DIY, short for do it yourself, can really be a great pleasure. With your own labor and skills, you handcraft the items you crave or need, and save big bucks while you’re at it. More often than not, the savings are huge, and quite often doing it yourself is the only possible method of getting what you really like.
DIY plans for just about any type of item you can dream of are available all over the web these days. They vary greatly in cost and can range from free to quite high prices. In general, a website that offers free plans will almost always offer these plans along with many other paid plans or the website may exist on paid advertising. Free plans, as a rule, will not be very up to date or of the best quality. As usual, there are occasional exceptions to this rule. You can see them by doing a search on the major search engines for the item you are trying to find.
DIY plans can always be obtained from a wide variety of publications, such as mechanical and craft magazines. Updated posts will have freshly designed and updated plans. Of course, you’re not likely to purchase a plan for whatever actual part you’re looking for. To do this, you’ll need to refer to old copies of these magazines and search for the unique plan you want.
This presents the obvious difficulty of availability of early journals. Public libraries, especially in larger cities, can be a good place to find them. In most cases, they keep bound annual volumes of old magazines that aroused great attention and interest. Bound volumes of mechanical-type publications from the 1950s onwards, and sometimes even older, can often be found. These are a great resource for locating old blueprints.
These old magazines, published before 1964, have almost all copyrights terminated and the content of them is in the public domain. This indicates that anyone can print these plans for any reason without any restrictions. Up to and including 1963, copyright in the US was granted for a period of 28 years only. This copyright had to be reinstated in the 28th year of his life or the publication’s copyright was terminated and fell into the public domain. Copyright could not be restored by anyone after it had expired. Therefore, any material in the public domain may not be copyrighted by either the original author, the publisher, or anyone else. Most publications wanted to publish plans only once, therefore copyrights were not renewed on almost all of this type of material. The content and layouts of these periodicals that were printed before 1964 are almost all in the public domain and free for any use by anyone.
Publications of this type include scientific and mechanical type magazines and some publications on carpentry, crafts and other miscellaneous publications. This is why early plans for such periodicals are often available on the web for purchase or, in some cases, for free. The most challenging problem for someone looking for a special plan is first of all to find the right plan in one of these publications and then to purchase the newspaper. This may well not be a simple task. It’s often easier to just get a provider’s plan rather than wasting a lot of energy trying to find a free item.