
Woodworking for Engineers - jakear
https://woodgears.ca/
======
robotmay
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...](https://www.wood-finishes-
direct.com/product/manns-pine-wood-stain), which makes no mention of pre-stain
conditioner, and I've had very good results with it so far.

~~~
sjs382
Here's some:

Badger Workshop is UK-based
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSQRZgy9lvGsLrWn6sFHZHw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSQRZgy9lvGsLrWn6sFHZHw)

Nick Zammeti is UK-based
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3-0S7vXfwYY2jj5EkMpymA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3-0S7vXfwYY2jj5EkMpymA)

Rag N Bone Brown is UK-based
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVyE_6jEtVZGmYGXtUOL5FQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVyE_6jEtVZGmYGXtUOL5FQ)

Ishitani Furniture is Japanese
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7FkqjV8SU5I8FCHXQSQe9Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7FkqjV8SU5I8FCHXQSQe9Q)

Giaco Whatever (some woodworking) is Italian
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYH-
XXUE2QDaWKvABsWJh8w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYH-XXUE2QDaWKvABsWJh8w)

Cactus! Workshop is from Spain:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCupK5wJGXHDemXmHFMCMtHA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCupK5wJGXHDemXmHFMCMtHA)

Lignum is based in Croatia
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSdejZFhw0rrDFlj9McyNA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSdejZFhw0rrDFlj9McyNA)

Marius Hornberger is German
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7lavsPdVGV0qmEEBT6NyA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn7lavsPdVGV0qmEEBT6NyA)

Laura Kampf is German
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRix1GJvSBNDpEFY561eSzw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRix1GJvSBNDpEFY561eSzw)

Ollari's is based in Hungary
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Sepirabbit](https://www.youtube.com/user/Sepirabbit)

~~~
jdboyd
Get Hands Dirty
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCETeXD_3awsQv-9rSdCYXQQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCETeXD_3awsQv-9rSdCYXQQ)

I'm in the US, but I find a tend to like european woodworking channels better.

~~~
bearcobra
Before the pandemic hit, I had planned a trip to Europe that included a stop
in Porto based almost entirely on enjoying this channel.

~~~
tasssko
I agree i really like that channel too. Look no excuses necessary not to visit
Porto. Its one of the nicest european citie!

------
gomox
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.

[https://youtu.be/RBucMKhrL8M](https://youtu.be/RBucMKhrL8M)

~~~
jmkd
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.

~~~
MatthiasWandel
Some specific examples would perhaps make your case, instead of just making an
unfounded assertion.

------
MatthiasWandel
Matthias here. Surprised to see my website hit the front page of HN overnight.
Got any questions for me?

~~~
Dumblydorr
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?

~~~
MatthiasWandel
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.

~~~
telchar
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.

------
davexunit
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.

~~~
cthalupa
>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.

~~~
TheRealWatson
Agreed. Love the people at my local Woodcraft and Rockler.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Do you happen to know approximately how much higher the dues would have to
have been to be for it to work?

~~~
Animats
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.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
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.

------
k_sze
There is a very surprising statement on his "Gear Template Generator" page
([https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/index.html](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?

~~~
Cerium
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.

~~~
NortySpock
And nowadays the lasers have been replaced with LEDs, perhaps that changes the
equation yet again!

[https://youtu.be/_saDCwsB9Ww](https://youtu.be/_saDCwsB9Ww)

~~~
dogma1138
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.

------
doctoboggan
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.

------
RNCTX
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
;).

~~~
jakear
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?

~~~
ageofwant
[https://www.openscad.org/](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/](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.

~~~
dekhn
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).

~~~
ageofwant
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.

~~~
dekhn
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...](https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Manual:A_gentle_introduction#Manipulating_FreeCAD_objects)
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.

------
m_fayer
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.

~~~
perpetualpatzer
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.

~~~
saalweachter
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.

~~~
m_fayer
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.

~~~
saalweachter
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.

------
aaronblohowiak
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.

~~~
dfc
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.

------
war1025
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.

~~~
JKCalhoun
Love that guy. Pretty sure he's always high tho.

~~~
nabilhat
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.

------
gorgoiler
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!

------
jml7c5
To Matthias, in case you do pop in to this thread: you've forgotten to set a
character encoding for pages, so some browsers display gobbledygook instead of
apostrophes. For example, on
[https://woodgears.ca/faq/video.html](https://woodgears.ca/faq/video.html):
"Howâ€™s your (shoulder?)"

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I took your suggestion and emailed him (mentioning it was from you on HN, of
course). Hopefully he'll read it.

------
starpilot
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?

