First Few Projects

Well, so I'd like to work on a few projects to get my woodworking skills up to par...I have a Router and Jigsaw, no guides, well a straight guide for the jigsaw, but that's about it, I'm going to make a basic circle guide for my router...

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions on good woodworking projects to get decent with the tools?

Mainly I'm looking at getting familiar with straight cutting and cutting curves and various shapes in a precision manner...

Are there any jigs/guides I should look for?

Thanks for the help...

You can buy jigs or in my case I built them since building the jigs not only teaches you how to use the tools you listed it is also cheaper money wise.  if you want to buy jigs though the best place to buy jigs and guides at is Woodcraft.  The link is below.  They are a little more expensive than say Sears or Lowes, but the quality and the durability is incredible.   My suggestion would be to build your jigs since this will help you learn the router and the jig saw.

https://www.woodcraft.com/Woodcraft/assets/html/homepage.asp?URLCheck=1

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Eat, Sleep, and Off-Road. Everything else is meaningless details.

Ah yes, well I would like to build them, I was just wondering what some good ones are to build, to get things going?

Sorry about that.  A circle jig for a router is easy to build.  Look at some that Woodcraft have to see what I am talking about.  What you really want to do is to buy a router book.  Barnes and Noble have some really good ones.  Inside the books they have the plans for making several jigs.  The material that you want to make the jigs out of so they last a long time and stay true is a combination of MDF and polycarbonate, a better version of plexiglass that machines a lot better.  The thing is though, is that you can only build several jigs without knowing what you are building.  Everytime I come up with a new project I make new jigs specifically for that project.  I am building a custom center console for my truck and fiberglassing it and the console has many curves.  To make the curves precise I used a French Curve.  If you go to the link and go to the center console page I have a picture of what it looks like.  I made three jigs in order to router a bunch of the curves on my console.  I drew out the design in full scale on paper then transfered it to polycarbonate then used a laminating bit (2" long) to router out the curves.  I used a 2" bit since I had two pieces of MDF placed together so that both sides of the console would match.  That just gives you an idea of a jig.  The circle jig I mentioned above is really good for makeing speaker rings so you can fiberglass sub boxes, speaker mounts, and such.  The best thing to do is figure out what you want to build, start with something easy first, then start making it and making any jigs that you need along the way.  Hopefully this helps.  Here is a link to my center console so you can see what a French curve looks like:

https://www.cardomain.com/memberpage/629249/5

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Eat, Sleep, and Off-Road. Everything else is meaningless details.

Hey master, that middle console is lookin really good!  Nice job!

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Im a fiberglass whore!!