a way of working that makes you interact with the wood more slowly and much more physically than using a power tool. What they said is true; cutting a straight, clean edge with a saw is a more difficult skill than doing the same thing with a power tool. The difficulty, as they explicitly noted, is the entire point. To find a skill that you very obviously don't have and learn to live with your mistakes as you improve.
I'm only going this far because you said, first of all, that "it doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools" and second that "even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes." Neither of those statements are, as far as I can tell, true, and the second especially would strongly discourage a lot of people from starting the hobby. Tell me that I need potentially a thousand dollars' worth of heavy, dangerous equipment and a large dedicated space to use them in, and I will probably conclude that the hobby isn't for me. But a small tote's worth of hand tools and a corner of a room? I can work with that!
I'm not suggesting you should buy lots of expensive power tools instead of a cheap saw. I'm saying that having to work with a cheap saw is just worse in every way, there's no spiritual insight to be gained, it's just a worse tool you are using because you prefer not to to or can't obtain a better tool. The fact that people fetishize it doesn't make it any different than digging the hole for a pool with a shovel instead of a backhoe, or moving a couch by yourself instead of with a friend. The swimming pool isn't a better pool in the end, and the couch doesn't transform into some kind of special couch.
Stop gate-keeping woodworking
If you're in it for quick results, absolutely agreed. If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools.
I'm saying what I love about woodworking and why I use hand tools:
The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery. And do it badly lol!
Sanding the deck to repaint? Absolutely! That said, I did use a hand scraper last time actually. The time before I used an orbital sander.
Of course you're gonna get the tree house done faster if you use the circular saw!
That's not the point. Not even the quality for me. For me, as a software developer, it's about doing things the slow way. Not necessarily the "better" way. I.e. using my hands. Meaning I built our tree house using only hand tools, save for the battery powered drill. Driving all those screws by hand, no thank you. Yes I did buy a hand crank drill as well and some drill bits to go with it. But I only use it to bore holes, not to drive screws, though you could too. Like this one https://img0.etsystatic.com/006/0/6916650/il_fullxfull.35811...
Some of you may appreciate this: http://www.supertool.com/forsale/2022nberslist.html (see main page and newsletter as well if you really want to buy - he's got already restored/more ready to use material than what you may find on ebay and the like, if you want to pay the price)
If you appreciate the feel and quiet of hand tools (like a nice hand plane!) that's great, otherwise if you like the accuracy and efficiency of a nice router, more power to you (rimshot!).
That said both chisels and planes are wonderful hand tools to work with and greatly reward even the most basic experimentation.
There's still a long road ahead for me to coming even close to mastering software engineering. Perhaps one day ^_^
e.g. things in the world aren't as permanent as they appear to be, you have agency to change and improve things, taking a step back to take two steps forward is sometimes the right path, etc...
Likewise, I heat the home office with the burning cycles of an intel Mac constantly compiling an electron app.
Until I read your comment, I hadn’t realized the parent comment was satire. Instead, I was amazed at some new technique I hadn’t heard of before of heating wood that would make woodworking easier.
It always takes me a few days of procrastination and thinking about going in the garage before I finally go and do it, by then the race is too close and I end up rushing. All that because I don’t want to confront the failures.
What’s funny is that when I complete whatever I do, the reward is so good that I don’t know why I can’t remember that feeling when I start the project.
It's fun and frustrating how ridiculously hard it is to measure and mark wood for cutting consistently.
I've been off by 1mm because I accidentally cut on the left side of the mark instead of the right side of the mark. Or I have a table leg that's not quite square to the floor because I forgot to square the table saw blade. Arrgh!
I would be interested in a more meta piece about how you approach problems and how you regularly achieve that 100x thing.
Thus said a therapist I had ages ago.
When you build a piece of furniture for yourself or especially somebody else, when you finish it, it's done. All the little mistakes and imperfections are just part of it, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just accept and be proud of it and move on to the next project. It seems odd but it's a very nice feeling for somebody who mostly deals in abstract, perpetually updating software.
If I ever got actually good at making stuff I would never be able to stop tinkering.
Fortunately, I am not good (and need to make money) so it remains an aside - a nice way to fail better.
When you look back at your career, how many projects did you complete which were actually used by someone? And how many were just canceled, or failed in the market?
Woodworking, metalworking, electronics, 3D modeling, CAD - just different ways to thinker with stuff.
Ward's electrical and electronic repair
Copy Carver - kind of a manually run 3D CNC, lets the user 'trace' in 3 dimensions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyNu8lpQI1g
Pantorouter - build an oversized template, then end-cut a piece in a way that scales down that template (effectively multiplying precision of the template to achieve precision you wouldn't be able to get otherwise)
Since discovering the pantorouter for woodworking I always wondered: wouldn't the same technology make sense for ultra precise 3D printing at home? Instead of having the motors drive directly on top of the model, have the motors drive a pantorouter instead and have the smaller end of the pantorouter on top of the model. It's "just" simple machines right, lever and axle basically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine
All I could find is people 3D printing parts to make a pantorouter for wood. But I'd really love to see one for finer 3D prints.
