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"Time" is not the only constraint, "effort" is as important. Woodworking features many health altering hazards, from the obvious cuts to dust poisoning, and wha

"Time" is not the only constraint, "effort" is as important. Woodworking features many health altering hazards, from the obvious cuts to dust poisoning, and what is rarely discussed: joints and back pain, due to repetitive movements, heavy lifting and bad posture. Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty. My personal approach has been to learn how to do everything by hand, from felling frees to making doll house furnitures. What I enjoy doing, I do with hand tools, the rest I do with power tools. It takes time to build muscles, posture and risk awareness.

jacquesm 6y ago
Skill is the major constraint. Some powertools can make up for lack of skill as well as lack of time.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  I think hand tools require less skill to get started safely, from my experience teaching kids and grown ups.
  - cthalupa 6y ago
    For getting started, I would probably agree on most things But something like a domino will give you what is essentially a mortise and floating tenon joint that is far easier to do for a beginner than trying to accurately chisel it out themselves. I think that most anything you'd use a router for is also way easier, skill wise, than doing it by hand as well.
cthalupa 6y ago
>Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty. This is a very important point. For anyone interested in woodworking or just starting out, I'll expand on this a bit: Some of the dangers are quite obvious: Spinning blades that are sharp enough to cut wood are sharp enough to cut you. SawStops are nice for protecting you from this at the table saw, but they don't make a bandsaw, router, etc. etc. etc. Some are fairly obvious if you've got a solid physics background and are thinking about it, but might not occur to you: Kickback from the table saw, ejecting a piece of wood at you at high speeds. Similar concerns with a router. Lathes are great at turning pieces of wood into deadly projectiles. Some are non-obvious: Lots of people take angle grinders and use them to power carve wood. This isn't super scary if you follow general safety practices and are using reasonable discs on your angle grinder, but there's also some out there that are basically miniature round chainsaws, and angle grinders can kick back in ways that aren't super intuitive if you're not experienced with them. Couple those together, and if the teeth of the chainsaw disc catch on you, the tool will basically ride along your body in the direction of the rotation. This has resulted in them climbing up people's chests, necks, etc. And there's the long term stuff. Dust is huge. If you use power tools, you must invest in respiration and dust collection - the long term use of them without it will kill you. In general, with hand tools, if you screw up and injure yourself, that's the end of it. You probably won't keep going and further injure yourself beyond whatever you did initially. This can still be scary - your chisels need to be sharp, and if you do something really dumb, this can still result in something fairly severe. But power tools (with exceptions like the SawStop) don't know if you got hurt. They don't care. They just keep going.

jacquesm 6y ago

Skill is the major constraint. Some powertools can make up for lack of skill as well as lack of time.

jeromenerf 6y ago
I think hand tools require less skill to get started safely, from my experience teaching kids and grown ups.
- cthalupa 6y ago
  For getting started, I would probably agree on most things But something like a domino will give you what is essentially a mortise and floating tenon joint that is far easier to do for a beginner than trying to accurately chisel it out themselves. I think that most anything you'd use a router for is also way easier, skill wise, than doing it by hand as well.

cthalupa 6y ago

>Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty. This is a very important point. For anyone interested in woodworking or just starting out, I'll expand on this a bit: Some of the dangers are quite obvious: Spinning blades that are sharp enough to cut wood are sharp enough to cut you. SawStops are nice for protecting you from this at the table saw, but they don't make a bandsaw, router, etc. etc. etc. Some are fairly obvious if you've got a solid physics background and are thinking about it, but might not occur to you: Kickback from the table saw, ejecting a piece of wood at you at high speeds. Similar concerns with a router. Lathes are great at turning pieces of wood into deadly projectiles. Some are non-obvious: Lots of people take angle grinders and use them to power carve wood. This isn't super scary if you follow general safety practices and are using reasonable discs on your angle grinder, but there's also some out there that are basically miniature round chainsaws, and angle grinders can kick back in ways that aren't super intuitive if you're not experienced with them. Couple those together, and if the teeth of the chainsaw disc catch on you, the tool will basically ride along your body in the direction of the rotation. This has resulted in them climbing up people's chests, necks, etc. And there's the long term stuff. Dust is huge. If you use power tools, you must invest in respiration and dust collection - the long term use of them without it will kill you. In general, with hand tools, if you screw up and injure yourself, that's the end of it. You probably won't keep going and further injure yourself beyond whatever you did initially. This can still be scary - your chisels need to be sharp, and if you do something really dumb, this can still result in something fairly severe. But power tools (with exceptions like the SawStop) don't know if you got hurt. They don't care. They just keep going.