DIY, short for do it yourself, can really be a great pleasure.
With your own labor and skills you hand craft the items you hanker after or need and save lots of dollars while you do it.
Very frequently the saving is enormous and quite often making it yourself is the only possible method to get what you really like.
Do it yourself plans for just about every kind of item you could dream of, are available on the web these days.
They vary greatly in cost and can be anywhere from free, to quite high priced.
In the main a website which is giving away free plans will nearly always be offering these plans along with many other paid plans or the website may exist on advertising for payment.
The free plans, as a rule of thumb, will not be very up to date or of top quality.
As usual there is the occasional exception to this rule.
You can view them by conducting a search on the major search engines for the item you are trying to find.
DIY plans are always obtainable in a wide variety of publications such as mechanical and crafts magazines.
Up to date publications will have plans which are right up to the present and of recent design.
It is not really likely of course that you will acquire a plan for any actual piece which you are on the search for.
To do this you will require to go into old copies of these magazines and look for the unique plan you desire.
This presents the obvious difficulty of availability of the early magazines.
Public libraries,especially in larger cities, can be a good place for finding these.
They do in most cases keep bound yearly volumes of old magazines which were of wide attention and interest.
You can often find bound volumes of mechanics type publications from the nineteen fifties and forward, and on occasion of even older age.
These are a great resource for locating vintage plans.
These old magazines,published before 1964, are nearly all copyright ended and the contents of them are in the public domain.
This indicates that any person can print these plans for any reason without any restrictions.
Up to and including the year 1963 US copyrights were given for a 28 year period only.
This copyright had to be reinstated in the 28th year of its life or the copyright on the publication was terminated and it entered the public domain.
The copyright could not be reinstated after it had expired by anyone whatsoever.
So any public domain material may not be copyrighted either by the original author, publisher or anybody else.
Most publications wanted to publish plans only once therefore no copyright renewals were placed on just about all of this type of material.
The content and plans in these periodicals which were in print prior to 1964 are nearly all in the public domain and free for any utilization by anybody.
Publications of this kind include,scientific and mechanics type magazines and some woodworking,crafts and other assorted publications.
This is the reason that early plans from such periodicals are commonly made available on the web either for purchase or in some Instances free.
The most challenging problem for someone looking for any special plan is to first of all find the proper plan in one of these publications and then to acquire the periodical.
This may well not be a straightforward task.
It is often found easier just to obtain the plan from a vendor rather than to waste a lot of energy attempting to find a free item.