At the very least, watch some Paul Sellers videos to inoculate yourself against the belief that you absolutely must give all your disposable income to Festool and Lie Nielsen.
His workbench tutorial is excellent, but for me, an absolute noob, it was still daunting to build a workbench as the very first project. What I ended up is building the Paul seller's Trestle [1] as my Hello World project, and it has been super handy. Even after that, I still think his workbench is too much work for me, and I eventually decided to build Christopher Schwarz's knockdown workbench [2].
That is where I first started out. Watching his videos helped build my first workbench, from there I found Wandel and others. I still go to Paul for tips and tricks.
Except for sanders. If you use one of them for a bit, you'll have no problem signing away an organ or two to Festool. And the dust collector, of course. Maybe a Domino joiner. But other than that, you don't have to give them all of your disposable income for your power tool needs.
Watch enough of hand tool videos and soon you will be hand planing and scraping instead of finish sanding.
Buying the sander and dust collector would probably be cheaper than all those hand planes, but there is something in that fine smoothing plane shaving that keeps you coming back.
Hi Matthias, I really enjoy your videos. I hope you didn't take my comment as a criticism of your work - it was really aimed at the broader culture of woodworking. Your videos are experimental, interdisciplinary and in many ways orthogonal to that culture.
The Sellers approach is obviously far more time-consuming than what I might call the New Yankee Workshop approach, but it has tremendous merits for new woodworkers. It's very easy to be intimidated by the huge workshops full of expensive machinery that you see on YouTube or in the magazines, but Sellers makes it absolutely clear that you can do fine woodworking with a tiny amount of space and a handful of cheap second-hand tools.
Other YouTubers promote a similar message - Rex Krueger springs to mind - but I think that Sellers offers a uniquely clear vision of how traditional skills and tools can make woodworking a more accessible and enjoyable pastime. For many amateur woodworkers, getting it done is almost besides the point - it's about the quietness and concentration of skilled manual work, the smell of the shavings, the satisfaction of a sharp tool and a neat dovetail.
That's fair, I think what is also fair is that a lot of folks simply enjoy spending the time on it rather than just getting it done, which is also the case when it comes to writing code.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork