TedsWoodworking: The 16,000 Page Book That Will Never Fit On Your Shelf

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

Search for the Ted's Woodworking book and you will never find a book. What you find instead starts with a white oak cabinet that fell apart in front of eight people on a Saturday morning in 1989, and the man who threw the plan in the bin that same night.

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The Ted's Woodworking Book Is Not A Book

Type those words into a search bar and you picture a hardcover. Four hundred pages, a spine that gets sawdust in the gutter, something that sits on the shelf above the table saw. That is not what this is. Ted McGrath's collection holds 16,000 plans and projects, which is roughly forty of those hardcovers stacked on top of each other, and it arrives as instant digital access instead of a parcel. His page lists it as a one-time $67 lifetime member deal, not a monthly subscription, and you can look through what is actually inside the plan library before you decide anything at all.

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

If you genuinely wanted paper for the shelf, we have picks for that, including the fantasy volume readers keep going back to. This is the opposite of that. So why does everyone call it a book anyway? Because that is what woodworkers want. One object. One place. Every plan you will ever need, in your hands, done with searching. Hold that thought, because the reason Ted built it this way begins on a Tuesday night in 1989.

Eight People, One Cabinet, Everything Wrong

Ted was teaching a Saturday workshop. Eight people, all skill levels, all building the same white oak cabinet from a plan he had pulled out of a popular woodworking magazine. Professional layout. The kind of thing you would trust without a second look.

By step six, three of them were stuck. The dado measurements assumed nominal lumber dimensions instead of the actual milled size you get at the store. One man had already cut his side panels straight off the diagram. They were wrong. Not because he could not measure. Because the plan was wrong.

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

That night Ted took it home, threw it out, and built the cabinet himself from scratch. He measured every joint as he went. He wrote down every cut as he made it. Where something was awkward, he found a better way and wrote that down instead. He handed the rewritten version out in his next class, and nobody got stuck. One plan became ten. Ten became fifty.

The Failure That Costs You Sixty Dollars At A Time

Here is the tension nobody in this hobby says out loud. A plan that looks finished and is not finished does not fail politely. It fails at step four, with your Saturday already gone and the lumber already cut. A measurement off by one sixteenth of an inch on the screen becomes a joint in your shop that will not close. A step that jumps from cut the side panels to attach the face frame, with no assembly order and no hardware specs in between. A materials list off by just enough to send you back to the lumber yard. A tool list that quietly assumes you own $7,000 of equipment. And $60 of good lumber turning into an expensive mistake while you stand there wondering what you did wrong.

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

You did nothing wrong. Ted's line for this is the one you will still remember next month: that is not a plan, that is a photo with ambition. After 25 years of teaching, he says the number one reason woodworkers quit is not talent and not tools. It is plans that look professional and come apart the moment somebody tries to follow them. The frustration was never a personal failing, much the same way trouble concentrating rarely is, which is the whole argument behind the audio track we looked at for focus.

Built First, Written Second

That is the promised part of the story. Ted now runs a team of twelve, and he says he does not hire people who can only draw. He hires woodworkers who can build and draw, because a plan is not a picture of a finished project, it is a set of instructions somebody will follow on a real workbench. If it does not work there, it does not ship. He puts the total at over 16,000 plans, each one built and tested before it reaches you, after teaching hands on classes to more than 4,000 students across the country. He signs the page as Ted Woody McGrath, Master Woodworker, Educator, Author, Member of AWI.

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

Now the named number, because vendor stories are cheap and marketplace data is not. On ClickBank, the platform that processes the sale, TedsWoodworking carries a gravity score of 48.0 as of 2 September 2026. Gravity counts how many separate affiliates made a sale recently, so it is a live measure of the thing actually selling, right now, not a testimonial anyone wrote. The vendor claims it has been a top seller there for over a decade. You can check the current offer for yourself here and judge the page on its own terms.

What The $67 Actually Covers

One payment. Lifetime member access to the full 16,000 plan library, per the offer on his page. Ted also states plainly that he reserves the right to end the deal at any time, which is his call and not a promise we can make on his behalf. What nobody can promise is the piece that depends on you: a complete plan removes the excuse, it does not clear your Saturday or push the wood through the blade. Pick the project, block out the weekend the same deliberate way people map the year ahead before it starts, and let the instructions do the part they were built to do.

Unlock 16,000 Woodworking Plans

The deck out back. The dining table the family actually gathers around. The workbench that finally gets the garage under control. You already know which one it is. You have known for months.

Go and open the full library of 16,000 plans today, because you have already given up enough weekends to hunting for a diagram that turned out to be lying, and the only thing still standing between you and that finished piece in your shop is instructions written by someone who built it first.

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