~~~
monksy
It just enrages me everytime I see a festools used. (It's the biggest brand on
ask this old house) They're really expensive.

~~~
rkangel
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.

~~~
monksy
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)

------
richardw
If you’re not a woodworker, try it. I watched a bunch of YouTube and spent my
December leave building my daughter a kitchen step. Such a nice experience to
work with something physical. Creative and exacting. Start with a plank and an
idea, end with a much-loved piece of furniture.

The outcome:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/ex4hej/first_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/ex4hej/first_project_kitchen_steps_for_my_daughter/)

------
ludwa6
Must-see presentation (~1hour) for anyone interested in this topic is
"Programming With Hand Tools" by Tim Ewald:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw)

------
raister
I saw someone commenting on YouTube that there is a lot of people from
software looking into woodworking.

I guess it calms you down after a stressful day.

Nothing relax you more than hand planning a crooked board and making a simple
dovetailed box.

~~~
jabl
I think it's due to software people often liking to build things, be it
software or something else.

For me, it's that, but also something simple, concrete and long-lasting.

At work, I sit in front of a computer, wrangling with something as abstract as
"information" through 147 abstraction layers, standing on the shoulders of
software and hardware high-tech representing certainly $trillions of
investment. In some ways, it's the pinnacle of human achievement, but it also
means that you're but a very very small cog in the whole machinery.

In contrast to that, woodworking with handtools is something where the tools
have existed for hundreds of years, if not millenia, the techniques are
largely millenia old, and whatever I do is something physical I can see and
touch, and won't be obsolete in a few years.

~~~
wetmore
Woodworking and building things in general also requires similar related
process such as "debugging", but I find the debugging to be a bit more fun
when working on physical objects because you can visualize more easily and use
physical intuitions.

------
MatthiasWandel
Matthias here (surprixed to see my website hit the front page of HN). Got any
questions for me?

------
sq1020
All this woodworking and carpentry stuff seems so interesting. For those who
are experienced, what's the most efficient way to gain basic woodworking
skills? And what's the best advice you would give a beginner who's starting
out? I.e. things you wish you had known when you were starting out.

~~~
BannedInSweden
Actually - I started out by building the bed from this website (woodgears).
Youtube has a tone of good basic tutorials and this site provides basic plans
(mind you - they needed some tweaking, there were errors in sizing and the
twin bed we bought was actually larger than this specified).

Turned out great - except the headboard wasn't tall enough (kid bangs his head
on it occasionally so re-doing that soon).

In general, just find something you want to build and build it. You will learn
a LOT. Its very much like programming in that sense. You can do very simple 2d
plans in openoffice draw or similar visio style tools and then buy the basics
at home depot or lowes or wherever. Hand tools are ok to start but would
suggest some basics like a circular saw or a portable table saw to help make
things a little more straight. If you don't have any of these things then
expect to spend a few hundred dollars on tools to even do something basic. You
can get away with cheap tools for a project or so but if you are serious about
doing this long term you are better off buying fewer higher quality things
than more lower quality things as they won't last (ie dewalt over ryobi and
anything from a woodshop over anything from harbor freight).

As for things I wish I'd have known when I started? Buy a good face-mask for
dust protection. I had no idea how freakin toxic pine dust is. If you don't
have a super high quality (read thousands of dollars) dust vac system then
work in a well ventilated area (like outside) with that mask on then clean up
after each session before you go inside so you don't track that junk in.

Oh and hand planing is the suck.

------
monksy
This is pretty funny.. I just finished a few shelves for my media area. (Went
from pineboard to finished product)

[https://imgur.com/a/VOeWisn](https://imgur.com/a/VOeWisn)

All of them are level.. however I do need to work on my cable organization and
slim down some of the cables.

~~~
mod
Looks pretty good for pine. You must have used pre-stain conditioner?

~~~
monksy
No pre-stain. However, I did sand them down quite a bit.

------
b0rsuk
Woodworking looks strangely appealing and it's satisfying to make something
with your own hands, at least once in a while. But with how absent-minded I
can be I'm scared of losing a finger. Around here we say every carpenter loses
a few sooner or later. Are there foolproof ways to keep them?

~~~
oflannabhra
Probably the most dangerous tool in a shop is the table saw. SawStop is really
the only truly foolproof method to prevent injury. Unfortunately, they are not
licensing their patent (even though they tried to initially), and they have
shut down several other companies who have come out with similar mechanisms
(at least Bosch).

