Three ways to get into woodworking

If you have some spare time on your hands, or if you have a few projects around the house that you want to complete, you may be thinking of taking up carpentry. It’s a great hobby, and it’s one that you can enjoy even if you don’t have any prior experience. The fact is, lumber project plans aren’t hard to find online, and many sites offer detailed plans that include step-by-step guides and lists of the items you’ll need. But, how can you go from never having worked with wood to making this your hobby? Here is the three step process.

1. Know the basics

Before delving into your research on woodworking plans, we recommend that you get the basics. Make sure you have decent measuring tools like tape measures, carpenter’s pencils, combo squares, and more. You’ll also want to get the tools you’ll need to cut wood, such as jigsaws, hand circular saws, and hand-held back saws. You only need to get one of each and you don’t need the expensive power tools. You can do this on your own, without the need for power saws.

2. Understanding how wood joinery works

In addition to learning how you are going to cut wood and reshape it, you also need to understand how the pieces of wood go together. This will help you develop simple and complex projects. Start with a glued or screw butt joint, as that is one of the most basic ways you would join pieces of wood together. You may also want to experiment with things like glued gaskets to see how they can be useful.

3. Find a superior site for woodworking plans.

There is no doubt that you can become a hobbyist on your own, but it is very helpful to use sites where you can browse and identify woodworking plans. These sites will show you different wooden objects and then demonstrate how they are made. There will be written and visual guides, and you will see a list of the items you will need.

Going with woodworking blueprints is a useful start, because it will eliminate the mistakes of beginners. When you are 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 adapt based on how something turns out. You are just following the steps and you will end up with something that looks amazingly like the product shown on the site.

Don’t think that woodworking is a hobby that will be too difficult for you. We promise that as long as you take it easy and don’t try to create too complex a structure as your first project, you will have a blast. You will begin to understand how wood can be manipulated with different saws, and then you will see how those pieces that you are cutting can be joined.