Home depot or Lowes really only carry builder grade stuff .... pine construction lumber and plywood with a very small selection of red oak & cedar. Not the kinda stuff you are going to be making furniture , cutting boards or functional art with. Quite often I source lumber from a guy who cuts down trees & sells firewood for a living , I go walk his lot and find logs I like , take them home and run them thru the bandsaw , then the jointer & planer. He usually has a large supply of oak , pecan & maple as well as the occasional mulberry or some other native hardwood so I get them for dirt cheap. For more exotic woods , I go to the places I linked earlier in the thread. Walnut & Olive are probably my two favorites to work with.
since it was bumped here is some stuff i made in the last couple years. I've been experimenting with mixing wood/metal. no fancy tools; not even a table saw. you still make decent stuff with patience and practice. obviously better tools are needed if you want to sell stuff or save a lot of time. coffee table - live edge wood with concrete in the middle. fabricated the base 3" flat bar. first foray into metal work. coffee table 2 - i got the butcher block from work for free so made another table to sell. havent sold it yet lol. but my welding got better. TV stand - pain in the ass making this without a table saw but leg style matches the coffee table Entry table - live edge wood piece i made for my sister. fabricated the base from roundbar. shoe bench - same style just red wood from home depot and fabricated the base from roundbar to make a shoe holder for the garage. plan to make some bookshelves or nightstands next. if you want to try just do it. pick cheap material and plan on making mistakes.
Would love some advice on a project. I've built a cabinet with an unattached top and a TV mounted to a remote controlled lift inside. I'm rethinking how I want the top to look/function. At this point, I really don't want to go back to Lowes to get another 4x8 sheet from the very top rack -- without a truck of my own. DON'T EVEN SAY IT -- iykyk. Can't decide how I want to cover the sandwiched 2x4/plywood/trim that is exposed when the TV is up. Also, when the top is up, I don't want to look into the giant void of the cabinet. I want some of that unnecessary gap to be covered. The top still has to cover the ENTIRE cabinet though when it goes down -- to keep out water. What material should I use to make a nice surface when the TV is up. Great...can't seem to upload these pics : /
Just picked up one last plywood sheet and some crown trim for the top of the box. Looking forward to using this on the patio but looking forward to rebuilding it in the future even more. So many mistakes, bad cuts, miscalculations. I’ve found woodworking to be like golf. Got to have some patience. Thinking about what you’re doing and set up your next shot/cut.
Any recommendations on affordable jointers? I just purchased a Dewalt 3 blade 12.5 in planer. Grizzly has a 6 in jointer for 395 and an 8 in for 495 but the 8 is on back order. Anyone have recommendations for good jointers? I hear Wen isn’t bad but if you have an issue they have virtually no customer support.
Steel City which turned into Cutech which turned into Wahuda are popular for their 8" spiral benchtop jointers. Just keep in mind that benchtops will only be good for boards 4' and shorter. I still haven't added a jointer to my tool collection yet. You can find 6" x 6' jointers used around $300-500.
That’s good to know. I haven’t really done any “fine woodworking” projects. I want to make some cutting boards. But also want to eventually get into some furniture in the future. Is it only good for 4 ft boards bc of feeder? Could I build an extension outfeed table like I did for my table saw?
Yeah, the length is limited because of the jointer's bed length. A rough estimate for full board length is to double the length of the jointer's bed length (infeed and outfeed). You need proper support while feeding the board through the blades to get a straight face/edge. Building infeed/outfeed extensions can help a bit, but that's hard to calibrate on a benchtop jointer.
Spent the last several days really trying to organize my garage and I built a rolling lumber storage cart, as well as some heavy duty slats for full boards on the wall. I have SO much 2x4 off cuts of mostly #2 prime, as well as several 2x6-2x12 cuts. I eventually want to get into making butcher blocks and cutting boards for fun/friends and family. Can I practice by making one out of scrap 2x4 with just a job site table saw and a 13 inch planer? I don’t intend to use these for cutting boards, I’d like to make a 4 foot by 3 foot counter top to put on top of the washer/dryer so fold laundry on. can this be done or is pine too soft?
Pine is perfectly fine for a folding station countertop. You could make a sled to use your thickness planer as a jointer and then run through the other side without the sled. Then cut your sides. For the glue up if it is decently deep you could do it in two sections first and then one final glue to join the sections. As the pine ages it will only get more dense and hard as it oxidizes. I’ve made multiple workbenches with laminated SYP tops and they have held up to chopping mortises and other traditional hand tool joinery.
thx. I’ll look for YouTube vids on planer sleds. I bought it months ago and haven’t taken it out of box bc garage was such a mess. I was going to make some table saw sleds this week. Glue up face grain?
I've made a few endgrain boards out of pine / 2x4's. They come out great .... Judt don't use treated lumber. I can't get an image to load into this damn thing. Here's a link to a pine board I made a while back (Instagram) - Link
