I sponsor Rex Kreuger on Patreon and have for a couple of years. He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in. I think he has a wide interest and doesn't ever shame people or make out like he is more pure somehow, he is very practical and puts a lot of effort and intelligence into understanding the process for our benefit. Rex is great. Watching his channel and his explanations would help anyone improve as a woodworker regardless of how they hack chunks off of boards.

Another thing Rex does is try to make the tools himself (sometimes this is a disaster, like his lathe, but even then you learn a lot about what makes a lathe the way it is). He is above all practical, and when he says you can make furniture with some cheap tools he isn't claiming it's better or demonstrates more "mastery", it's just a way you can get started cheap. I think if you can make a tool by hand from garbage or whatever, and then you can use that tool to build other things, that is somehow very different from just bragging about how you use hand tools 'because mastery and time'. Buying a plane that was made in a huge industrial factory around the time of WW1 and then using it 100 years later to act cool is very different than being able to demonstrate that you can 'get by' without spending thousands of dollars. How to build the tools and how they work and building those tools by hand from scratch is also interesting in itself.

I think it depends what you mean by 'fine' furniture. He has shown how to make some very simple colonial stools and boxes using simple techniques and hand tools. But more to the point, he is interested specifically in the history of woodworking and understanding how craftsmen were able to make things with the limitations they were under. If you want to help preserve that history I support it, but there isn't anything special about doing woodworking that way, any more than there is anything special in doing anything in an archaic way. By all means if you have more fun doing work by hand then do it by hand, what I take issue with is the claim that it is somehow closer to some ideal and other ways of doing things are not as desirable somehow.

Watching that guy in Australia build up from being naked in the forest to smelting iron tools is incredibly interesting and valuable, but I don't recommend it as a strategy, and there's no shame in not.

Anyway, my point was that a router and a table saw can take the place of hundreds of hand tools. If you look at a cabinet makers tools before power tools you will see dozens and dozens and dozens of planes for all the patterns they will want to cut. Cutting a panel for a cabinet door is amazingly complicated without a table saw and requires many specialized tools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo). Doing the same thing with a router and a table saw requires skill but doesn't require any other tools (maybe some chisels and of course clamps). I'm not saying "there does not exist furniture you can make with 3 tools", I'm saying modern tools take the place of hundreds of hand tools that would cost far more than their modern (more general) replacements. Besides, you can't buy those tools anymore and they haven't been made for over 50 (80?) years, you would have to find antiques. So yes, you can make some stuff, but you can't make a lot of things with hand tools anymore because the tools aren't made and can't be found reliably for any price. Where would you find this pattern again: https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 or these: https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 Even if you cut a pattern in an iron and manage to temper it you would have to cut the same pattern into the wood, I have no idea how you do that or it requires a negative of the iron? Do you cut them at the same time using some kind of jig to keep everything perfectly aligned? It would be interesting to know how they are made, but I don't want one, and I certainly don't want 50. I don't want another one to cut rabbets, and I don't want any of the rest of them. You can collect a few hundred of these things or have a router table and a carbide bit set that costs about $100 and you can buy at any big box store or on amazon.

Good to know! But now we're talking about fundamentally different things. The posts you were replying to had this to say:

>If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools.

>[T]here is something very satisfying of doing a rabbit plane or using a low angle block plane that isn't felt when sanding.

>The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time.

No one is denying that for the actual profession of carpentry, furniture-making, etc. a power tool is a superior option. Those commenters were sharing subjective experiences of satisfaction in learning a manual skill (and there I will have to disagree with you; I think using a hammer and chisel or hand saw to cut a straight edge is more physically difficult and demanding than doing the same with a table saw). A professional cabinet maker is not a hobbyist, and needs those power tools, and in previous eras those many planes, to make a living. But that's not relevant to gatekeeping; for someone just getting started, it would be much easier to buy a small set of hand tools rather than everything that would be required for full automation.

>He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in.

He also is very tepid on the idea of a Saw Stop for a beginning hobbyist [0]. I would argue he rents the commercial building more as a studio space; he only looked into it after quitting "woodworking" as a profession and deciding to go all-in on YouTube. Before that, he was working out of his basement, as I'm sure you know.

https://www.rexkrueger.com/articles/2020/11/30/the-riddle-of...

> The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery.

Doing woodworking with neolithic tools, with 1700's era tools, with WW1 era tools, or with modern power tools satisfies all of these requirements. It takes time, it requires skill and mastery in all cases. OP is saying that woodworking with power tools doesn't qualify in this regard, which is false and I find very annoying and I consider gate-keeping.

