Reasons Why You Need Woodwork
Woodwork Essentials For Your Everyday Needs
Woodwork is perhaps one of the skills that not many people have. It’s a great essential skill to have as it brings many benefits to you. With woodworking skills, you are able to create many wood-related projects.
Woodworking: A Background
Classes in the “industrial arts” were first introduced in Eurocentric schools in the 1880s. For that next century, taking a course in woodworking was a common educational rite of passage for young men.
Then several decades ago, woodwork classes began to be removed from school curriculums. With the reduction in educational funding, and increasing emphasis on standardized testing, schools began to reject electives such as woodworking. They begin to introduce stricter graduation requirements. At the same time, they also focus more on college preparation academics and the subjects needed for passing state exams.
There weren’t enough money or time to maintain tools and sawdust-filled workshops. Due to these issues, one by one school districts dropped their woodworking (and similar crafting) classes. They figured that students who wished to pursue trade skills can do so later at a vocational college.
This demise of woodwork classes is quite unfortunate. They were never really about preparing students for trade employment. Rather that they taught all men manual skills that they can use and enjoy throughout their lives. This is regardless whether if they became a carpenter or a doctor. They were considered part of becoming a well-traded man – one who is able to use both his hands and his mind.
Putting Woodworking Skills In The Back Seat
Debatably the industrial arts class such that is most missed is woodworking. Learning how to work with wood is not only useful, allowing you to make and fix things around your home. At the same time, it also allows you to satisfyingly connect with a long history of craftsmanship.
Woodworking was one of the earliest skills the human race developed. The pre-industrial world was, for the most part, made of wood. For so many years, all men had at least an elementary understanding of how to shape and manipulate it. Even up until the last 50 to 100 years, tradesmen and professionals alike had the confidence to be able to build wooden furniture for their family.
The woodwork in Present-Day Use
In the present day, in our age of plastic and factories, woodworking has changed from a common necessary skill into something that is enigmatic. Most 21st-century consumers are used to driving to huge stores to pick up another mass-produced replacement when their wooden furniture breaks. Any person today that can walk up to a lumber pile with saw and plane to shape a beautiful and enduring replacement is seen as a “true craftsman”.
Useful Woodwork Tips
If you are ever interested in woodworking or improving your woodworking skills, here are some useful tips for you. We can assure you that you will find these invaluable for you in the long run. There are so many woodwork tips out there, so we have gathered some that are the best (by our opinions).
1. Use the best tools for the job
When you are doing a new woodworking project, it’s definitely great to use the best tools for the job. You wouldn’t want to use the wrong tools for the job, will you? Not forgetting to mention that using the wrong tools may lead to damaging long-term effect of your project.
Using the wrong tools can also mean lazy work. We’d advise against that, and for you to use the correct tools.
2. Practise a lot
By a lot, we mean a lot. As the cliched saying goes – practice makes perfect. Woodworking may or may not be a complicated skill to some people. Regardless of its complicacy, it’s always great to keep practising for the better. If you have already mastered one part of woodworking, move on to the next part. When you have completed “mastering all parts of woodworking”, it’s always great to re-visit old sections and parts of woodworking.
Always fine-tune and rework your skills for improvement. Skills can rust when you didn’t use it for a very long time.
3. Planning is especially imperative
Before anyone starts on their projects, it’s advisable that they come up with a plan first. Like a blueprint of sorts. When you have completed the first draft, always improve it for the better. First drafts rarely are perfect. Only a few planners can get the perfect first draft. However, if you are not the kind of person who can produce the perfect first draft, you will have to keep planning until you get it right.
Conclusion
Woodworking is an especially important skill in the present day. It may be a job that will be automated in the coming years. However, there are still needs for bespoke woodwork people for bespoke woodwork projects. Woodworking may not be as mystical and mysterious as some people think it to be. It just so happens that you don’t find a lot of woodwork people around anymore.
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