First few hand tools to buy on limited budget?
I want to start learning woodworking with hand tools, but I only have $250 to spend right now. So I’m starting small. I’m fine spending a while perfecting small dovetail-joint boxes before buying a few more tools and moving on to bigger things (Shaker cabinets someday I hope).
Can anyone give me a list of the first several hand tools I should buy, and what brands? I’d rather buy solid tools that will last, so if it means waiting a month or two when I can spend a little more, I’ll do that.
I’m in a small apartment so no workbench, but I’m hoping to barter some stuff for a barely used Jawhorse: http://www.amazon.com/Rockwell-RK9000-Jawhorse/dp/B0018MRUN4/ref=tag_stp_s2f_edpp_workbench
It looks like my library has enough to get me started (Tage Frid, Jim Tolpin), but I’d appreciate any small-project book/video recommendations too.
Thanks!
Rob
Replies
Short list
Robert:
The best advise I can give you is to get and read the book "Hand Tool Essentials" by the staff of Popular Woodworking before buying any tools. It is sort of an inexpensive crash course in hand tools. Chris Schwarz's book "The Anachrist's Toolchest" is another good source of information on handtools that I found to be a fun read. Use the internet to learn all you can about a tool before buying. The tools you need are dictated by what you want to build.
Second, it is easier to learn to use hand tools on a solid bench than on a Workmate or some other modern clamping sawhorse. The bench doesn't have to be expensive or large. A 20" by 5' top will get you started. Look at Chris Schwarz's second book on Workbenches "The Workbench Design Book" for ideas. If you are a good scrounger you can recycle framing lumber from building teardowns to build a good bench for next to nothing. A vise screw to make a leg vise is less than $60.
Here is a quick short list of inexpensive hand tools that will get you started. Your money will go farther buying used tools in good shape than buying new tools, but depending on where you live can be hard to find.
Saws (I'm not a fan of Japanese saws, but you can buy good new ones pretty cheap. ) - 1 crosscut handsaw (can be a Stanley "Sharktooth" toolbox saw from Home Depot or Lowes $15). 1 rip handsaw (used ones can be found at Antique stores for $20 or less. Try to find one that is fairly sharp to start with). Dovetail saw (Crown has a decent gent's saw for around $25 or get the Lee Valley Veritas Dovetail saw for around $70, Highland Woodworking carries both). A crosscut backsaw and small miterbox is also handy to have, I can't give you a recoomendation for inexpensive ones though.
Planes - Used Stanley #5 will get you started for around $40 in good shape (look it over, take it apart, and make sure it isn't cracked anywhere). Get a new Stanley #80 cabinet scraper for $40 if you are working highly figured hardwoods. Also get a card scraper these are less than $10 new.
Chisels - Set of 4 (1/4", 1/2", 3/4", 1") For around $60 Narex has a boxed set of 6 that is a good starter set (Highland Woodworking has these too). Any chisels you buy will need the backs flattened and then sharpened before you use them (same goes for plane irons).
Drill - Used braces are $10 and eggbeater drills are around $15. Get a working one of each. By bits as you need them.
Hammers - A standard claw hammer, tack hammer, and wooden mallet all come in handy. The mallet can be made by you out of scrapes. Use it to pound on your chisels.
Clamps -- I've used pipe clamps with pipes from 1' to 8' feet long for lots of glue ups. They are more affordable than most other types of clamps. Harbor Freight has these cheap or get better ones at Home Depot or Lowes. The more the merrier. Hard to own too many clamps.
Look up "Scary Sharp" on the internet for a cheap way to get started sharpening plane irons a chisels using sandpaper.
I'm sure others will give you their ideas and either add subtact from my short list.
gdblake
Add to the great advice above... a try square or better yet a good combination square.
Rob; you don't have to live with the heart break
and stigma of
>chunky but<
there are cures for that now. Don't suffer in silence . . .
cure the condition of chunky but by getting a rip saw or better yet a bandsaw.
The poster said that the tool budget was $250. Even my list of tools most likely exceeds $250 if you buy good tools. But maybe not.
So I purposefully left out the rip saw.
I would say get a Starrett combanation square.
good advice so far
I, too, would pass on the Jawhorse, and agree with the suggestion of a solid bench. (Remember, it can double as a desk if space is limited.) A used solid-core door can be a starting point, but there are better options, such as laminating your own from scrounged 2x4s. Spending time at flea markets looking for old tools that can be reconditioned is a good suggestion, too.
How about a hunk of butcher block counter top on a 4X4 (legs) base on locking wheels. Round over the good side and it is a rolling kitchen stand - chopping block - island. Flip the top over, lock the wheels, and it's a bench. There is a vise that is sold by Woodcraft that drops onto a mounted post in both vert and horiz positions that would be perfect for a small flip top bench. The post would be mounted to the underside, unseen till the top was flipped and the vise dropped on. It pivots but when the jaws are clamped it is tight.
