Has anyone found any good non-American-continent woodworking YouTube channels?
Nothing against the Americans/Canadians etc, but this is one area where regional differences make a pretty huge difference in terms of wood and products available. If, like me, you're in the UK and looking for vaguely specific details regarding woodwork online, you're going to find an awful lot of American content and very little local stuff (a blog opportunity there perhaps).
A good recent example of this effect for me was when I was looking up pine stains. You will find constant references to something called "pre-stain conditioner" online; this basically doesn't exist in the UK. Everyone online is insistent that you need it, and you can just about buy it here (it's expensive), but it turns out it's pretty irrelevant. In the UK our pine is typically a different variety, and so therefore has a different composition, and our terminology is different here too; wood stain in the UK is, I think, "wood dye" in the USA? Please correct me if you know better :)
Paul Sellers have moved back to the UK. In addition to his website [0] and blog there's plenty in his YouTube channel.
And my feeling is that Europeans in general don't insist on staining everything like Americans do. Or maybe it's just us in Scandinavia that actually think the bright natural color of birch, but even pine, is quite beautiful.
The one thing I find (as a UK woodworker) when watching US or Canadian channels is (a) they all seem to have massive workshops, like size-of-a-barn massive, and (b) they have machines for everything. I could not tackle many of the projects they do because of limited space, which restricts the machines I can accommodate.
Paul Sellers definitely understands that many UK woodworkers are in their garage or garden shed and keeps that in mind for his projects, and uses predominantly hand tools. I'm not saying I don't like the North American channels, and Matthias is a true hacker as well as a woodworker, but it's a different world.
Just to add my own recommendation: Alain Vaillancourt does some excellent stuff, from his vast workshop located somewhere in the New World:
You might like Rex Kruger's channel. He has a large shop and lots of machines, but he mainly focuses on hand tools and doing things cheaply/diy when it comes to his YouTube content. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj4SLNED1DiNPHComZTCbzw
No affiliation. I just found him a couple weeks ago and have been really enjoying it.
It's a guy in South Africa with a small workshop. The main point of his videos is designing space-saving tool mounts and storage for his shop. He uses cheap tools—and lots of plywood—to make some clever stuff.
It's not a channel for seeing furniture made, but it's interesting nonetheless.
I learnt to carve spoons from a few Swedish guys so I have a lot of love for a simple linseed-oil finish :) Can't get any nice, bright, linseed-oil paint in the UK though, which is a bit of a bummer.
I ended up using stain for this current project as the room called for dark wood, but the only two real-wood options for skirting boards in the UK are pine or oak, which are both light woods, so I opted to stain pine for it.
And thank you! Someone at work mentioned his videos recently and I completely forgot the name.
+1 for Paul Sellers. He's a bunch of content on finishing too and I've just tried his combo of shellac + beeswax to finish pine and it works fantastically and is cheap.
Stain is a tool like any other. It can be used garishly and tastelessly or it can be used to complement a piece. See also: carvings, inlay, brasses, or pretty much anything else used for anything beyond holding the piece together.
It is. From a fine woodworking perspective, however, it very often runs counter to purpose when the goal is to take advantage of the natural beauty inherent in the medium.
I am super confused right now. I tried to be very careful in my wording to avoid being hyperbolic or all inclusive. Am I giving that impression at all?
Eh, I dunno. I don't take issue with your reply. I suspect some people might read "from a fine woodworking perspective" as snobbery or a no-true-Scotsman that I'm not seeing?
From my standpoint as a woodworker, everybody's money's equally green and if somebody wants a piece stained something garish, it doesn't cost me any more than if they want it in a natural color. Although, as a mentor of mine once said: "You don't have to sign everything you build".
I'll let you know if that perspective changes if I ever have so much work coming in that I have to turn jobs down :-)
I watch a ton of woodworking channels on youtube, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen anyone use prestain conditioner. If anything, they all seem to love single coat stains.
There's quite a lot of non-US/CA woodworking channels out there, though.
Paska Makes, Australia
Woodshop Junkies, South Africa
Paoson Woodworking, Spain
JSK-koubou, Japan
Laura Kampf, Germany
Crimson Guitars, UK (Mostly luthier projects, but Ben does some crazy stuff that I think woodworkers could find inspirational in general)
Dekay's Crafts, Korea
Get Hands Dirty, Portugal
Resin Timber, Lithuania
I've seen plenty of others - these are just some of the ones that I subscribe to.
Damn that man for working so incredibly neat and tidy. No stains on his virginal birch-ply, ever — not even a smudge. Sawdust seems to bend to his will, and all cuts and holes drilled are surely accurate to the micrometer.
