Woodworking has probably been one of the most important things to add during my career. I went from being and feeling like I knew how to do most everything to being forced into confronting the fact that just because I'm experienced, I don't know everything. I make so many fucking mistakes when I'm woodworking that, when people ask about what I make in my woodshop, I just respond "sawdust and mistakes, mostly".
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.
I have a woodshop and I develop software for a day job. The best piece of tooling I can suggest for a wood shop is a wood stove for heating it. I have reached 100% efficiency with my materials usage and it brings me a great satisfaction to so easily maintain such an impossibly high result.
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.
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.
Learning a trade, even if it doesn't become a profession is something which is very under-rated.
I would go as far (as I did) and recommend not buying any expensive power tools at all.
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!
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.
Don’t act like re-toothing a crosscut saw is some easy process and everyone has all the tools available :) at a minimum you need the correct needle files, a saw set, a bastard file, some kind of vice preferably a saw vice, and the skill on what pitch and yaw to file at. Hand saw sharpening like most woodworking is a lovely ‘rabbet’ hole.
Edit: this was meant as a bit of tip of the hat to anyone who can sharpen a crosscut panel saw, not snark.
I never said it's easy if you have nothing yet. But it's satisfying ;)
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 ;)
I've been taking woodworking classes from a fine furniture for about 6 months total now (2 different classes, just finishing it up). There's a lot of value in having power tools, but some hand tools just do a better job in so many areas. I love mixing both, and there is something very satisfying of doing a rabbit plane or using a low angle block plane that isn't felt when sanding. Smoother surface and better cuts too if you sharpen 'em.
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. Even Paul uses them. I.e. as far as I know he does the rough cutting and planing for projects using machines but finishing is done using hand tools.
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.
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 :)
Stop gate-keeping woodworking. It doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools, but it does take more time and physical exertion. It's not more pure, it's not better in any way. Wood is not a material you can treat with precision, it changes and moves with the seasons, with power tools or hand tools you can make cuts that far exceed the precision that can be maintained with wood.
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.
> It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish... 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.
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.
I sponsor Rex Kreuger on Patreon and have for a couple of years. He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in. I think he has a wide interest and doesn't ever shame people or make out like he is more pure somehow, he is very practical and puts a lot of effort and intelligence into understanding the process for our benefit. Rex is great. Watching his channel and his explanations would help anyone improve as a woodworker regardless of how they hack chunks off of boards.
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.
Good to know! But now we're talking about fundamentally different things. The posts you were replying to had this to say:
>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.
> The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery.
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).
Okay, much of what you say is relevant to the professional woodworker. But the OP was not discussing the professional woodworker and "gatekeeping" as an accusation is not relevant to the professional woodworker. No one is denying that for the actual industry, for the objective of actually producing accurate, reliable, long-lasting furniture, power tools are the superior choice.
>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!
Crawling is more difficult than walking though. Why isn't it valuable to build skill as a crawler?
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.
Whoa, that's quite a bit of text but it all went off the rails in the first sentence already and you go on a tirade from there that's wholly uncalled for:
Stop gate-keeping woodworking
I don't see where I "gate-keep" woodworking. My first sentence specifically said:
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.
That's the opposite of gate-keeping. I'm saying, power to you if you want to use power tools, like one of the other replies says they do because it's just an enabler of other hobbies to them. And I say even I would if I had to make a living being a carpenter for example.
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!
For me the fun is in the process and seeing that these results can be achieved with just these hand tools. I find that amazing. It was a lot of fun scouring EBay for cheap, in-enough-shape-to-be-useable planes and saws. Why do I choose one arbitrary limit over another? Well because it's arbitrary and I chose it and I'm having fun with it!
Sure, in most cases the power tools are strictly time savers and not "do the job better". But router or orbital sander (hell, anything powered related to sanding) is gonna save so much time they are worth every penny
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)
My perspective is a bit different because woodworking is a bit of a hobby that I use in other hobbies. I enjoyed making a stand for my synthesizers or various shelving and cases for my electronic things, and I didn't rush it or anything, but in the end getting a tool that just does the skill I already learned ("cutting the board straight") just leaves more time for my other hobbies.
