Free Woodworking Patterns For Beginners

free woodworking patterns for beginners

Find Woodworking Plans for Free on the Internet

Gone are the days of toiling for hours designing your next woodworking masterpiece.  Thanks to the power of the Internet and the generosity of our fellow woodworkers, there are thousands of free plans you can download instantly to get your started on your next woodworking project.  These aren’t just low quality simplistic plans that are available.  You can download plans for everything from fancy furniture, to children’s toys, to complete tree house plans.

Downloadable plans include detailed drawings, often including metric and imperial measurements, photos, materials lists and sometimes even videos to show you exactly how to get going.  These plans can be easily printed out on your home printer and used immediately.  If you get the plans dirty while working, you can easily print replacements as often as you need to.

Find Your Plan

Let’s use a real world example.  My wife is itching for me to build a swing for the yard.  We have a nicely wooded back yard and she’d like to have a swing out there to enjoy the evenings in.  I open Google and search for “free woodworking plans yard swing”.  Of the 452,000 results that came back, I found an interesting one from a site called FreePorchSwingPlans.com.  Low and behold it’s just what I am looking for and comes with everything I need to get started on my swing project:

• List of Materials
• Patterns to use for cutting the wood
• Detailed Assembly Instructions with measured photos

If for any reason this set of plans doesn’t work for me, there are many others that I can download and check out.

Searching for Plans

As you can see, finding plans on the Internet is a snap.  Open your favorite search engine and search for “free woodworking plans” or, you can get more specific and search for something like “free woodworking plans for beginners” or “free treehouse plans”.  Remember that the more specific you can be, the better your search results will give you what you need.  Don’t worry about being too specific, woodworking in particular has so many enthusiasts that there are pages available to suit just about any search term.  If for any reason you get too specific, you can always change your search term and try again.  Go ahead, give it a try now… open a new browser window and try searching for some plans.  When you are done, come on back and we’ll cover the rest of what you’ll need to know to use Internet plans.

Downloading Plans

Once you find the perfect set of plans, they will likely be available in one of two ways…. either as a downloadable PDF file or just as drawings that you print directly from the screen.  If the plans come as a downloadable PDF file, you’ll need to click the link that says something like “download plans here”.  Save the file to your hard drive somewhere you can find it later.  To open the file you’ll need the free Adobe Reader.  Chances are that it’s already installed on your computer, but, if it’s not, you can download from the internet easily.  Just go to your favorite web browser and search for “Adobe Reader download”.

If the plans are drawings that you can print directly from the site, go ahead and print each picture and/or page available so you’ll have them for later.  It’s also a good idea to bookmark the page where you found the plans.  If you ever lose the plans later, you can quickly get back to the right page if you have it bookmarked.

Using Plans

The final step is to print your plans and get started.  For this you’ll just need a printer.  If you have a color printer that can be helpful, but usually drawings come in black and white so any printer will work.  Print out your plans and put them in a binder or a folder so you can easily flip through them when you get to your shop.  Have fun!  Remember that finding the right set of plans can be just as fun as building, so take your time and enjoy the search!

About the Author

Wayne Foreman is an amateur woodworker that loves to make things for his busy family.  He runs the site WoodWorkingProjectGuide.com which is dedicated to the Woodworking enthusiast.  With Articles, Videos and Woodworking products available, the serious and hobby woodworker alike can find fun and useful woodworking information.

Since you found this site, you must enjoy working with wood. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent hundreds of hard-earned dollars on wood plans and projects that turned out to be disappointing (or maybe even disastrous!). Maybe you’ve halted projects in mid-stream because of frustration or from running out of ideas. To read more, please click here:Woodworking4Home