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by VBprogrammer 2570 days ago
I'd recommend NOT starting to watch Matthias Wandel's videos. I must have lost years of my life watching woodworking videos on youtube after he got me hooked. It also cost me several thousand pounds in tools and culminated in me buying a home requiring complete refurbishment (not quite finished).

Save yourself! (mostly in jest).
2 comments
jdietrich 2570 days ago
At the very least, watch some Paul Sellers videos to inoculate yourself against the belief that you absolutely must give all your disposable income to Festool and Lie Nielsen.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork

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Loughla 2570 days ago
Honestly, if you're interested in woodworking, Paul Seller's original 'workbench' video set is how to get started.

Cheap materials, can be done with cheap tools, and he's pretty straight forward about what's important to worry about and what isn't.

You'll learn whether or not woodworking is for you, and you'll have a handy workbench.

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teacpde 2570 days ago
His workbench tutorial is excellent, but for me, an absolute noob, it was still daunting to build a workbench as the very first project. What I ended up is building the Paul seller's Trestle [1] as my Hello World project, and it has been super handy. Even after that, I still think his workbench is too much work for me, and I eventually decided to build Christopher Schwarz's knockdown workbench [2].

[1] https://paulsellers.com/trestles-drawings-and-cutting-list-d... [2] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2014/09/18/materials-tools-for...

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razster 2570 days ago
That is where I first started out. Watching his videos helped build my first workbench, from there I found Wandel and others. I still go to Paul for tips and tricks.
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Bluestrike2 2570 days ago
Except for sanders. If you use one of them for a bit, you'll have no problem signing away an organ or two to Festool. And the dust collector, of course. Maybe a Domino joiner. But other than that, you don't have to give them all of your disposable income for your power tool needs.
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exDM69 2570 days ago
Watch enough of hand tool videos and soon you will be hand planing and scraping instead of finish sanding.

Buying the sander and dust collector would probably be cheaper than all those hand planes, but there is something in that fine smoothing plane shaving that keeps you coming back.

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markdoubleyou 2570 days ago
I just looked up the Domino joiner. It looks amazing, but good lord, it's $1500 after you add in the different sized cutters.
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MatthiasWandel 2570 days ago
Paul sellers is all about spending the time on it, vs just getting it done.
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jdietrich 2570 days ago
Hi Matthias, I really enjoy your videos. I hope you didn't take my comment as a criticism of your work - it was really aimed at the broader culture of woodworking. Your videos are experimental, interdisciplinary and in many ways orthogonal to that culture.

The Sellers approach is obviously far more time-consuming than what I might call the New Yankee Workshop approach, but it has tremendous merits for new woodworkers. It's very easy to be intimidated by the huge workshops full of expensive machinery that you see on YouTube or in the magazines, but Sellers makes it absolutely clear that you can do fine woodworking with a tiny amount of space and a handful of cheap second-hand tools.

Other YouTubers promote a similar message - Rex Krueger springs to mind - but I think that Sellers offers a uniquely clear vision of how traditional skills and tools can make woodworking a more accessible and enjoyable pastime. For many amateur woodworkers, getting it done is almost besides the point - it's about the quietness and concentration of skilled manual work, the smell of the shavings, the satisfaction of a sharp tool and a neat dovetail.

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teacpde 2570 days ago
That's fair, I think what is also fair is that a lot of folks simply enjoy spending the time on it rather than just getting it done, which is also the case when it comes to writing code.
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MatthiasWandel 2570 days ago
If I just want to spend the time at it, I’d build another bandsaw.
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DarrisMackelroy 2570 days ago
He's an extremely interesting person. He was a longtime engineer for RIM and he holds several GSM-related patents [1]. He's also written a few neat pieces of software, my favorite of which is Bigprint [2].

[1] https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthias-wandel [2] http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/index.html

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