I don't see the need to choose just hand tools or not. Buy some of both, make good investments where it matters and buy what you need for what you're making.
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!).
I would recommend everybody get a small table saw and chopsaw. Neither is expensive and both are transformative, especially for clumsy people like me who can't saw a straight line.
That said both chisels and planes are wonderful hand tools to work with and greatly reward even the most basic experimentation.
my other pithy statement that I stand behind is my poorly routed sign that says "Glasses and Mask, Jackass" and sits right in front of the door entry to my workshop.
haste makes waste, but even worse, it can make for blind people with breathing problems
The gate drug to woodworking is doing small repairs around the house. Hey I changed a lightbulb, let me replace that door knob, oh I need a chisel for that? Bam
The added benefit of arriving it via this path is that getting really handy teaches you a lot of valuable lessons applicable everywhere else in your life (ones that extend far beyond knowing when contractors are taking advantage of you).
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...
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!
The way she goes about it, using power tools without goggles and gloves is just horrifying. It's a lovely concept, showing what can be done with the materials and tools available. But I wouldn't recommend such a cavalier approach to anyone in real life. This seems very staged to me anyway, with the result not matching to the process shown. Also the structural integrity and endurance of those constructs seems a bit questionable.
Wearing gloves when using most power tools is so unbelievably dangerous.
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.
Yes, please don't wear gloves when working around (most) power tools.
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.
Table saws generally come with whole slew of "just please fucking don't"[1]. My grand-grandpa lost a part of the thumb to it, which is still probably low price for a man working in construction most of his life in now-post-communist country where OSHA-equivalent didn't exist.
Like, preferably don't even use hands at all to push it in the first place
Ah, yes, that belt sander is totally out to get ya if you don't have gloves, and that nail gun is gonna kill you without googles lmao.
> 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
I wear glasses and consider that to be enough with most portable tools, grinders excepted. She's wearing gloves half the time - it's a personal choice. Gloves don't prevent traumatic injury, just abrasion. You be the judge, if your hands are soft.
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?
Guoer, accused of that, has posted some long videos. Over an hour of Diesel engine overhaul. Start to finish on a motor rewinding job. With this one, though, there was probably some assistance not shown. Somehow, a lot of concrete got up to the top of the mountain. There's no reason she shouldn't have some unskilled laborers lifting and carrying.
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.
Well, the videos are pushing the "genius mountain girl" thingy hard.
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
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.
You're probably right, but this is new construction.
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.
Yeah. I can't find anything right now, but there have been many takedowns that show the excavator tracks in the background. Also videos that show the aftermath of these "hand-dug pools", where you see a bunch of them clustered in an area (again, with evidence of earth moving equipment).
Other absurdities are when the pool is filled with thousands of gallons of water, one bucket trip at a time.
This has been welding for me.
The amount of failures, small and big (like when I get under the car to mount the exhaust and I find that the second turn is actually 90 degrees off) and small (like when I’m using the last piece of stainless with the last c and I have and I forget to turn down the amps and blow a hole right through both).
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.
About 17 years ago I was an intern at RIM/Blackberry and even then Matthias was a legend in the company, built the communication/foundation layer for the device.
Engineers like woodworking because they spend so much time often building intangible things (like software engineers), that it satisfies an unmet need to hold, feel, or experience their creations in a tactile way.
Another key difference is that software is never finished, you can always fix a bug or add a feature or tinker with it.
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.
The material and sensitive aspect are important but I'd add another factor: physical geometry. Real objects can't be coupled virtually like bits. They interlock in simpler ways.. it creates hard constraints too but I think our brains often prefer them. Unlike a video game, most objects can traverse each others (well to an extent).
I got into software because I loved making stuff, I got my computer as a gift at 12 and I was consumed - I could make stuff and the only limit was my knowledge - not materials or tools - 20 something years after I'm still doing it.
Woodworking, metalworking, electronics, 3D modeling, CAD - just different ways to thinker with stuff.
Totally. A computer is worth tens of thousands of board feet of wood. Until I could afford a house and woodworking tools, this (and music) were my two primary creative outlets.
I say this in my woodworking classes to my fellow SWE classmates. It's so rewarding to have something you can hold, and people like looking at wood a lot more than they do code.
