If you want to get into the arts and crafts scene, one of the best ways to do so is through woodworking. Now a lot of people would laugh at this because they would think that woodworking is almost impossible. It’s easy for people to get this impression.
First, they would think that woodworking involves picking up and moving heavy blocks of wood. This is not necessarily through, thankfully. Some types of wood are very dense. They have tons of fiber-packed in a square inch and they weigh a lot-they are also tough to work chip away or process. Thankfully, not all hardwoods are so dense that it seems like you’re working on a piece of metal. Many types of wood are soft or moderately soft that you can come up with lots of awesome designs without having to break your back lifting logs or blocks to work on.
Second, many people think woodworking is just too intricate. They think it would take too much skill. Well, woodworking does require skill but you can scale up your skillset with practice. Using the right tools, your initial foray into this amazing hobby doesn’t have to eat up all your time and attention.
It’s not uncommon for people to object to the steep learning curve of woodworking. Others have an aversion to manual labor, and they believe that this is just all drudgery and involves lugging very heavy pieces of wood from point A to point B.
Thankfully, none of those scenarios are true. The reality is woodworking can help you make six to seven figures year after year. I’m not just talking about people in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Western Europe.
I’m talking about people from all over the world. In Thailand alone, traditional woodworkers ship millions of dollars’ worth of goods throughout the world. The best part, people don’t have to hop on a plane to go there to see their wares.
Instead, people just need to see the website or their samples on Etsy and Pinterest and other online platforms to fall in love with distinctive traditional Thai woodworking. That’s how lucrative woodworking is.
Guess what? You don’t have to be tired. You don’t have to have some sort of ethnic spin. You can just come up with your own unique design. Let’s face it, everybody’s different.
We’re all idiosyncratic at some point. When we tap into our unique vision and how we look at the world and express that uniqueness, we come up with distinct spins on wood products.
It might be different enough to separate us from the rest of the people selling woodworking arts and crafts in the global marketplace. This is just a fancy way of saying that you can make quite a bit of money in woodworking.
Different types of woodworking
It’s very tempting to think that to produce woodworking crafts, you must be the modern-day version of Michelangelo. Basically, you must roll up your sleeves and then take a huge block of lumber.
Take a chisel and draw initial designs on it. Then take forever to just chip away all the wood to come up with this solid, highly polished, amazing piece of wooden art.
Thankfully, that’s not necessarily the case. You can take that route, but you don’t have to necessarily work with your hands 100%. You can use tools. That’s always an option.
You see, if Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, they probably would not be using a hammer and chisel. They probably would be using all sorts of power tools to cut chip away and polish their final work.
All things being equal, there’s a high likelihood that if Michael Angelo was still around today and he was using power tools, he probably would be making many more sculptures.
So, if you’re a big fan of the Pietà or David, you can bet that Michelangelo probably would be creating many more landmarks and earth-shattering pieces of art.
That’s how efficient you could be with equipment. That’s why I suggest that if you’re going to get into the arts and crafts industry involving woodworking, you need the right equipment.
Here are some woodworking tips that might be helpful when starting:
Lathes
Your first stop is a lathe. A lathe is just a spinning device that you put a piece of wood in. When the wood is spinning, you use some other tool to cut the wood. You can shape the wood by cutting it with a chisel, or some sort of knife.
While the lathe is turning the block of wood, you can also apply different types of sandpaper to smooth in it to the right texture. It’s really is amazing what a lathe can help you do. The downside with a lathe, of course, is that you can only produce certain shapes.
It is quite limited at that level. If you’re looking to sculpt out of a block of wood a Michelangelo’s David, you’re going to have a tough time. David is uneven. It has many different angles and different shapes. It breaks many different planes.
In that case, if you want to come up with your own wooden version of David, you will still need power tools, but you wouldn’t use a lathe. You would use power cutters, power grinders, certain drills and of course, sanders because they are localized.
They enable you to get to the right spot very quickly. You also get a maximum range of motion when you’re using these power tools.
How hard is it to learn woodworking?
If you can follow English instructions and you know how to learn from your mistakes, woodworking can be quite simple. It also depends on how simple the finished product is.
If you are just looking for turned wood items like maybe orbs or spherical items, you probably would be able to master that much faster than if you were to initially set out crafting your own modern-day version of Michelangelo’s David, but in solid Ebony, or some other type of smooth wood.
