How to Break Woodworking Into Small Drills Instead of Jumping Straight Into Big Projects

One of the most important things to understand is that the next project will not be the solution to all your woes. A lidded box, a little stool, a wall shelf, to the novice it seems that one of these projects will be the turning point when their hands will finally calm down and they will begin to produce cleaner work. The problem is that large projects just as readily conceal weaknesses as they do reveal them. A shelf can look perfectly fine from across the room and still contain wobbly saw cuts, skewed layout lines, hacked chisel work, and gouged sanding. I find it’s better to break the work into small drills that concentrate on a single motion at a time and allow it to be practiced enough to become muscle memory.

A drill doesn’t have to be an artificial thing. It just means practicing a single action on its own without the burden of completing an entire project. Instead of building a whole box, for example, practice laying out 10 parallel lines on a scrap board and seeing if the distance between them remains consistent. Instead of cutting all the joints for a frame, practice a series of crosscuts and see if you can stop the cut precisely on the waste side of the line. Instead of cutting a full set of mortise and tenons, chop a few shallow mortises in scrap to practice how to hold the chisel as the grain orientation changes. This isolates the action and allows you to see more clearly what your hands are doing.

It also isn’t a good idea to approach drills as some kind of mindless repetition. I often see inexperienced woodworkers cut 20 successive lines, for example, but if none of those cuts are ever closely examined and analyzed, not much will be learned. Instead, you want to turn each trial into a piece of evidence. After one cut, for example, examine closely where the blade entered the board, whether the line remained visible throughout the cut, and whether the cut edge remains square from face to face. After one pass with a chisel, examine the floor of the recess and the definition of the edge. If the same problem keeps recurring, define it clearly before trying again. “The cut drifts toward the end” is helpful. “I suck” is not. Woodworking reacts much better to close observation than it does to exasperated despair.

A good 15-minute practice session can be devised to make most drills accessible even on a busy day. The first couple of minutes can be spent setting up a single scrap board, a single tool, and a single distinct goal. The bulk of the time can be spent repeating the action several times, paying close attention, and slowing down enough to catch yourself in the act of making a mistake. The final minute or two can be spent comparing the last attempt to the first. That comparison is essential. It helps you see whether the improvement was due to better setup, lighter pressure, greater concentration, or a more stable body position. Without that comparison, the practice session becomes a muddle, and whatever lesson it contained is lost.