Also why I like playing instruments and drawing with pen and paper and sculpting with clay. After awhile I just got so tired of screens and living in essentially virtual reality.
Another factor I'll add is that anything you build yourself like this is actually a completed project that you can use.
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?
This is exactly why I enjoy cooking so much. It produces something of value from raw materials, and, if I do everything well enough, other people get to derive joy from my effort. :-)
Same here! I started cooking like an adult around age 30, and then really got into it around 35, but didn't feel confident enough to feed large groups until my late 40's. Now I'm in my 50's and love throwing parties and cooking days in advance. My next house needs a dining room that can seat at least 14 or I won't be happy.
I have a buddy who retired around the same time I did who turned his hobby into a retirement project on YouTube. Like Matthias, he also worked on low level code for devices (Philippe Kahn's Fullpower.) In this regard I think YouTube is great for providing retired people a good way to share the knowledge they've accumulated over a life time and make a little money in the process.
First video I see: a visit to Tim Hunkin's Arcade. That's a good sign, Tim Hunkin is basically the nerd equivalent of "the band your favorite band likes".
Wandel is really cool. Highly recommend his woodworking channel. Some of my favorite things he's made cluster around making high precision things with tools that are usually easy to use imprecisely.
Copy Carver - kind of a manually run 3D CNC, lets the user 'trace' in 3 dimensions:
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)
These are amazing. I could swear I've seen some of an horizontaly, not vertically, mounted pantorouter.
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?
I would think that play would be difficult to keep low enough to make this worthwhile. A servo driven hot end is already pretty precise, so a pantograph-like transfer would have to be rigid and tight enough to beat that. No small feat.
Here's Stefan Gotteswinter giving a talk about his Deckel G1L pantograph engraver.[0] For the side load on a 3D printer it probably would work fine but as others have mentioned, 3D printers are already relatively precise. 0.04mm/step on my ender 3 as I recall. (about 1.5 thou)
I'm following him on and off for years. He's the most engineer minded woodworker I met on youtube and what stands out for me is the precision he does his stuff. Most other woodworker goes by gut feeling or well established tricks or jigs to make stuff easier. This guy goes by raw precision.
I don't know how but he manages to cut stuff by the hair of a millimeter on purpose.
I've enjoyed reading/watching his posts as well, most recently for garage storage as I just moved into an empty one. What I found refreshing is that he is not snobbish about materials and has no qualms about using 2x4 pine or old pallets, as long as they accomplish the job in a desired way with suitable margins. Very engineer-like indeed :-)
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...
Wandel is doing something right, that's for sure. But for me he goes a little too far in ignoring established wisdom in his attempts to reinvent the wheel. While I admire the idea of going back to first principles, debunking myths and applying new perspectives, sometimes you need to acknowledge that things are done this way for a very good reason so let's use that as a foundation, instead of going further back and eventually, painfully concluding that you have not been able to reinvent the wheel.
Here is a particularly egregious example that simply causes harm to those trying to refinish wooden floors: https://youtu.be/mHiF8xwjRGI?t=357
I remember when I was getting into woodworking and found Wandel's channel.
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.
I'm used to hearing tall Os from Canadians, but I guess this was the first time I've ever heard a Canadian talk about a mouse. If I hadn't first seen the creature, it would have taken some time for me to realize what he was talking about :).
My biggest regret about college is not taking that workshop training lab that the Architecture department offered, which was open for any student to join, for free. With a lot of free scraps that can be practiced on. It would have been a great experience.
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.
Where is around you? I can try to offer some suggestions of places that offer hand tool classes or instructors who travel to look for.
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.
For an example: I am enrolled in a woodworking class my Park District has. It is $50 for about 8 classes. YouTube is great but having an expert to ask questions to is priceless.
I am also planning on getting a membership to a maker community that has a full shop (just bring your own wood). All the tools you could need. Especially valuable since I live in an apartment and can’t set up my own space if I wanted to. Plus they also have things like metal welding, textiles, electronics facilities and more if I want to branch out from the woodworking. $50 a month. The people I’ve met there also buy in to the community aspect so they are very, very helpful.
Make use of these options if you have them in your city.