His workspace is as clean as an operating theatre.
You can make your own wood conditioner by mixing 70% varnish with 30% mineral spirits or a 60/40 of Denatured alcohol and shellac.
You only need a conditioner if you are staining a soft, sap wood such as American yellow pine. We have a pine here called slash pine that is similar in properties to your pine, but it is virtually extinct. It does not need pre-stain conditioning because it is a harder pine, and it was mostly harvested from old growth forests.
Point being it is really not, the specific wood, it is the characteristics of the wood, mainly hardness, porousness, sapling harvest or heartwood harvest and oiliness.
If you have a soft, pours, sap wood harvested, with little oil content it is going to need conditioning. If you have something like Ipe, hard as a rock, oily and a tight grain, you will not need it and most likely need a dye to actually stain it.
+1 for Ishitani and Pask, and thanks for the other links. If we're talking about boat-builders, don't forget Louis Sauzedde, who seems recently to have returned from a long hiatus:
Regarding finishes, I highly, highly recommend the book Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner. Flexner applies a very no-nonsense scientific approach which greatly demystifies the process. For example he explains what that pre-stain conditioner actually is (chemically), what it achieves (with photos), and exactly when you would want to use it. There is a lot of marketing and folklore around wood finishing which makes it a lot more confusing than it is, and this book helps cut through all of that.
The other transatlantic issue I notice is space. North American content tends to assume "shop" space on a scale that's much less likely to be available to the average UK person.
oh for sure. "here is my shop space, some spare room" thats the size of my entire house. And on the table top gaming front, very envious of US households i see with their similarly sized D&D room with a floor space that rivals my entire ground floor.
"I love wandering around my local wood yard and I've just come back with these lovely panels for making a jewellery box, and this great piece of yew I'm going to turn into a longbow."
Every sawmill/timber merchant/whatever near me basically sells fences and roof trusses.
This is largely the case in the US as well. Most lumber yards principally sell building materials (dimensional lumber, plywood, and other "engineered wood products"). Finding lumber other than dimensional SPF for one of a small handful of species already milled (but poorly) usually requires a trip to a specialist vendor.
For example: Home Depot (which is a national chain of home improvement stores) generally stocks pine, red oak, some yellow poplar (which is not actually a poplar, but I digress), and sometimes something they'll call mahogany (which almost certainly isn't Swietenia anything) . That is about as good as you'll find unless you go somewhere that specializes in hardwood lumber. Unfortunately, some of those don't do retail sales.
For US readers in the northeast, Highland Hardwoods and Northland Forest Products both do retail sales. Northland is more focused on North American wood, though they stock FSC certified mahogany. They're about 10 minutes from each other about an hour and 15 minutes from Boston (usual traffic caveats apply), where I suspect a lot of people from HN at this time are located.
I have to search for 'exotic lumber' to find places selling anything more than construction grade stuff. Otherwise, yeah, all dimensional lumber, plywood, mdf, etc.
>And the wood supply is always so cheap and plentiful!
On the other hand, I always see Europeans complaining that American houses are made out of wood and aren't designed to last like good concrete or brick European houses... Well now you know why. No need to double the cost of materials for most houses.
I wanted to make a very basic cabinet for my bathroom. It basically required two long planks, yet the price of these two planks was more than buying a ready made cabinet from ikea.
One thing to keep in mind is that wood is more expensive the larger it is. Learning to assemble large panels from smaller scrap -- either decoratively with rails holding smaller panels or by just gluing everything together into one big flat panel -- can let you trade time for money in your projects.
Smaller pieces will typically cost less at the lumber yard, and it also makes it easier to work with salvaged wood -- you no longer need to find big pieces to salvage, you can salvage a lot of little pieces and build them up.
Also note that salvage isn't just dumpster diving -- at auctions and sales you can find large things people made for particular purposes that no one wants, and break them down for raw materials. I've picked up a couple hundred dollars of dimensional lumber for a $5 bid before because it was in the form of a 9 foot tall viewing platform for refereeing volleyball games.
That should clue you in as to how cheap the panels ikea uses. If you want to be part of the throw away culture buy ikea. If you want it to be usable for the next 300 years spend the money on real wood.
The price of walnut here in the UK right now is insaaaane. I think France can often have it for a decent price but you really have to know a guy who knows a guy who seems to have his own mill.