I don't know how but he manages to cut stuff by the hair of a millimeter on purpose.
As a result I was inspired to calculate out forces/stresses for a 1x2 pine structure, driven by the crazy lumber price inflation, and now have a 1x2 scrap wood rack, a 1x2 free-standing shelf, a 1x2 wall-attached shelves...
Here is a particularly egregious example that simply causes harm to those trying to refinish wooden floors: https://youtu.be/mHiF8xwjRGI?t=357
I had so many 'unusual' questions in my mind, and watching Wandel's videos answered about 90% of them.
I'd also highly recommend Paul Sellers channel. He's a traditional woodworker. Watch for example his mortice and tenons how-to video. He's an old school master craftsman.
If Bob Ross would have been a woodworker, he'd have been quite like Paul Sellers.
But one common fact of the most successful Youtubers is that they have been putting out content fairly consistently for years.
There definitely seems to be something about time and consistency in the equation of success.
Are you talking about the word mouse? I don't hear anything unusual about his pronunciation.
Now, wood working courses around me cost a thousand bucks, are at least 10 miles away, and are completely full. They only train for power tools, which I don’t have the space for at home.
If it's nowhere I know of anything, I can at least start out by offering that Mary May does an online woodcarving school of video lessons.
Edited to add:
You appear to be Bay Area (unless you misspelled Berklee, then I can help you). That's an area I know little about the woodworking scene in. You might see if the Krenov School's summer offerings suit your needs. They're in Fort Bragg. The American School of French Marquetry is in San Diego, and is quite specialized.
Combining those worlds is even more fun. I had a simple project involving an Arduino board and built a nice housing for it out of wood that managed to combine my interest in software, electronics and woodworking all in one!
Forced me to confront a lot of my shortcomings as a developer because iteration is a lot more expensive in woodworking than it is in programming.
ps: https://archive.ph/5bdae just in case
Also his website is well worth a peruse: https://woodgears.ca/
Something about the geometric java games where you would click your mouse very precisely made them a great primary intermediate step activity-wise to building the self-esteem I needed to get out of my room and get help. I will always be very grateful.
Some of the most enjoyable videos I've watched are of people using Japanese techniques and only traditional hand tools.
At least, that's how his blog posts and videos used to be. I haven't read or watched any of his stuff for many years because I disagreed with him on so many things. I still do want to make a crokinole board like the one he made (I started many years ago, but didn't grt very far).
Did you see that article the other day about someone cutting their Gameboy in half so they could make it fold in half? That is so impractical. Why didn't they just buy one like that?
You may not learn by watching people work and listening to their reasoning, but others do.
The other advantage of machines you make yourself is that you can always fix and improve them yourself.
Both machines are an engineering challenge by the way. In the pantorouter, alignment/calibration was a big issue for me - there too many of degrees of freedom, combined with inevitable slop in the mechanism, that has to take a lot of force from the router. Also, even after calibration you need to be careful to not cut too deeply, and in consistent direction to prevent the router bit pulling too hard. But it's all worth it once you're making perfect mortice and tenons with minimal effort :-)
CNCs would let you accomplish more with less effort but maximizing productivity per unit effort is not what Mattias goes for(I think)
CNCs don’t interest me personally and they look fairly complicated but the reason I like woodworking is because I’m not in front of the computer. This is to the detriment that I rarely have a plan and get bored drawing things out but know I should be for better outcomes. It’s fun just winging it.
Once you build some skill, you'll develop a pretty good idea of what you want for your use case and where spending an extra nickel or two makes sense or doesn't.
I'll also note that a huge hurdle for a lot of people is grasping the differences between raster data, vector data, and actual CAD data.
I really started doing new things with a machine once I had my own and could run 12 hour jobs overnight.
The maker community online is pretty robust so I had no problems being able to pick up the necessary information that way.
You are exposing yourself to fire risk by running a hobby machine unattended for any period of time, and you are compounding it by not being conscious.
Spending that much on tools doesn't seem like his style. He makes his own tools using scrap wood and salvaged washing machine motors.
Sometimes I'll spend hours making a meal. That's also fine, and personally, I find it more rewarding.
I love my fancy tools - I have a couple mills and a lathe I've converted to CnC, and also a sort of weird autorouter I put together for wood, for a specific project. (Probably going to recycle the parts, it was a good learning experience, but very limited.)
I also love doing things from first principles, or at least closer to that than letting the computer figure it out. It also makes me better with CnC - just like most things automation-related, doing it by hand illuminates a lot.
If you don't like watching his stuff, why not change the channel? There are many, many great CnC operators making video, too. No need to shit on things you don't seem to understand.
I am sure he would push the envelope in those areas too if he chose to.