In article ,
Bay Area Dave writes:
This little rant is designed NOT to hurt anyone's feelings: I JUST WANT
TO START A DIALOG ON THE SUBJECT, AS I JUST DON'T GET IT!

Dave,

Just my limited experiences:

I've built four major things from my own designs and two major things
from plans.

The first thing I ever built was a shop table for my planer. I didn't
have much else working, yet, so it's just screwed together and is
rickety. I designed it myself, though. Wish I'd known about half-lap
joints at the time. Maybe a plan would've helped.

The second thing I ever built was a table for my son, of my own
design. I didn't get a plan because it seemed to be to be very
straightforward. I looked at a number of other children's tables to
get the basic dimensions, and designed a big, heavy library table with
mortise and tenon jointery - but sized for a two year old. I'm very
proud of it.

The third thing I ever built was my son's bed. I looked for plans as
a basis because there was a lot about making a bed I didn't want to
learn by messing up $250 in cherry. I had no idea how to distribute
the loads, how big it should be relative to the mattress, or what
knock-down jointery system to use. I got _The Bed Book_ and
discovered that the first bed in it was exactly what the bed I wanted
to build. I changed the design not one iota. I'm also very proud of
that bed - while the design is not mine, I did select the wood, mill
it and select and implement the finish. If I do say so myself, it's
very pretty.

The fourth thing I ever built was some wall-mounted cabinets for my
shop. I designed them myself. One of them is in the process of
falling apart. I didn't do a dado for the backs, I just glued and
nailed them on, and that wasn't sufficient for the stresses. I wish
I'd spent more time looking at plans. Hopefully I'll be able to
salvage the materials.

The fifth thing I ever built was an enourmous (6' x 2 1/2') planter
for SWMBO. I designed it primarily to skimp on materials while
allowing for a lot of wood movement while not actually doing any
complicated jointery so that I could move on to a project I really
wanted to do. Between you and me I realized after it was about 90%
complete that, if you tried to pick it up in the most obvious way
while it was full of dirt that it was going to fall apart, so I
reinforced it with a bunch of metal L brackets. Yuck. I'm not very
proud of it, although I am happy with how it looks. I looked at a lot
of plans, and got a lot of ideas about how to design the drainage
system for it, but I never really found plans that were exactly what
I wanted, so I designed my own. I'm a big fan of the saying,
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." This
project was good experience.

Finally, I'm building a bench along one wall loosely based upon Norm's
"Miter Bench and Storage." It's not exactly the same, but it was very
convenient, for such a large project, to have someone else provide a
materials and cut list. I'm also paying a lot more attention to how
to do things like build drawers so I don't make similar errors to what
happened with the cabinets.

To me, there's two basic reasons to use plans. First of all, I know
WAY more about woodworking than any other person I know.
Unfortunately, that's not saying much. Rather than teaching myself
how to design at the same time I teach myself craftmanship, building
from someone else's plans allows me to focus a lot of time on the
craft of building and not sweat about design details.

The second reason is that the plan is available and is exactly what I
need. Most of my woodworking at this time has a utilitarian base -
I'm building furniture and fixtures I need. If I see plans that are
for almost exactly what I want, it's a definite time-saver to use them
as a starting point. Since I'm researching plans anyway to get an
idea of what the design elements are to consider, if I find exactly
The Plan, why try to recreate it from scratch?

Do I hope to some day be able to just sit down and whip out a design
for any project? Absolutely. But I guess in some ways this lets me
apprentice myself to people like Jeff Miller or Norm Abram. The
master designs, and I implement, and in implementing try to understand
the design better.

-BAT