$250 It's tough to stay inside that
A person can spend that much on wood before they know what happened.
Maybe check out estate sales at least for a basic saw or two.
For an inexpensive vise I am going to go look for a link to an old post here.
more to come . . .
OK
Go here
http://forums.finewoodworking.com/fine-woodworking-knots/hand-tools/klausz-frid-scand-bench-dead
Page down to post called "Oh sure"
Look for clamp that looks like the photo I post here. I bought it at Home Depot. But just that clamp is $25 or $30.
You know . . . you can make your own saws too. See other photos here.
For one of my first stiff, flat , benches I used a Japanese planing beam that I made from 2x4s ( actually two ; one small and portable and one quite long.
How small?
"I'm in a small apartment so no workbench"
Just how small? Will you have an extra bedroom for your shop or will you be doing woodworking in your living room? Do you have to put the projects and tools away every time you want to entertain or will you leave everything set up all the time? A while back FWW had a video tour of a shop in Japan that was smaller than small. I'll try to find it and get back. Found it... shows what can be done in a small space but this shop was not on a small budget so no help there.
View Image
Tokyo Dungeon Workshop - Shop Tours -
Thanks for the shop tour
Reminds me of my shop I had in the eighties and early nineties.
I had to go outside to the basement door, prop it up on the cable and go down the stairs.
Not the most fun late at night during a snow storm and you just got to go to the shop for that last bit of work.
Well I came home one day and my hard core girl friend had her Porter Cable circular saw out with an old nail blade in it. She was cutting a hatch door in the floor of one of the closets between the floor joists. She got the edges of the hatch door nicely centered on the joists.
When we moved out a decade later , lets just say, the landlord was surprised to see the new "improvement".
She built a cool ladder for me and all. I was doing zero woodworking then. All metal work.
I had my outside door. I am wondering how your video guy gets the Townsend shell front secretaries up the ladder and through the hatch.
: )
Oooooorr
By the looks of all the effort he has put into his shop maybe he is like me and just makes tools so he can make more tools so he can make the tools that he really wants. Sure cuts down on transportation logistics because everything just stays in the shop once it is built.
Swenson,
Do you ever get the feeling that Rob has given up on this woodworking idea and moved on to another hobby ? Haven't heard from him .
Happens a lot
More and more I see posts with interesting questions and lots of well thought out answers but not one single reply from the orig poster. Not a comment or a thank you or even a screwyou I don't like your answers. Just silence.
I was wondering how the shop tour guy got the sheet goods down in the first place, and he had a bunch of it. In my old age I'm getting more and more claustrophobic, not too sure I could take a shop that tight.
Great story about the new basement stairs and hatch.
Question
Been following this thread with interest, , mainly to see where suggestions varied from what I did decades ago.
One question: What is a "hard core girl friend"? I know I had a few that I really flung a craving to, but they were not quite to hard core.
wondering how... guy gets the Townsend... up the ladder
That just reminded me of a FWW piece many years ago that had me rolling on the floor. Craftsman had built a large piece being delivered to an apartment on the top floor. Couldn't get it on the elevator so they got controll of the elevator and ran the top of it to be even with the floor, loaded the piece on the top of the car and rode with it inside the shaft while balancing it and keeping it from hitting the shaft walls. At some point in the trip up they lost control of the elevator and it started making trips up and down to other floors. I'll see if I can find it.
Man I just hate when a good idea goes south
>At some point in the trip up they lost control of the elevator and it started making trips up and down<
Ha, ha, ha, aaahhhh, Ha, ha, ha, ha
An interesting challenge....
...especially since I'm in the middle of reading Anarchist's Toolchest and reading about minimal tool sets.
So you have $250 to spend on tools and you want to start out making dovetailed boxes. I think you have a very good idea. And your instincts are right when you say you want to buy "solid tools that will last".
Ok so can we assume you will be using the commonly obtained 3/4" stock?
3/4" will make your boxes look a little chunky but!....you can learn about the effects of, say, an underbevel on the lid of the box that makes a 3/4" lid look much thinner and lighter.
And since you can buy 3/4" stock at various widths, we can eliminate a rip saw to start.
So what do you need to make a dovetailed box? There's an awful lot to be learned doing that.
You need a crosscut saw to cut the wood to length.
You need a dovetail saw to cut the dovetails.
You need a chisel - say a 1/2" chisel - to chisel out the dovetail waste. You can also use this chisel to rout out hinge mortices.
You need a method to sharpen the chisel and the jack plane iron (see below). The Scary Sharp is a good idea for starting. I moved away from it, but if money is really tight, it's a start.
You need a mallet. But this can be found in the woods if you really want to.
You need a plane. To smooth the surfaces, square the edges, and trim the ends of the dovetails. So maybe a jack plane for a start.
