Woodworking Tips and Quick Learning

Woodworking tips are one of the fastest ways to absorb information about woodworking. This quick learning method is a secret to building your woodworking knowledge quickly, and with a whole lot less mistakes than the try/fail/learn method. Here is how you do it.

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If you want to learn something quickly, studying tips is a great way to start. Tips are small lessons that another woodworker had to earn through failure.

There is something to be said about learning from your own failures…it stinks. There is also something to be said about learning from the failures of others…it’s much less costly.

When you learn from others, and the mistakes they made, you get the advantage of learning the lesson in a way that is not as damaging.

A lesson can be as simple as buying good wood glue, or as harsh as becoming injured. If you learn this lesson first hand, you gain knowledge. This also happens if you learn the lesson from reading about the mistakes of others. The knowledge still transfers, you just don’t have to go through the damage to attain it.

Where to Find Woodworking Tips

You are already in the best place to find woodworking tips. The internet is a huge place, and it’s filled with people (like me) that love to share what they do. I write a lot of books, but I also share a ton of information for free right here several days a week.

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One of the easiest ways to learn about woodworking through tips is to simply search for woodworking tips in Google. Start with the top few sites and then start reading. If you like a site, bookmark it so you can get back easily.

Another place online is on YouTube. The YouTube community loves posting videos and sharing their creations. Woodworkers are no exception. Chances are, if you want to learn how to make something specific, it’s on YouTube.

Woodworking Tips from Lessons

Lots of woodworking tips are cautionary tales, designed to teach you a lesson without experiencing the pain. The tips that come from lessons are going to be some of the most important, and the ones that will save you time, money, and your body.

I wish I read the tip about not hand holding on the drill press long before I hurt my thumb when a bit caught and pulled a small piece from my hand. It may seem like common sense to some people, but when you are new, you don’t really know what you can’t do.

Unfortunately, without these kinds of lessons, you have to earn your stripes and learn from failure. Thankfully, woodworkers that do make mistakes from time to time also like to share the experience to help protect others. You will see many woodworkers sharing successes, but you will also see many sharing failures to help warn others before they do the same thing.

Woodworking Tips to Teach

Other woodworking tips are more for teaching you about something. These can be tool specific, project specific, or just a general “measure twice and cut once” kind of thing. Either way, they can build up your knowledge base quickly.

In the beginning, you will not have a lot of experience to draw from. A lot of woodworking is based in pulling from the past, and looking for similar things that worked before. When you find one, you use it for the current project, and it helps you become successful.

Until you build up that base, reading tips and learning through the experiments of others can start creating that base. Start with tips about your project, and about the tools that you are using. This is important because you will start learning things that you can apply right away.