Yesterday’s post covered a couple good magazines, but YouTube has lots of excellent free content. Here are the series I follow every week:
- I Like To Make Stuff – This series generally has very quick projects and sometimes incorporates electronics.
- Jay Bates – He works out of his garage and builds a lot of things for his home. He puts a lot of effort into video editing and has a lot of it synced up to the beat of the music. Jay also posts videos of his design work using the free SketchUp tool. I’ve tried with limited success to use it to plan projects in the past, but by watching him work, I think I’ll get a lot more use out of Sketchup.
- The Wood Whisperer – Marc is the godfather of woodworking podcasts. He was the first and his podcast has a lot of polish. He has a very high end shop, but some of the projects he does are still within the more casual woodworker.
- Frank Howarth – I only recently started watching this. Frank has a nice shop and does lots of lathe work. I don’t have a lathe but I like his style and I still learn some things watching his projects. His montage scenes often have fun little timelapses where the wood pieces seem to move themselves around.
- Woodworking for Mere Mortals – This is the other new one in my list. He has a sense of humor to his videos, and, as the title suggests, he makes projects that most of us can relate to.
A lot of these videos have plans posted either for free or for purchase. It’s incredibly helpful to have a video to go along with the plans if you decide to build one of them. And even though I have yet to build anything that I’ve seen on these videos, I’ve learned a ton just by watching them work. It’s an excellent free education by osmosis. It’s hard to watch and not get inspired to go out and start building something.