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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Cutting your own pine boards to replace the particleboard shelves and side panels in your Billy bookcase is likely to give you ok-but-also-not-exactly-straight-and-parallel results without a lot of specialized tools and techniques.

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Not really. Youtubers with sponsors sell this daft idea that you "need" a lot of power tools to do woodwork, but you can do most of it quite precisely with a couple of hand saws, a good chisel and a block plane. Though by the time you've replaced all the particleboard in a Billy you may as well just make a new bookcase from scratch and give it proper joints.

If you're going with hand chisel and block plane you're well out of the realm of "easy," if only time-wise.

I also don't think a hand plane will help you with warped boards much, and buying sizable not-warped wood is gonna likely add to your cost unless you get lucky at Home Depot. I've never had as much luck with the DIY fixes for that as others. I dunno what the hand version of a jointer is but I don't want to find out. ;)

You don't need a lot of power tools to do pretty cool stuff, but cabinetry is one of the tougher things to do precision-wise if you're unpracticed or don't have tools that make it easy to get repeatable results.

I've never tried a jointer to be honest. One of the many uses of the plane is taking out the gaps where bought wood's planed edges don't quite line up. I was a little unreasonable suggesting people could get away with only one plane though!

I make quite a lot of furniture from scrap or salvage - that's quite fun.

And loosing 5-12 hours of your life. Is the price difference worth that?

Being on phone, ipads and computer almost all the rest of my waking hours makes doing single tasks towards a larger project slowly quite meditative.

That would be pretty slow working. It's more entertaining than television and not bad exercise. And if you start with that attitude there is no helping you.

No, not really. Good dovetail joinery, without machines that do it perfectly, take a LONG time.

I've done quite a bit. (never tried a dovetailing machine tbh). It doesn't have to take a huge amount of time and a lot depends on exactly what you choose to do. Also you're moving the goalposts a bit there.

What else should I spend my hobby hours on? Woodworking is better than DotA2 or whatever kids play these days.

If you are doing that, then why are you even starting with IKEA furniture? My local home store sells various sizes of laminated furniture panels that you can use to assemble bookcases like LEGO. No cutting required.

You wouldn't want to use pine boards anyway, you'd want to use plywood, likely with a cabinet grade veneer for the outer veneer, unless you were going to paint it.

that is replacing essentially the whole piece of furniture beside the cardboard backing

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