So I have a garage, a few (very few) hand tools and a working (UK Level 2) knowledge of bench joinery.
How the frick do I make it? I need an income and this is all I know, I am not going into coming like every other millennial. My gf who's fairly artistic suggested wood and resin chopping boards to begin with
easiest road to millions is pallets, baby.
Yeah I hear that a lot but I assumed it was just a meme
*coding fml
bump pls advice guys
Advice? Quit bumping this idiot thread on a slow board at 6am where guys actually go to work, use the catalogue, go hit up the woodworking general.
Find a carpenter or a company that makes stuff with wood such as a bedroom fitters.
Get a job as a skivvy.
Demonstrate that you aren't moronic.
Be competent.
Get them to put you through the NVQ's.
palletwood israelite here.
a lot of men have asked this question already. the short answer is you don't. making the type of money you can live off of--exclusively from woodworking--is extremely difficult. lets ramble for a minute.
i recently felt the old man itch, and got into it over the past year. it's been extremely enjoyable but you need to put an enormous amount of energy, and time into it. some people will tell you that money is the next thing required but if you're smart you can pick up old tools for cheap, give them some maintenance and they'll serve just as good as most new shit.
so lets assume you've acquired some tools that will cut semi straight and now you want to chip some wood. but you're an idiot and buying a slab of expensive wood is a moronic idea because you'll just frick it up. next best thing? pallets. they're free and if you can process them you'll end up with something you can frick around with guilt free. fricked it up? frick it, to the scrap box. onto the next piece.
this is the ONLY way you will get better. until you know how your tools act, how the type of wood you have will behave, and a semi-decent understanding of the best known methods, you will frick up and waste wood. you can read all the books in those /wwg/ threads, but until you make a shitload of stupid mistakes, and waste a frickton of boards, you won't know shit
another piece of advice; watch older men who have already done their time. monkey see, monkey do. you will gain a huge amount of knowledge from bob the career carpenter who is 65 and has already been cutting wood for decades.
alright. that's it. now go get some free wood and make something. don't worry about making it perfect. just do it. when you figure out how to do it reliably, then you can move onto the next step of making it a living.
It's an expensive hobby. You're not going to make a living doing this, especially given your background and equipment.
The trick to maximizing profits is to cut on the number of operations, make jigs and process as many at a time that you can. If you are gluing boards together, make several at a time and use a longer clamp. Sandwich between two 2x4 to prevent collapsing. If you need to drill a hole into a piece, try stacking 5 or 6 of them and drill through a bunch at the same time. You will understand that errors can be costly so you have to strike a balance. Try to do risky operations like drilling and sawing first, so if you frick up a piece you won't have spent as much time as if you routered and cut mortises and stuff.
Start out small, buy a hand plane .
Go to a garage sale buy a broken hammer, use a spike shave and learn how to replace the handle.
Then use the hand plane and build a box with rabbets to store your fixed hammer in.
Rinse repeat buy old tools, build box with nothing but hand plane
You don't go into a hobby to make money, that's a job. You inprove at a hobby because it's something you enjoy. That could be the craft, learning everything there is to know about small details, or taking things in a new direction like look at Mathias's pantorouter.
If you find a niche that generates income then keep it on as much of the downlow as you can and rifle out product like a sweatshop. Else you have to sink huge effort and artistry into expensive pieces. I don't see build and hope income as a solid foundation.