this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Exactly. I started learning harmonica on those $20 pack of 8 and struggled for weeks to get anything to sound close to what I wanted. When I spent $60 on a decent instrument, I could suddenly do what I'd been practicing. There's a sweet spot for getting good enough equipment to actually learn without blowing the budget on something you may not continue doing

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Right and top end is several hundreds or thousands. So $60 is cheap just not cheapest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Woodworking planes.

You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that's just on another level.

Here's the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you're doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I'll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I'd still have been gouging the shit out of everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I don't disagree with what you're saying. But learning to tune a plane takes skill and time. People get into woodworking because they want to build things out of wood. The love of adjusting tools comes later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

on another level

Ohhh youuu

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Another thing that works really well is buying old when it comes to some tools.

I have a handful of 80 year old Stanley planes that are all the same quality as the expensive Lie Nielsen options, but I got them for about 50 bucks each.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Absolutely agree with you, it’s about finding that value curve, where quality scales well with price. Say the cheapest ‘something’ is $10, the $20 one is twice as good, the $40 is maybe 70% better again but the $80 might only be 10% better than that.

As a beginner, I’d go for maybe the $20 option or the $40 if I were confident I’d stick with it. But yeah, it’s a pain when your ability to enjoy or succeed at a hobby is hampered by buying the cheapest option off AliExpress, haha.