Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>Look in particular for "The Handplane Book" and Peter Korn's "Woodworker's Guide to Hand Tools," but check out any book or DVD that seems to have substantive information on hand tools.

Planes are seen as the most mysterious of the hand tools - but there's a lot you can do with the common chisel, too, so don't focus just on planes. I'm talking below about planes, but you should spend time on learning chisel skills, layout skills, etc.

Tools in general - hand or powered - require certain physical skills (more on that in a bit), but power tools will permit a wider range of less competent skills and still generate results (although the consequences of doing something incompetently risky with a power tool are greater). While you can do something with marginal physical competence with a hand tool and get the job done, it won't be efficient or fun.

So: you have to recognize that, in learning to use hand tools, you're teaching both your brain and your body. The reading will foster your brain, but nothing but practice will nourish your muscle skills. In other words, practice practice practice. As Jack Wortz suggested, buy a plane from the flea market or a garage sale (read the books first, so you have some idea what to look for). A jack or smooth plane - 9" to 14" long - is a good place to start. Buy some pine or poplar from your local lumberyard or home center. Clean up the plane and sharpen the cutting iron (more on this in a bit). If you've already got a workbench, clamp it on edge on the bench and try it out, then clamp it flat and try surface planing. Mess around, in other words; try to make a toothpick (just kidding). Once you're feeling like you've got a sense of it, make a simple project, like a footstool. Build on your skills from there.

THE most important element of a usable tool, assuming it's not a total wreck, is a sharp cutting iron, so, before you touch the tool to wood, work on the sharpening (the books you've read or DVDs you've watched will have introduced you to sharpening practices). This is kind of like playing a musical instrument: you can go from zero to beginner pretty quickly. Beginner to intermediate takes a little longer. From there, you spend the rest of your life refining toward expert, but that's not a bad thing; what looks impressive one year reminds you that you've gotten even better the next.

Yes, lurk and post here; questions are always welcome. If you'll include your city and state in your name line, you may find there's a Centralian near you who'd be willing to spend an afternoon with you doing show and tell, but be fair to her/him and to yourself: do your reading and DVD watching first, so your questions will be smarter.

I suspect most of the members of this forum got started like me, fumbling and learning alone. You can do it too.

Oh, one warning: you'll see references to the slippery slope. You can do a lot with a very basic kit, but many people get, um, interested in all the various kinds of hand tools out there, and find themselves haunting garage sales, or drooling over mail order catalogs. If you've got the money and time and space, fine, but do be aware that acquiring tools is a separate thing from working wood. You can't work wood without acquiring some tools, but you can acquire many tools and never touch a piece of wood with them. If what you want is to make things from wood, resist the siren call of owning one example of every model of something or other made by a particular company, etc., etc., etc. I say this as someone who has to fight that tendency (and lose sometimes).