Reply To: Soooo Slooowww
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I’m new to woodworking also, and I certainly agree with the answers in this thread. You’ll get vastly better with experience. I planed 26 square feet (~2.5 square meters) of hardwood last Saturday from the lumber yard “S4S” to within a hair of perfectly flat, parallel, and square on all 6 sides / edges (I have a problem with over-doing it on the flattening, but I seem to really enjoy planing). The point is that it used to take me a weekend of exhaustive focus just to do a single board.
You get better at absolutely every single thing, and each feeds into the other, so the improvements compound on each other. You get better at selecting wood, so you’ve got a better starting point — no knots, straighter grain, more convenient to go from boards to components. You’ll get better at knowing which pieces of which boards need to become which components, etc.
All the steps become more automatic, efficient, and accurate. You’re planing along, finish a side, check it to confirm what you already know (which is that it’s flat and true) and immediately take out the blade and strop it, replace it, and start on the other side without even missing a word in the lyrics of the song on the radio.
Having said all that, woodworking is supposed to be fun, and some people are going to be very very results-focused, and don’t enjoy the process as much as others. If that’s you, it might be that you’ll never be fast enough with hand tools, and so you should buy some machines. Or maybe you just don’t enjoy some specific things, like say planing, or chopping mortises. So get a thicknesser (“planer”) or a mortiser and only do the parts you enjoy by hand.