DIY Plans - Do it Yourself - Make the Things You Need

Do it yourself can be a real joy. With your own hands you make the things you want or need and save money. Often the saving is huge and quite frequently build it yourself is the only way to get what you want. DIY plans for just about every kind of item are available on the internet these days. They range in price from free to quite costly. Generally a website which is offering free plans will be offering these plans along with numerous other paid plans, or on a site which depends on advertising for revenue. The free plans generally will not be very modern or of top quality. However there is the odd exception to this rule. You can check them out by doing a Google search for the item you are looking for.

Do it yourself plans are available in magazines such as woodworking, science, mechanical and crafts publications to mention only a few. Current issues will have plans which are right up to date and of modern design.

It is unlikely of course that you will find a plan for any particular item which you are seeking. To do this you need to go into back issues of these magazines and search for the specific plan you want. This raises the problem of availability of the old magazines. Public libraries can be a good source for these as they do in most instances keep bound copies of early magazines which were of wide interest. You can frequently locate bound copies of mechanics type magazines from the nineteen fifties and onward and sometimes of even earlier years. These are a great source for plans.

These early magazines prior to 1964 are pretty well all copyright expired and the contents of them are in the public domain. This means that anyone can reprint these plans for any purpose. Prior to 1964 US copyrights were granted for a 28 year period. This copyright had to be renewed in the 28th year or the copyright on the material ended and it entered the public domain. The copyright could not be renewed after the 28th year. Hence any public domain material cannot be copyrighted either by the original author, publisher or anyone else. Most magazines intended to publish such material only once hence no copyright renewals were made on nearly all of this type of material. The articles and plans in these magazines which were published before 1964 are almost all in the public domain and available for any use by anyone.

Magazines of this type include Science and Mechanics, Popular Mechanics, Mechanix illustrated and Popular Science to mention some of them. This is why old plans from these magazines are widely made available on the internet either for sale or in some cases free. The most difficult problem for anyone searching for a particular plan is to first of all locate a suitable plan in one of these magazines and then to find the magazine. This may not be easy to do so it is often simplest just to buy the plan from a seller rather than to spend a great deal of time trying to search out a free copy.

You can find many old copies of such magazines for sale in online auctions such as eBay. However you will seldom be able to see the complete content of a magazine prior to purchase. Alternatively you will find copies of plans offered on the internet and on eBay. The advantage here is that you can see exactly what the plan is and whether it is what you are looking for. You could get lucky and find a free plan on the internet or you can generally buy them for only a few dollars. This is less costly than buying many magazines with unknown content and paying for shipping of heavy packages.