Things I wish I had known

[Mark Flippin]

Several things I wish I had known when I started woodworking:

- Plastic gloves are great for glue ups and finishing
- Respirators and filters are mandatory
- Start sanding with a coarser grade of sandpaper than you think
- Clamps and vises beat using your knees to hold down work
- Cross cut sleds are worth their weight in gold
- Hand tools are the better choice in some circumstances
- Milling shortcuts aren't
- Dust collection, dust collection, dust collection
- Plywood is good
- Finishing is a necessary evil (for me)
- Save your jigs
- Stop blocks are good
- All power tools require setup/calibration
- Blue tape helps in setup
- You need a good hand saw

These would have made my early attempts at woodworking easier

[Jim Koepke]

- Start sanding with a coarser grade of sandpaper than you think

My use of sandpaper has diminished greatly since learning how to set up a plane. Mostly it is only used on the lathe.

jtk

[Dave Zellers]

"- Save your jigs"

I like this one. I started saving late, but I did save. The problem is, as yer beard grows longer, you need an entire room for storing all the jigs.

And the second part is, make a note on it what you used it for! I've got a few without a clue.

[Thomas McCurnin]

Mark and save your jigs. I spray paint mine and label them and even then, two years later, I have to figure out what I meant when I put those cryptic arrows. I've mistakenly thrown out more jigs than I care to admit.

[glenn bradley]

"- Save your jigs"

I like this one. I started saving late, but I did save. The problem is, as yer beard grows longer, you need an entire room for storing all the jigs.

And the second part is, make a note on it what you used it for! I've got a few without a clue.

Ding, ding, ding!

Double-plus-good on the sleds and jigs. I have seen more folks post "why did I wait so long" regarding their first tablesaw sled than almost anything else.

I also took awhile to lose my prejudice about the "right" way to do something. I constantly look at other folks methods and adjust my own. However, I do try to avoid getting bogged down in the quagmire of having to sharpen something just so or using this tool or that to achieve the end result. Sam Maloof claimed to use a drywall rasp for shaping for cryin' out loud.

[Rick Potter]

Push sticks
Push blocks
Long push dowels for getting past guards.
Jessem hold down rollers.

Looks like a pattern here.

[John K Jordan]

And for the woodturning side of woodworking:

- Use hand scrapers off the lathe instead of power sanding, coarse sandpaper, and clouds of dust. I can often start with paper others end with and get a better result. Fortunately I learned this by myself fairly early before spending a bunch of years getting locked into the "usual" method.

- Get a high quality lathe at the start instead of an iteration or two of upgrading. Same with turning tools.

JKJ

[Mark Flippin]

I haven't gotten that good with the planes yet. Hoping to and trying to practice.

But when push comes to shove, I fall back to sandpaper

[Mark Flippin]

The hardest lesson for me was that sometimes an inexpensive tool is inexpensive; sometimes it's cheap

Life is too short for cheap.

If you go cheap to see if you have an interest...OK (my first welder)

But if you like it, go quality after that.