I'm not saying Rex is recommending a Saw Stop, I'm saying when he has to get work done he uses whatever tool he thinks is the right one for the job.

> I think using a hammer and chisel or hand saw to cut a straight edge is more physically difficult and demanding than doing the same with a table saw

Well of course it is. Building things from wood isn't the same as the steps to do it. You can chew the wood with your teeth and if you are skilled you will end up with a piece of furniture that will last generations, or you can use a table saw and build something that falls apart in an hour. And vice-versa. Woodworking is building things out of wood. Being better at woodworking means you build better things of the wood, not being more impressive when people watch the video of how it was made, which doesn't exist and nobody wants to see. If you are a professional you also have to worry about building good things efficiently (in time and other resources like materials and wear on tools). If you are not a professional you are free to be inefficient but that just means you are measured entirely by the end result. If one way or the other is a more fun path for you to take then of course do it that way, whether it's power tools or not, but if your goal is just to spend time sweating over wood without worrying about the quality of the final product we fundamentally don't agree on what the point is. Crawling is more physically demanding than walking, and crab walking is harder than crawling, and rolling is harder and more physically demanding than crab walking, and dragging yourself by your teeth without using your arms or legs is harder still. Why do you still walk?

To quote Kenny Powers, “I play real sports. Not trying to be the best at exercising.”

To build something as 'simple' as a stool or a table you have to understand how the wood will move, how the forces will be applied to the piece in years (hopefully decades) of use and how it will wear or weather, how to make it so that wearing doesn't degrade or ruin the piece, how to build it to be strong when resisting those forces but not overbuilding it so that it is needlessly heavy or wastes wood or is ugly as a result. You have to make something that will be attractive and somewhat stylish, at least to someone's idea of what is attractive and stylish. Woodworking isn't cutting a straight cut, it's building furniture that serves it's owner for a very long time and is loved and passed on through time. It's building the things that Rex finds and shows us why they have held up and are still being used 100 or 200 years later, and that people will want to have in their possession at all. Who cares how you cut the boards? How is that even a consideration? Do it how you want, it couldn't matter less and nobody should care (and nobody does).

Okay, much of what you say is relevant to the professional woodworker. But the OP was not discussing the professional woodworker and "gatekeeping" as an accusation is not relevant to the professional woodworker. No one is denying that for the actual industry, for the objective of actually producing accurate, reliable, long-lasting furniture, power tools are the superior choice.

>Who cares how you cut the boards?

Everyone who enjoys the feeling of satisfaction in shaping wood with more limited tools. The kind of hobbyist who does this for fun. People, presumably, like the OP given his other comments. No, they are not "playing real sports" - they're having fun. And again, for that express and specific purpose, recommending hand tools over heavy automation makes sense. The expectation or even recommendation that a hobbyist should invest a thousand dollars into a table saw, router, planer, dust collector, etc. acts as much more serious gatekeeping in that it makes the practice of woodworking seem a lot more formidable than it is.

In addition to all the baseline skills that you pointed out that everyone who shapes wood will have to learn, the OP is also recommending a way of working that makes you interact with the wood more slowly and much more physically than using a power tool. What they said is true; cutting a straight, clean edge with a saw is a more difficult skill than doing the same thing with a power tool. The difficulty, as they explicitly noted, is the entire point. To find a skill that you very obviously don't have and learn to live with your mistakes as you improve.

I'm only going this far because you said, first of all, that "it doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools" and second that "even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes." Neither of those statements are, as far as I can tell, true, and the second especially would strongly discourage a lot of people from starting the hobby. Tell me that I need potentially a thousand dollars' worth of heavy, dangerous equipment and a large dedicated space to use them in, and I will probably conclude that the hobby isn't for me. But a small tote's worth of hand tools and a corner of a room? I can work with that!

Crawling is more difficult than walking though. Why isn't it valuable to build skill as a crawler?

I'm not suggesting you should buy lots of expensive power tools instead of a cheap saw. I'm saying that having to work with a cheap saw is just worse in every way, there's no spiritual insight to be gained, it's just a worse tool you are using because you prefer not to to or can't obtain a better tool. The fact that people fetishize it doesn't make it any different than digging the hole for a pool with a shovel instead of a backhoe, or moving a couch by yourself instead of with a friend. The swimming pool isn't a better pool in the end, and the couch doesn't transform into some kind of special couch.