You need a hammer and some nails to nail on the bottom of the box. You need a screwdriver to drive the hinge screws. And you need a drill or a gimlet to drill pilot holes for the hinge screws. You can get an "eggbeater" drill for that.
OR you can make leather hinges and use clenched nails. So no drill is needed.
If you buy just those tools - the best you can afford - and start building the boxes, you will know what other tools you want, and you will KNOW what those tools need to achieve for you. You'll be much better equipped to buy intelligently.
And you will learn an awful lot. Your method is a much better idea than going out and buying $10,000 worth of tools before you build anything.
Ah the good old days . . .
>hard core girl friend<
Hmmm, let me seeee, where do I start . . . WO . . .
For short I call her my surfer girl because when young she moved from Berkley to Hawaii with her high rise building family. Mostly brothers but a big and diverse family so she picked up all sorts of skills and interests along the way.
On the island she used to run to work in the morning and run home. Worked at a bicycle and parts distribution center.
She would come to the main land and travel around the USA with a fairly high level bicycle racing team racing for money.
She could pull off a fairly professional performance of Van Morrison songs including Into the Mystic on her classical Spanish guitar which she also played classical style with the foot rest and all.
There didn't seem to be much in the way of home building that was a mystery to her. She could frame and pour concrete.
In fact when I first met her she had walked away from a construction job building three story apartment housing. One day they were working on the third floor with a fairly high wind , and speaking of plywood, there were stacks of plywood up there and she tried to tell the guys they needed to secure the plywood or they would start to take off like playing cards.
To make a long story short the guys didn't listen to the "know nothing " "GIRL" and the plywood did and she decided rather than die from a sheet catching her in the back and then making a nasty stain in the parking lot bellow she might be able to find some other activity that could hold her interest.
She came to work for us as a mechanic.
Do you see what I am saying here ? Hard core.
Well one thing led to another along the lines of "hey beautiful where have you been all'a'mylife" ?
We had a good go 'round riding bicycles, running, camping, being bohemian artist types etc..
Being a judo person with a whole lot of physical energy she used to get this look in her eye and even though I was taller than she was I just knew what was coming. . . she would scoop me up in her arms and spin around with me like in the movies but roles reversed.
It was funny as hell to both of us!
She hadn't run in years and years and decided one day to run to work where we both worked. Four miles/ one way / no problem.
Because of the screwed up situation in the grade schools in Hawaii for "howly" kids (white kids) they basically get driven out of the schools by the locals and turned into delinquents. Despite this I believe that she was and is an intellectual and was quite capable of educating herself and did.
Hard core.
She came back to the mainland when her family was building a sky scraper in Denver. ( Well about as tall as any of the other down town high rises.) I got to tour it while it was being built. Very cool ! So hanging around this crew of a family she picked up quite a lot. The wife of her brother, the iron worker and pro chef, was an iron worker as well. The first lady ironworker I had ever met and I grew up around construction workers some what. Hard core people ( bound to rub off ).
Oh and there was the time when , as she was riding her bicycle home, one of the truck drivers going into an administration building near our home had been particularly rude to her and I believe even had endangered her life.
She stormed into our house, threw off all her cycling clothes, always a moment of fascination for me, and threw on a smooth silky dress and high heals before strolling off to have a word, or two, with his supervisor.
As I recall there were no further incidents with misguided lorry drivers.
Of course she was probably going easy on the driver. Wouldn't have been pretty if my little angel had got her delicate little hammer wielding, ( that was pretty much before nail guns ), wrench turning, Judo throwing fallangies on him. Did I mention my surfer girl's best girl friend was a black belt (and raced bicycles on an international olympic level )?
Hard core.
The black belt was a Polynesian and looked as pretty as a model. Many years later she wound up introducing me to Queenmasteroftheuniverseandbabybunnytrainer. Thank you for that.
I could go on and on but better end this before Queenmasteroftheuniverseandbabybunnytrainer catches me and misconstrues a long , long, ago historical period into a current events problem to be vigorously acted upon if you know what I mean.
hard core
Great Story ROC! Got the stuff in it that instigated the LN jointer thread! Maybe we can get the likes of Mel, Lataxe, et. al. to weigh in.
Tools
Check with Habitat for Humanity. If they have a store you may find several good items such as a bench, bandsaw or etc. When I retired and moved I donated a complete shop full of woodworking power tools and hand tools to Habitat. They sold them, I deducted them from my income tax. Unfortunately I could not retire my desire to woodwork and at age 78 I built a shop and use only hand tools and a bandsaw. Good exercise pushing a LN #7. Build yourself a solid bench with some southern pine with a moxon vise that can be built by hand. Get some holddowns!
For ROC: Write a novel from your experience, please! It will pay more than chopping down trees.
Rex
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