Years ago, when I was still new to power tools, I tried to rip a narrow piece of wood on my miter saw. If you know what that means, you're already wincing. A miter saw is built to chop across a board, not to slice down its length — so when I forced it to do the wrong job, it grabbed the piece, kicked, and reminded me exactly how close my fingers were to the blade. I got lucky. I still have all ten — and I never made that particular mistake again.
That's the real danger of not having the right tool. It isn't that the project stops — it's that you reach for whatever's on the wall and force it to do a job it was never built for. That's how people ruin material, ruin a weekend, or end up in the emergency room.
Here's the good news: when you don't own the right tool, you almost never have to choose between forcing the wrong one and giving up. There's a whole ladder of better options in between. Here are all six, in the order I actually reach for them.
1. Buy It
I'll be honest about my bias up front: when I hit a tool wall, my first instinct is to buy the tool.
That probably sounds like the expensive answer. Stay with me. A new project is the best excuse in the world to grow your shop — and if you'll use the tool again, buying it isn't a cost. It's an investment that outlives the project. Almost every tool I own arrived because some build needed it. The planer, the router, the pocket-hole jig — each one has a project's name on it. That's how a workshop gets built. One tool at a time, one project at a time.
There really ought to be a meme about this: every new project is just an excuse to buy a new tool. If there wasn't one, now there is.
But — and this matters — don't reflexively grab the cheapest one on the shelf. Cheap isn't the same as a good fit. Neither is most expensive. Tools are built in tiers, and the tiers are aimed at genuinely different people.
Here's something most people don't know. Walk the power-tool aisle and you'll see Milwaukee, Ridgid, and Ryobi sitting a few feet apart. All three are owned by the same parent company — Techtronic Industries, or TTI. You'd think that means they're the same tool in different-colored plastic. They're not. (I know this firsthand — a senior sales executive at TTI used to come speak to a class I taught, and he laid it out for us.) Each line runs its own research and development, built for a different buyer:
- Ryobi is built for the homeowner — the person who hangs a shelf, builds a planter box, does a project or two a year. Affordable, lighter-duty, with a huge battery family that fits a hundred different tools.
- Ridgid sits in the middle — the serious weekend builder who's hard on tools but isn't earning a living with them. Known for the lifetime service agreement.
- Milwaukee is built for the trades — the person who runs the tool to death every day on a jobsite and needs it to survive. Priced for it, too.
None of those is the "right" tier in the abstract. The right tier is the one that matches how you'll actually use the tool. Match it to the hours you'll put on it — not to the one project in front of you.
(A fun one from that same conversation, since we're here: ever wonder why DeWalt is yellow and black? The founder was a die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. That's the whole reason. Tool colors are branding, not engineering — don't let a paint job talk you into a tier you don't need.)
When Buying Isn't the Move
Buying isn't always the answer. Maybe it's a tool you'll use exactly once. Maybe the right one costs more than the whole project. Maybe the cash just isn't there this month. There are five more rungs on the ladder.
2. Rent It
A lot of people don't realize you can rent tools the same way you rent a carpet cleaner. The tool-rental counter at the big home centers — Home Depot and Lowe's both have one — will rent you a floor sander, a tile saw, an auger, a big planer, by the half-day, day, or week. For heavier or more specialized gear, there are dedicated rental yards: Sunbelt Rentals and United Rentals are the national names, and most towns have an independent rental business too. Search "tool rental near me." Renting is the right call when you need a serious tool for a single weekend and you'll never touch it again.
I rent more than you'd guess. I once rented a carpet stretcher to fix the carpet in a single room — a tool I was sure I'd never need again. About a year later, I needed it again, and I rented it a second time. No problem. Even renting it twice came out cheaper than buying one once — and I never had to find a place to store a carpet stretcher in between. That last part matters more than people think: space in your shop isn't free. A tool you use once a year is paying rent on your wall the other 364 days.
Match the rental to the job, too. To replace two cracked tiles in a bathroom, I rented a manual tile cutter — a cheap hand tool, exactly right for a tiny job. For a floor-to-ceiling tile wall, I borrowed a powered wet saw, because that job needed the real thing. Same kind of work, two very different tools, and neither one lives in my garage.
3. Borrow It — or Take the Material to the Tool
Before you spend a dime, ask who you know. I started out borrowing — I used a friend's table saw for years before I ever owned one, and I'm not too proud to say it.
And here's the move people forget: sometimes it's easier to bring the material to the tool than the tool to the material. A sheet of plywood is awkward to haul; a table saw is bolted to a stand. If your buddy has the saw, load your lumber in the truck and go cut at his place. I've been on both ends of that trade now — the borrower, and the guy with the saw in his garage. Both are a good way to spend an afternoon.
