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Whether you're making fine furniture or decorative birdhouses, there's a process in woodworking
that you go through on each of the machines to get the lumber that you're using into the
shape that you need.
And, that could involve different cutting operations. Boring operations with the drill.
Material removal with a router to create joinery. And all these machines do have a specific
job that they do very well.
Now, some of the tools overlap and can do the same job. And it's your job as a woodworker
to figure out which one is the better one for the job at hand.
But, this is a quick overview. We'll look at the main cutting tools first.
Usually, in a wood shop, you'll have a table saw. That's the workhorse of the shop, in
my opinion. You can do pretty much anything on the table saw. Making straight cuts, rip
cutting, using the dado set. Very versatile tool.
You also might have access to a chop saw. Which is also, can be a miter saw. So, you
can do angle cuts in addition to just basic chopping.
And then, you'll have a band saw. A band saw is good for a number of things. It's, of course,
good for doing curved cuts. But you can also put wide blades on it and resaw wood, creating
panels for book matching and other purposes. You an even create veneer on a band saw.
In addition to all those cutting tools we've got, usually, you know, most shops will have
routers and a router table. Those are used for all variety of tasks. You can do edge
profiling, creating decorative molding type appearance on wood. You can also do joinery,
creating dovetails, slots and dados.
And then, you also will have tools like a drill press. Which are really dedicated to
just boring holes in wood. But, they can also be used to create different types of joinerys,
such as moritises.
So, all of these tools function in, as a group, you go from one to the other in your project
and to get your job done.
Now, in addition to those basic tools, if you're working with rough lumber, you'll also
need milling machines. And that's some of the other tools we have in our shop.
We have a jointer and a planer. And the surface planer flattens and smooths boards. Gets it
down to a certain thickness. The jointer will also function to flatten the faces of boards
and also square off edges.
So, if you're working with rough lumber those tools are also a must.