If anyone is saying cocobolo is cheap here in the US, they must be making a lot more money than I am, and I can afford a Sawstop and Festool workshop. I've got 7-8 shops where I can buy exotic wood locally, and none of them stock it on a regular basis. Online, about the cheapest I can find it for is $50/board foot, which is way outside of my budget for use in any real quantity.
I ended up doing all the skirting boards for my office spread between both the office itself and the room next door, just to have enough space :D
I do actually have that rare privilege of having a "workshop" space (a solid shed), but as I'm in Wales it is of course up some extremely slippery stone steps, currently leaking quite dramatically, and full of crap I've chucked out of the house but can't take to the tip during lockdown measures.
I've stained wood (USA) for decades and never used a pre-stain conditioner. This is the first I've heard of it. One article says:
"A wood conditioner is basically a wood finish reduced to a very thin consistency."
Sounds like a money-making product to use on very porous wood that has water-damage (rotted?) or has been repeatedly treated with solvents, leaving only weak wood fibers. I usually replace such wood.
There are also products for "rejuvenating" rotted wood:
I've used pre-stain conditioner when applying a dark oil-based stain to pine. It does seem to help even out the finish with soft woods. It is pretty useless on harder woods though, and since I don't typically use pine or stain I have maybe used it once or twice.
I've actually done some side by side tests with stains using conditioner vs not. I wouldn't call it necessary by any means. Depends on the stain and the wood but sometimes I did feel the result was noticeably better, sometimes I couldn't tell the difference.
Parent commenter might specifically be talking about yellow/white pine, which is notorious for splotchy staining and yellowing over time, which conditioner can mitigate a bit.
If you're working with oaks or hardwoods, I agree with you.
I share your pains. That an the fact that a lot of tools here (portugal) cost twice as much as they cost in the US and we have way lower wages.
For finishes I just realized I have to do my own offline R&D the to learn what works well with the brands I have here. Started doing my own wipe on poly (it's harder than it looks when most brands don't even refer the finish is polyurethane). Also my finishing techniques tend to be a lot slower than what you see on youtube, which I guess makes sense, since I'm not on a schedule, don't need to be profitable but want my pieces to look as good as possible.
Which is a shame really, as the sustainability of it is quite a merit. I opted to use it for all the wood in my office as I could get a finish I was happy with, whilst also not spending an absolute fortune on wood (posh woods are very expensive in the UK right now). Unfinished, as I'm redoing the door architrave soon, but here's a photo for reference: https://i.imgur.com/OHzUPfb.jpg
Our options here generally seem to be pine or oak, from normal stores. At more specialist stores you might be able to pick up some stuff like sycamore and walnut, but it's a bit hit-and-miss as to what dimensions are available.
Is the pine you use soft? Southern Pine is too soft for a desk or most parts of an office. You could write on it and the letters would be visible in the wood.
It’s great for framing but I’ve been hesitant to use it for my beginner woodworking stuff.
A blotter/desk pad is a great solution to this problem. I built my wife a pandemic desk, and pine was what I could get locally. I have no illusions that it'll hold up as well as, say, oak or ash, but it's done alright over the last couple of months.
She also prefers rollerball or gel ink pens to regular ballpoints. As they require less pressure, that's likely helping.
Hah yes pine is pretty infamous for denting easily. I actually received a pine desk surface today that I'm staining/oiling. It's nicer quality pine than what I used for the skirting boards by far and seems pretty tough so far. I could probably give it a properly tough surface by using a two-part plastic finish (like the sort of stuff they use for bar-tops), but I've never used it so I'm sticking with Danish oil for this, as I can always sand it back and refinish it if it gets truly dire.
I like working with pine, particularly because it's cheap enough that you can make mistakes when learning and not feel too bad. But it is much more variable than other woods, I find, and the species vary by country.
Nothing against the Americans/Canadians etc, but this is one area where regional differences make a pretty huge difference in terms of wood and products available. If, like me, you're in the UK and looking for vaguely specific details regarding woodwork online, you're going to find an awful lot of American content and very little local stuff (a blog opportunity there perhaps).
A good recent example of this effect for me was when I was looking up pine stains. You will find constant references to something called "pre-stain conditioner" online; this basically doesn't exist in the UK. Everyone online is insistent that you need it, and you can just about buy it here (it's expensive), but it turns out it's pretty irrelevant. In the UK our pine is typically a different variety, and so therefore has a different composition, and our terminology is different here too; wood stain in the UK is, I think, "wood dye" in the USA? Please correct me if you know better :)
For reference I use this stain: https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/product/manns-pine-wood..., which makes no mention of pre-stain conditioner, and I've had very good results with it so far.