If you have some free time on your hands, or have some projects around the house that you want to complete, you may be thinking about going into woodworking. It’s a great hobby, and it’s one you can enjoy even if you don’t have any prior experience. The fact is that plans for wood projects aren’t hard to find online, with many sites offering detailed plans that include step-by-step guides and lists of items you’ll need. But how do you go from never having worked with wood to making it your hobby? Here is the three step process.
1. Get the basics
Before you delve into woodworking plan research, we recommend that you get the basics down. Make sure you have decent measuring tools like tape measures, carpenter pencils, combination squares, and more. You’ll also want to get the tools you’ll need to cut wood, such as jigsaws, handheld circular saws, and handheld backsaws. You only need to get one of each, and you don’t need to get the expensive power tools. You can do it yourself, without the need for power saws.
2. Understand how woodworking works
In addition to learning how you are going to cut wood and reshape it, you should also understand how the pieces of wood are put together. That will help you as you develop simple and complex projects. Start with a glued or screwed butt joint, as that’s one of the most basic ways you’d join pieces of wood together. You can also experiment with things like glued joints to see how they can be useful.
3. Find a top site for woodworking plans
There is no doubt that you can become a woodworking hobbyist on your own, but it is very helpful to use sites where you can navigate and identify woodworking plans. These sites will show you different wooden objects and then show you how they are made. There will be visual and written guides, and you will see a list of the items you will need.
Going with woodworking plans is a helpful start, because it will eliminate beginner’s mistakes. When you are just starting out with woodworking, going with a guide is very helpful. You are just following steps, like completing any task. You don’t have to think on the fly or adjust based on how something turns out. You are just following the steps and you will end up with something that looks amazingly similar to the product shown on the site.
Do not think that woodworking is a hobby that will be too difficult for you. We promise that as long as you take things slow and don’t try to create too complex a structure as your first project, you will have a lot of fun. You’ll start to understand how you can manipulate wood with different saws, and then you’ll see how those pieces you’re cutting can be joined together.