Do a search around you for a makerspace. If one doesn’t exist, even better: found one. Woodshop + CNC router + Laser cutter + 3D printer is a great setup. Add metal working, textile shop, software dev / design - that’s a powerful creative powerhouse.
Woodworking can be a good hobby for an engineer as there's a lot of problem solving - both design problems or construction problems (like how to set up a particular cut to make it more accurate or efficient).
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!
Started woodworking when I started a little back yard farm and built all of the housing for the animals. Learned a lot. Built everything with my wife, who outside of comfort operating power tools, is a much better builder than I am.
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.
I’ve always been curious to learn more about Matthias’s RIM days. I might have read somewhere he was responsible for low level radio design / engineering, as a very very early employee. Every once in awhile his electronics knowledge kinda sneaks out in a video and you know it’s the tip of an iceberg of knowledge he has no interest in revealing.
Years ago, I thought that 3D printing would be an interesting hobby … until I realized that the frustration was aligned with my software dev day job frustrations. The lathe, the chisel, the saw - crucially the opposite of additive manufacturing. What are the analogs (er digilogs?) in software dev? Tree shaking? Ah, so many metaphors!
Holy cow, when you go to his channel and look at his video catalog, it just keeps scrolling! That in and of itself is super impressive - I don't think I've ever seen a quality personal channel with this many videos.
I love his videos about making his own bandsaws, belt sanders, etc. I've heard/read of people doing this sort of thing, but his videos documenting the process are really fascinating.
In 2008 or 9, I was an underdiagnosed college student with intersecting mental health challenges who had trouble getting out of his room
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.
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 think you’re missing the point. Doing CNC is different enough that some don’t consider it woodworking, not for some romantic idea about a “true craftsman” but just that you’re programming things more than actually working the wood yourself. Just like in the article he points out that his amount of time spent woodworking is about the same as a weekend hobbyist and he spends more time editing videos. If he were doing CNC primarily then he’d mostly be in front of a computer.
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.
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).
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 :-)
> 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.
For the kind of stuff he does, I highly doubt a CNC would be much easier. He does zero production work, so it's not like he would gain by being able to batch out the same part over and over
Sure but then aren’t you just glued to the computer doing 3D design and letting the machine translate that to reality? Isn’t the point to build stuff with your hands?
You need to know a lot about how to use a CNC such as tooling selection, milling strategies, setup, work holding, etc. that dramatically affect the result. It's not as simple as 3d printing, but yes obviously it's more technical and less 'analog.'
If you don't already have experience, join a makerspace or hackerspace. They'll likely have a far more capable and reliable machine than you can get at the entry level. And a community of people who can already tell you "don't bend your arm that way". And handle the maintenance. Ideally they'll have dust collection and some shared tooling that's in good enough shape to get you off the ground.
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.
This didn’t work for me. I don’t like shared resources and it wasn’t particularly fun the few times I went into a makerspace because you can’t take your time, make additions to the machine etc.
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.
>I really started doing new things with a machine once I had my own and could run 12 hour jobs overnight.
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.
I have a sprinkler system in my shop and the shop is isolated. I also only use upcut bits for overnight jobs and the CNC is in the middle of the shop on a concrete floor away from anything else. It’s a risk I’ve considered and tried to minimize.
I can swear by the Onefinity (personally have the journeyman). Solidly built, all ball screw rails (not inaccurate belt feeds), great customer service, large work area (32’x 48’) and surprisingly affordable.
Well, yes and no. It's not hacker-good to dismiss others' cool and interesting work by saying, "That's dumb; a machine could do it easier." But it is hacker-good to see inefficiencies that could be eliminated, even if it's an exercise in missing the point here.
Not "any" - have you seen Make magazine? Most of the projects involve computers, microcontrollers, and CAD/CAM in some way. Some people prefer to use hand tools (often faster), and some people like to introduce bits and bytes wherever they can. Personally, I like both ways.
You can use whatever you want. And that’s the whole point of my comment. Telling others they are wrong by not using (or using) certain tools is frowned upon.
What? Deliberately hamstring yourself so the videos are more interesting? I disagree, I feel like he would be able to do much more interesting things given CNC tooling.
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.