The downside to this is that the cost of safety is relatively high ($2000+),
and there is no way to retrofit high-quality used saws from the used market
($500+)

~~~
dacohenii
Even a SawStop won't prevent kickback, which is the most common type of table
saw injury. However, it will prevent you from losing fingers, which was enough
to convince me to buy one.

------
richsu-ca
I made my shed using his design and techniques. Every fall, when we stow away
backyard furnitures, the umbrella, and Cycles into the shed with ease. I thank
him.

[https://woodgears.ca/shed/shed1.html](https://woodgears.ca/shed/shed1.html)

~~~
frosted-flakes
Interesting shed. He put the roofing screws in the wrong place though. They
should go on the flats, not the ridges, so that the gasket is fully
compressed. In heavy rain, that roof will likely leak. My shop certainly does,
and whoever built it also nailed the roof like that.

I have a friend who owns a company that manufactures and installs metal
roofing, and this is his professional opinion.

~~~
nkurz
Interesting, I wasn't aware of this recommendation.

Searching, it seems to be somewhat contentious. Most --- but not all ---
manufacturers recommend installing in the flat (usually with shorter screws at
the ridge to join panels). Sometimes a distinction is made based on gauge and
style of panel: very thin is always on flat, rounded corrugated is always on
the ridge. Some local regulations though appear to require installing through
the rib. Discussion here points to some of the advantages and disadvantages of
both approaches: [https://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/179392-metas-
ro...](https://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/179392-metas-roof-wood-
screw-placement.html).

If you find a firm manufacturer's recommendation for the style of panel that
Mattias is using, perhaps email him? I think this is the sort of thing he'd be
eager to get right.

~~~
frosted-flakes
I think that forum thread is confusing two types of metal roofing: large wavy
S-shaped heavier-gauge corrugated steel (often galvalume), and flat thinner-
gauge steel or aluminum with short ridges every 6"-8" that Matthias used.

As you said, it's also my understanding that the corrugated wavy stuff should
be screwed on the ridges (that's how my friend did our sauna roof), not the
valleys; and the flat stuff should be screwed on the flats, not the ridges.
But I don't know whether nails have different recommendations (I imagine my
friend would say don't use nails, use screws instead). I'm certainly not an
expert, but my friend is.

I'd rather not contact Matthias though. I once wrote to him about some minor
problem with his website (many years ago, way before his YouTube channel was
popular), and his reply was rather mean-spirited and completely uncalled for.
I don't hold it against him, but it's soured my opinion of him ever since. In
any case, once you make holes in the metal, you can't really remove the
screws.

------
wandering-nomad
Does anybody know of any Indian youtube channel/blog/website which dispenses
similar knowledge. I am deeply interested in pursuing woodworking and such in
my spare time but haven't been able to start because of paucity of resources
applicable to Indian context

~~~
balladeer
Not really. There ares some who do workshops/etc (I know some in Bangalore -
Masterclass, Kaydo) but they don't really have much info online. Try talking
to them. By the way if you are from there, there's IWST you might want to look
at.

The tools and the wood - I kept trying but I couldn't really figure out a way
to procure these easily and with some help in selection. Getting them from
abroad would cost multiple limbs.

~~~
wandering-nomad
Thanks! I am in Bangalore and will definitely give IWST a try. Btw, I found a
DIY woodworking site from India
[https://indiandiy.blogspot.com/](https://indiandiy.blogspot.com/)

~~~
balladeer
Were you able to get some info on how to procure tools and wood etc?

------
agumonkey
This chinese elder makes stuff that ressembles mechanical jigsaw puzzles
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClaEdLrmti779-tyovta8zw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClaEdLrmti779-tyovta8zw)

------
pknerd
I would like to know some more X for engineers like:

\- Cooking for engineers \- painting for engineers. Etc.

~~~
jakear
Modernist Cuisine a good option for “cooking for engineers”. It was actually
made by a former CTO of microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold.

~~~
__turbobrew__
I find Cooks Illustrated is another good option. They tend to focus on the
science of cooking and do a lot of exploratory work on how to hone/simplify
traditional recipes to work better at home.

------
throwawayForMe2
I am a big fan of Mr. Chickadee, he doesn’t talk much.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkYrJ2Fbe7pBjEZvkFzi3A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHkYrJ2Fbe7pBjEZvkFzi3A)

------
conroydave
i just got smoked by that eyeballing game

------
crimsonalucard1
I'm waiting for the day where 3D printers become so powerful that I only need
a minimal set of these "physical" DIY skills to build random physical objects.

Anybody know of a printer that can get me very close to this goal?

