This is 10 Expert Reasons to Join a Woodworking Forum. In this post, I’ll show you all the great reasons to join a woodworking forum and become a part of a rich community that is bigger than yourself. It’s no fun to do it alone, and thankfully you don’t have to. Enjoy.

Woodworking Forums

There are many thriving woodworking forums online, and for the majority of them it’s as easy to join as just signing up. These are fantastic groups of people that all share a common love of woodworking.

Thanks to the internet, the world has gotten a lot smaller. In the past, it would have been nearly impossible to coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to be able to communicate together and share their hobbies and ideas.

Now, thanks to the world wide web, you can share ideas with people on the other side of the world, and they can share ideas with you. It’s a fantastic feeling to be a part of such a community, and your woodworking skills will improve as a result.

Here are the reasons why you should join the woodworking forum online, and I’ll go into each one of them in detail farther down in the post:

• Meet Other Woodworkers
• Learn New Techniques
• Learn from the Mistakes of Others
• Face to Face Opportunities and Events
• You Can Ask Questions and Get Help
• Find New Types of Woodworking to Try
• Be Part of a Woodworking Community
• Read the Archives to Learn Fast
• Posting Pictures to Inspire Other Beginners
• Contributing to the Group

If you are already sold, you can Join Our Q&A Woodworking Forum Right Here.

Meet Other Woodworkers

The most significant advantage to joining a woodworking forum is the fact that you will meet other woodworkers in the process. With many hobbies, it can be a challenge to find like-minded people to talk to.

Woodworking is no different, and you can almost feel like an island, all by yourself. This isn’t a good way of learning about anything, so joining a forum can help fix at least that part of the learning process for you.

Meeting people means learning new ideas. It also means hearing different opinions, and different ways of doing things. It’s finding someone to talk to you when you have a question, and benefiting from in the knowledge of the community.

The people is what really makes the difference. When you join a forum, do your best to get to know the people as fast as you can. They are truly the ones that understand the creativity and the overall scope of the group.

See Also: A Beginners Guide to Woodworking

Learn New Techniques

A forum is great for learning new tricks as a group. When you are working by yourself, you’re only really as good as what you already know. If you’re a beginner, then you don’t really know very much.

When you join a woodworking forum, and start interacting with the different members, you’ll start to pick up different ways of doing things. These new techniques will eventually become part of your normal process, and you may even improve them.

It’s through seeing other people’s interpretations of the same process that you and up developing your own process. We all think of things a little differently. Seeing that difference can be a big change for you and your abilities.

See Also: Woodworking Tips and Quick Learning

Learn from the Mistakes of Others

Another fun thing about a woodworking forum is that people enjoy sharing their successes, but they also enjoy sharing their failures. In general, failures tend to have a little bit more humor to them, and they make for great learning tools.

Successes are great, but when it comes to learning, failure is the absolute best teacher. Hopefully you never have any type of failure the costs you an injury, but there are times when this teaches a lesson too.

People are going to share quite a bit of their mistakes with you, and as a new woodworker you might not know where all of the pitfalls are. Seeing these mistakes will help you avoid them yourself, and they can save you money, and keep you safe.

The problem with being new is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Until certain things are demonstrated either for you or to you, you just don’t know where all the dangers are. Learning from the mistakes of others can help ease that pain a little bit.

See Also: Woodworking Mistakes and Why They Are Good For You

Face to Face Opportunities and Events

Not all forums do this, but some forums will offer face-to-face interaction and opportunities to do things in real life as a group. This is where they cross the boundaries into what would be considered more of a woodworking club or organization.

In cases like this, you may find that you have an opportunity to join the group live and in person for some sort of gathering. This might be an educational opportunity, or it might just be a social get together.

In many cases, there will be people that demonstrate different woodworking techniques, and they usually meet in a public place. This can be a lot of fun, because you’ll get to put a face to a lot of the names that you’ve been working with online.

See Also: 19 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Woodworking

You Can Ask Questions and Get Help

This is quite possibly one of the best reasons to join a woodworking form. When you are new, and you feel like you’re all by yourself, sometimes all you really need is able to ask somebody a question.

All the books in the world, and the videos, and the tutorials, they just don’t compete with being able to ask somebody who knows what they’re doing a simple question. It can take hours of research and boil it down to seconds.

