Useful Woodworking Tools For Beginners

What kind of woodworking you’'ll be doing?

If you are doing home improvement and DIY, such as installing molding or making picture frames, the most useful tool would be a miter saw, which allows you to make guys at various angles.

Another incredibly useful tool for the home DIY’er would be a nail gun, along with an air compressor. This allows you to tack together pieces quickly, as well as makes the installing of molding much easier. Of course, this is assuming that you already have all the basic hand tools, such as a cordless drill, a measuring tape, and a square. (These would be an absolute first)

If you plan on doing more real woodworking projects where you’re creating things, there’s two routes you can go, power tools, and hand tools. The choice is yours, both of which will have around the same cost for the most important tools. For a power tools shop, the two most important tools are a router table and a table saw.

On these two tools, you can accomplish almost anything you need to do except curves cuts. Tablesaws allow you to take down sheets of plywood, resaw lumber, and make all repetitive cuts. Router tables allow you to cut profiles along the edges of boards, such as if you wanted to make your own molding and trim.

One other tool (well, actually, two. Bit you only need one) which I would suggest, although isn’t absolutely necessary is either a band saw or a scroll saw. These two enable you to make curved cuts. The decision whether which to purchase depends on whether you want to make cuts in the inside of a piece (Such as if you wanted to do cutout letters in a sign, that would be the job of a scroll saw) or wanted a little more powerful and tool (bandsaw). Of course those are only my recommendations.

For a hand tool shop, there s a lot of tools. And they are pretty self explanatory, so I’'ll just make a small list.

• A #4 or #5 hand plane (can be 4.5 or 5.5 if you have larger hands, it all comes down to personal preference)
• A set of chisels, preferably a 3/4″, 1/2″, 3/8″, 1/4″, 1/8″, and a Mortis chisel; however, a combination of only three or four of these would deffinetly work.
• A wooden mallet
• A set of sharpening stones, one course (1000 grit) and one fine (above 10000 grit). Although, for a workable enough edge, you don’t need the fine grit, as it only adds a higher polish, making a slightly cleaner and easier cut.
• A set of marking tools (T-bevel, combination square, etc.)
• A couple of good handsaws, one fine and one coarse, or Japanese pull saw with both coarse and fine.

This is by far not a complete list of tools for any type of shop or woodwork, but it should have the bare essentials for a good shop.