4. Find a Makerspace
This one's a secret weapon, especially for specialty tools. Makerspaces — sometimes called fab labs or hackerspaces — are shared workshops. You pay a membership or a day rate and get access to gear most people will never own: laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers, full woodshops. A few places to look:
- Your public library. A surprising number now run maker labs with 3D printers and laser cutters — often free with a library card.
- Local universities and community colleges. Many have shops open to the community, or continuing-education woodworking classes that come with shop access. This one's underused — worth a phone call.
- Standalone makerspaces in mid-size and larger towns.
If your project needs one specialty cut you can't make any other way, a makerspace day pass beats buying a three-thousand-dollar machine for a single part.
5. Pay Someone Who Has the Tool
You can also just hire the cut out — and the most accessible version of this is sitting in the store where you're already buying the wood. Most home centers and lumberyards will break down sheet goods for you on a big panel saw. The cuts come in close — usually within about an eighth of an inch — which is perfect for getting a full sheet of plywood down to pieces that fit in your car, though not precise enough for a final, finished edge. They'll generally make straight cross-cuts; most won't rip a board down its length, but it never hurts to ask.
And it goes beyond cutting. On one build I needed pipe clamps, so I had Home Depot cut threads onto the ends of some black pipe — they threaded eight ends for me, and the whole thing came to about ten dollars, if they charged me at all. The people at the counter can often do more than you'd expect. Ask.
Here's where I earn my humility points. On one build I needed a stack of boards flattened, and I fought it for days on a used lunchbox planer that was never meant for that kind of work. I should have just paid the lumberyard to plane them. It would have been faster, cheaper, and a lot less miserable than what I actually did. Lesson learned; pride decreased; humility points gained. Paying a pro to do the part you're not equipped for isn't a failure. It's just math.
And it scales further than you'd think. I don't own a sawmill, and I don't have the space or the money to set one up — not even a chainsaw-style Alaskan mill. So when I had felled logs I wanted turned into lumber, I found someone on Facebook Marketplace with a portable mill and paid him to do it. There's almost always somebody nearby with the tool and the skill. Renting their time is a perfectly good answer.
6. Improvise — There's More Than One Way to Skin a Cat
And if you can't buy, rent, borrow, hire, or find the right tool? You improvise. Woodworking is thousands of years old, and the "right" tool is usually just the fast tool — there's almost always a slower way to the same result. The trick is to pick a substitute that can do the job safely — a tool that's genuinely up to the cut, not one you're forcing the way I forced that miter saw:
- No table saw? A circular saw with a clamped straightedge makes a dead-straight rip. It's a track saw on a budget — and it's exactly how every cut in our plans is designed to be made.
- Need a curved or rough cut? A jigsaw with a clamped guide — or a steady hand — covers a lot of ground.
- No planer? A router on a flattening sled — a simple jig that rides over the board on two rails — will flatten a slab surprisingly well.
- No jointer? The same router sled, or a hand plane and a pair of winding sticks.
- No drill press? A handheld drill with a square block clamped beside the bit to keep you vertical.
Some of these are slower. All of them work. People built cathedrals, ships, and furniture that's still standing with hand tools and patience.
(My favorite version of this, which I picked up at Colonial Williamsburg: before sandpaper existed, woodworkers smoothed their work with dried shark skin. I'm not telling you to go fishing — modern abrasives are one of the great bargains in the shop. It's just a good reminder of how little you actually need to make something beautiful.)
All that said, improvising has a ceiling, and it pays to know when you've hit yours. I found mine opening up the floor in my daughter's bedroom. I was reinforcing the joists for her heavy safety bed, and figured that while the subfloor was open, I'd add insulation to quiet the dining room below. The opening was two feet wide and ten feet long; the joist bays ran fourteen feet back, crowded with wiring and plumbing. There was no pushing insulation that far by hand. So I engineered a solution: a bag of blow-in insulation, a couple of five-gallon buckets with holes cut in strategic spots, and my shop vac flipped around to its blower port. I'd done my research. I was confident.
I'm fairly sure more insulation ended up in the bedroom than in the joist bays. Thank goodness I'd had the sense to shut the door, open the windows, and put on real PPE before I flipped the switch. In the end I filled the bays the slow way — pushing insulation back with brooms and sticks. It worked, but it was messy, more stressful than it had any right to be, and took far longer than just renting an insulation blower would have. When the contraption you're about to build is more complicated than the job itself, that's your sign to go back up the ladder.
The Tool Gap Is a Fork, Not a Wall
Modern tools are genuinely amazing, and the good ones are worth every dollar — I'm the first to say it. But don't let a missing tool be the reason you don't start. Buy it, rent it, borrow it, drive the wood to a friend's garage, book a makerspace, pay the pro, or improvise around it.
The cut will get made. Then you get to keep building.
Built Around the Tools You Already Have
Every set of Peterson Plans is designed around this exact idea: you shouldn't need a shop full of specialty tools to build something you're proud of. Every cut can be made with a circular saw and a straightedge. A table saw makes it faster. It doesn't make it possible.