A good set of woodworking plans means the difference between a beautiful, functional project or one that just doesn’t measure up. I’m not a woodworker myself, but I know a bit about working with wood because my father was a skilled woodworker, albeit a hobbyist. My dad drew his own plans. It was a long time ago. I’m not sure you could even get woodworking plans back in those days.
Today is a different story. Those who don’t want to start from scratch and create their own plans can find an array of ready-made guides to use. There are advantages to this, of course. Most obviously, when you obtain a set of plans developed by someone else, you benefit from their mistakes. They have discovered and eliminated the errors, so you are getting a set of plans that is tried and tested.
Secondly, you save time, if that is important to you. Why re-invent the wheel, after all?
When you obtain your woodworking plans, you need to take certain things into account.
Metric System or Imperial System of Measurement
The US uses the Imperial system of measurement. Tools and woodworking plans created in the US are therefore likely to use Imperial measurement – ie inches, feet, yards, pounds, ounces, and so on. Most other countries in the world use the Metric System of Measurement, meaning lengths based on meters and weights based on kilograms.
You may save yourself some grief, and certainly some inconvenience, if you look for woodworking plans that use the same system of measurement as your tools. Measurements can be converted, of course, and you will find many good conversion sites online. Nevertheless, the need to convert from one system to the other makes it more likely that errors can occur.
Free Woodworking Plans or Paid Woodworking Plans
Who doesn’t like free? We all do. It’s true you can find a good many plans and guides that are freely available online. The flip side of this is that you have no idea about the quality of the plan that you find. Although a good many free woodworking plans are of excellent quality, there are those that are not. You may be challenged to find any sort of plans that are well organized.
Many experienced woodworkers consider quality woodworking plans to be a crucial part of the project, and a good investment. You are, after all, investing a considerable sum of money in lumber and other supplies. Why risk that by starting out with questionable plans?
In fact, if you are looking for specific woodworking plans, such as plans to build chicken coops in keeping with the currently popular trend of raising chickens in cities, then you could be well advised to look for a product designed by people who specialize in that sort of building.
A good reference book is also a handy item to keep in a woodworking shop. Computers are great for many things, but they will not appreciate the amount of dust they will encounter in most well-used workshops. A good reference book is handy when you realize you have forgotten exactly how to make a seldom-used technique, and such a book will last for many years.
Two excellent reference books are the Collins Complete Woodworker’s Manual or The Complete Manual Of Woodworking.
Printing Woodworking Plans
As mentioned earlier, you will find an array of quality woodworking plants available online. As I said earlier, a computer does not thrive in a woodwork shop, so your best bet would be to print the plans out and take the paper copies to your shop. Many of the plans you find are available as Adobe PDF files, which are easy to print and which give you an accurate representation of the image. PDF files end with the three letter extension of .pdf. You can also find plans that are image files. They are likely to end with the three letter extension of .jpg (or .jpeg), .gif, .bmp or .png. The problem with image files is that your computer may rescale the image to print it, meaning you end up with a distorted image.
Photos, Diagrams and Video
Many of the woodworking plans that you come across are photographs with annotations. (hopefully converted to PDF format, as mentioned earlier). In most cases, these annotated photos are sufficient.
Less common, but often more helpful, are plans that include drawings with full dimensions. These plans are seldom available for free.
In recent years, thanks to the proliferation of online video, you can often find woodworking plants available in video format. If you intend to go that route, be sure you have a high speed broadband connection to the Internet. You may also find free woodworking plans on YouTube and other video sharing web sites. The quality of these free videos tends to be low.
