Cheap tool suggestions wanted!
Hey folks. I recently started writing a sequence of articles titled "Woodworking on $1.50 per day", as both an exercise that amused me and a serious guide to starting woodworking on a college-student budget. Each installment covers purchases for one month: what can you do with $45? As it turns out, if you're willing to compromise on quality you can do quite a bit.
Before I give links and ask for suggestions, let me deal with one complaint I'm already expecting. The tools I'm recommending are, for the most part, not very high quality. They're largely things I expect people to outgrow within a year or two at most, and they will never work as well as high quality tools. Why, then would I recommend them at all? Because some people who want to start woodworking don't have the tools to buy a full kit from Veritas or Lie-Nielsen, and don't have the ability to buy and restore tools from flea markets or eBay. These articles are written for those sorts of people: the kind I was when I started about five years ago. I was never able to find solid recommendations for cheap tools that would work without driving me insane, and now that I have (some) of the knowledge necessary to make those recommendations, I felt like I was obligated to do so.
The lists are organized in favor of being able to get started quickly, with greater precision and higher quality following a fast entry. There are a lot of other ways I could have gone, but I'm committed to this one now!
Part 4 hasn't been posted yet, but will be in two parts: recommendations on how to look for used hand planes (at $45/month, it would be a year before a beginner had anything like a set of usable new planes), and a recommendation for a drill and drill/driver bits. Also in my plans are a wooden rabbet/shoulder plane (one of the odd hybrids that are mostly made by Mujingfang), and possibly a plow plane. I'd like to try one of them before recommending it, but it might be a while before that happens.
So the question I have is: what would you add? What inexpensive (no more than $90, for lack of a better definition) tool would you add, somewhere in the second half-year of someone's woodworking career? How do you feel about wooden planes for a beginner? Saw files and a flea-market saw?
I'd like to fill this out to twelve months, but I'm definitely reaching a limit on what I can honestly recommend for low prices.