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Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

The downside is that CNC woodworking videos are less interesting. I know it's not "easy", but it looks too easy compared to less automated methods.

Some of the most enjoyable videos I've watched are of people using Japanese techniques and only traditional hand tools.

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There’s enjoyable ASMR tier videos and there’s useful videos and I think Matthias falls strongly into the latter category. Would love to see what he could come up with given the extra capabilities.

A lot of what he does is pure entertainment and has very little practicality. It's all about the cool ideas and the engineering. No sane person would spend the time and effort to build a band saw out of wood when you can buy a good metal one for a few hundred dollars.

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).

> A lot of what he does is pure entertainment and has very little practicality. It's all about the cool ideas and the engineering. No sane person would spend the time and effort to build a band saw out of wood when you can buy a good metal one for a few hundred dollars.

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.

Yes, like I said, it's purely entertainment.

For you, yes.

I guess I'm insane then... I built his pantorouter, and am half-way through his 16" bandsaw build. One good reason to build the bandsaw is that it's actually a very high-quality machine - if executed well. It has an extremely stiff frame (for a relatively light weight), and a large capacity. Buying a similar quality saw of a similar size would be a lot more than a few 100 dollars. That is in fact part of the reason I'm building it (though mostly it's for the challenge).

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 :-)

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