I get great stuff here: and here:
I don’t recall exactly when the woodworking bug hit me, but I know it was sometime before May of 2000. We were living on Long Island and various home improvement projects had been nudging me in the direction of finer work for some time. Our house there had a cozy little room that housed the water heater and furnace. In that room I found space to construct a workbench. I mark this as the birth of my shop.
For more than two years before moving to the country I read everything I could find about woodworking. I lurked in USENET newsgroups, browsed Web sites, read magazine articles, and thought constantly about building furniture. A Web forum called The Oak became my most frequented and trusted source. Although I didn’t have the space to follow through on what I was learning, it was there that I got the advice about tools that guided my decisions about purchases I made when I finally got a large enough shop.
I dreamt of the day when I would finally be able to begin cutting wood and building beautiful furniture to fill my house and impress my friends. Like most dreams however, this one didn’t become a reality exactly according to plan.
I knew from my reading that a good table saw was the centerpiece of any woodworking shop and I had decided on a Cabinet saw called the Unisaw by Delta Machinery. This saw is a high-end tool that will be going strong long after I have departed this world. Tools like this are very expensive. Although I knew it was central, I made a financially motivated decision to purchase other tools first.
The first thing I bought was a router table. This is arguably the second most useful tool in the shop. By buying lumber that was already dimensioned and surfaced on all four sides and cutting it with my hand-held circular saw or a hand saw, I could build simple projects using the router to shape wood. I completed several interesting projects while this was my only “large” tool, but my capabilities were severely limited.
A friend gave me a very low-end table saw, which I welcomed since I knew that a table saw was crucial. This tool looked like a table saw, claimed to be a table saw, and even had a few limited uses, but it wouldn’t cut accurately enough for sophisticated work. This disappointing lack of performance was something I should have expected because under the nice-looking top it was essentially a cheap circular saw bolted to a flat surface.
After the router came the thickness planer then the band saw, followed by the jointer, and a drill press. Each tool made it easier and more practical to create increasingly sophisticated projects, but I felt the lack of the quality table saw on every project.
I finally added the Unisaw and placed it at its rightful location in the center of my shop. The difference this tool makes is nearly impossible to describe. For one thing, I now feel like I am equipped to do any project I decide to take on. More than that though, this tool enables me to make highly accurate cuts and to mill lumber in ways impossible before. It speeds simple operations as well.
That’s my experience for what it’s worth. How did you decide what to buy first when you set up your shop? Are you a power tool or hand tool sort of person–”Normite” or “Neander”? Fill us in!
