Woodworking 101: Basic Power Tools You Should Own

If you’ve always wanted to start woodworking, I completely understand the feeling. This activity is both relaxing and fun and allows you to materialize your creative ideas into functional pieces. The best way to begin with woodworking is to start small, gradually accumulating the tools you need. Buying your equipment piece by piece is also a more affordable way to assemble your working environment, since tools are quite expensive. If you go buying head first, you might end up with equipment costing you thousands of dollars which you later won’t even use. However, there are a few power tools you most certainly should not go with out and they should be on the top of your list.

Circular Saw

Most beginner woodworkers tend to shy away from buying a circular saw, thinking that’s it’s mainly used for carpentry. Opposed to other types of saws, the circular one is perhaps the most versatile and easy to use. It’s also incredibly lightweight fitting perfectly in your hands. When you use it with a clamp-on straight edge, it can be just as precise as the bulky table saw and can easily carry out tasks such as cutting plywood, fiberboard or other sheet goods. As you get started, cutting pieces of wood would be your first preoccupation, therefore a circular saw should be one of the first power tools you decide to purchase.

Power Drill

Of course, woodworking is all about assembling different pieces of wood into a functional and attractive whole. If you are going to use nails to create a jewellery box for instance, you will need a power drill. There are two types of drills – corded and cordless. The cordless drill is portable and suitable for working outside in your garden weather permitted, but the corded version is more powerful and for some reason more affordable. Moreover, corded power drills are more versatile with the option to choose between different chuck sizes such as 13 mm or 88 mm, a keyed or a keyless chuck, hammer drill or straight and other features.

Nail Gun

After you’re done drilling holes into the wood, you’d need a strong nail gun to securely fasten the different parts together. For this purpose you might need nails, brads or staples, depending on what your end goal is. There are types of nail guns that work only with nails, and then there are some that use both brads and staples. When shopping for these power tools, remember to look for models that can work with both plastic and wire collated nails, so that you can always use the right nail for any job. A touch-strike security system in a nail gun is not only safer for the operator, but also for everyone around him, because it means there will be no rouge nail accidentally flying through the air.

Sander

A sander is another must have tool you should equip your woodworking shed with. It can smooth out the surface of your wooden creations, because you wouldn’t want anyone to get a splinter. Moreover, it prepares the wood for finishing and painting. Concerning sanders, there are cheap options like palm sanders which use pain sandpaper cut into one-fourth sections. But when wood is treated with this type of a sander, there’s usually a noticeable pattern which can ruin the smooth look of the wood. To avoid this, you can use an orbital sander which uses a random sanding motion that leaves the wood free of any sanding marks and helps preserve it’s natural beauty.