When you are part of the woodworking forum, you have the ability to ask somebody a question when you get stuck. This can be a huge burden lifter, because you’ll be able to move forward faster when you get information faster.

If you get stuck, you can Ask Me a Question and I would love to help you.

Find New Types of Woodworking to Try

Woodworking is such a vast hobby. Not only is each technique in woodworking very deep, but the amount of techniques and types of woodworking makes the craft very wide as well. With so much to do, you’ll never see the end of it.

This also works the opposite way too. With so much you can possibly do, you might not ever experience all of it. If you don’t know something exists, you don’t have an opportunity to figure out whether you like it or not.

With a forum, you may run into individuals that make projects that you absolutely love. In a case like this, you may never have been exposed to that project had you not been a part of the forum.

Especially if you find something that you really like, it would be a terrible shame to have gone your entire life without stumbling upon that project. An online forum is a perfect place for sharing things, so you are sure to be exposed to quite a bit.

This is where the inspirational side of a group comes into play. Sometimes just seeing the right project, or reading the right words can make all of the difference. It can make you super excited about trying something, and that’s awesome.

See Also: 11 Great Ways to Find Woodworking Inspiration

Be Part of a Woodworking Community

There’s also something to be said about being part of the community. When you are an individual, you are only so big. When you’re part of the community, you become a segment of something much larger than yourself.

With community also comes identity. After a while, once you’re invested in your forum, and you’ve helped enough people, you’ll feel an affinity towards the group. You’ll actually care for the individual members, especially those who you interact with most.

It will make you feel great, and it can also help you see that you’re not alone. Woodworking is pretty popular, but it’s still difficult to find people to socialize with that have the same hobby. A forum solves a lot of that.

See Also: A Woodworking Notebook

Read the Archives to Learn Fast

I talked about this before, but one of the secrets of a well run forum is the archives. This is where all of the past conversations, questions, and other interactions between the members are stored. It is a pot of gold.

Especially as a beginner, if you just read through the archives, you will learn more in a few hours than you probably learned in the last few months. It’s an information explosion, and its all from real people just like you.

Another thing that it will do is expose you to the common threads that are repeatedly posted and subjects that have already been covered thoroughly. This will help you avoid the mistake of asking a question that’s been asked 50 times before.

I normally recommend that newer members spend at least a few hours combing through the archives to get a sense of what they can learn from the forum before they begin posting. It’ll give you a good idea with the group is about, and that’s super helpful.

See Also: 9 Important Things to Put In Your Woodworking Notebook

Posting Pictures to Inspire Other Beginners

After you join the form, it’s important to share your work and your knowledge with the group. Even if you are a beginner, there are still people in the group that you can help, and there is nothing wrong with sharing.

Don’t be afraid to share some of your projects, some of your victories, and some of your mistakes. When you do, you’ll enrich the experience of all of the other people on the forum, and also help people.

It may not be super apparent to you as a beginner that you could help anybody. However, you can. There are always people that are in different places in their journey, and there are bound to be people behind you that can benefit from your knowledge.

See Also: 50 Awesome Reasons to be a Woodworker

Contributing to the Group

When you contribute to a group like this, it almost puts you in a position where you have to think and act more like a teacher than a student. This is advantageous for a number of reasons, the primary being that it elevates your abilities.

When you have to explain something, or show something, you have to understand it well enough to present the information in a positive way. As you’re creating a post, you’ll naturally do what you need to fill in the information gaps to help make more sense.

When you do this, you’ll actually be learning more about your subject. Just explaining things helps your brain organize them, and you’ll learn even more as well. Sharing not only elevates the people who read your posts, but it elevates you too.

See Also: 29 Ways to Maximize Your Woodworking Shop Layout

Your Action Assignment

Now that you know these 10 awesome reasons for joining a woodworking forum online, it’s time to head over to the computer and take action. Go find yourself an awesome woodworking forum, and join it.

I have my own woodworking a forum for this website. Though we are new, we are definitely excited to be here. You are welcome to join of course, and we all look forward to learning from each other.

If you have any questions on joining a woodworking forum, please post a question and I’ll be glad to answer them. Happy building.

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