Setting Up a Shop with Woodworking Hand Tools

For many of today’s woodworkers setting up a shop means buying a bunch of often expensive machines and power tools, figuring out how to plug everything in, making sure you have enough outlets and electricity, and all this before you even begin to think about dust control and noise issues.

Even apart from the health and safety issues, and ignoring the expense, there is still a learning curve involved in becoming familiar with table saws, jointers, planers, router tables, and a variety of other powertools, stationary or otherwise. All this can seem overwhelming for the beginner, and while ultimately the rewards of woodworking are typically well worth the effort, it can be a lot to deal with in one gulp.

There is an alternative — much less expensive, simpler, safer, healthier, and for many, even more rewarding. For hundreds of years there were no power tools, and yet the craft produced amazing woodwork, and more importantly for the hobbyist, an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure.The secret is to start with woodworking hand tools by setting up a shop that relies exclusively on relatively inexpensive items. As you progress you may well have the urge and opportunity to add in some basic power tools to make certain jobs such as stock preparation easier — which, incidentally, is what power tools were invented for — but in the meantime you will have learned a lot of skills and techniques that cannot be easily duplicated with power tools alone (try making a cabriole leg on a router table or a Bombay chest on a jointer — it can be done but only with a complicated array of extra jigs and fixtures, which seems to defeat the purpose of being efficient).

The heart of a hand tool workshop is its bench. Thereafter you need a certain number of basic sawing, planing, and cutting tools. You will need to understand how to prepare and sharpen them, how to use them and the jigs and devices that go along with making their use easy, secure, and accurate. And you will need to understand the best way to organize your workflow and storage. It’s a lot of information, but it can provide the foundation for an almost limitless array of techniques that will equip you to produce virtually anything. A hand tool workshop is by no means an inferior substitute for the more typical power shop.

Hello!

I work wood as a hobby for my own enjoyment therefore I work in ways that I find enjoyable.  For the most part that means doing thing by hand.  In some cases a power tool may get the job done easier and faster, but I don’t find using power tools to be enjoyable, so my use of them is limited.  There seems to be a growing divide between the power tool and hand tool users on some woodworking forums.

I will also blog about hand tools and toolboxes brands which I find awesome. I recently tried a new brand of toolbox, called Wilson and Miller, which is apart from making awesome tools and toolboxes donating a portion of their profit to American War Veterans. Try it out, you will not regret it!