>Power tools are easier on the body, but also more dangerous, noisy and dusty.
This is a very important point.
For anyone interested in woodworking or just starting out, I'll expand on this a bit:
Some of the dangers are quite obvious: Spinning blades that are sharp enough to cut wood are sharp enough to cut you. SawStops are nice for protecting you from this at the table saw, but they don't make a bandsaw, router, etc. etc. etc.
Some are fairly obvious if you've got a solid physics background and are thinking about it, but might not occur to you: Kickback from the table saw, ejecting a piece of wood at you at high speeds. Similar concerns with a router. Lathes are great at turning pieces of wood into deadly projectiles.
Some are non-obvious: Lots of people take angle grinders and use them to power carve wood. This isn't super scary if you follow general safety practices and are using reasonable discs on your angle grinder, but there's also some out there that are basically miniature round chainsaws, and angle grinders can kick back in ways that aren't super intuitive if you're not experienced with them. Couple those together, and if the teeth of the chainsaw disc catch on you, the tool will basically ride along your body in the direction of the rotation. This has resulted in them climbing up people's chests, necks, etc.
And there's the long term stuff. Dust is huge. If you use power tools, you must invest in respiration and dust collection - the long term use of them without it will kill you.
In general, with hand tools, if you screw up and injure yourself, that's the end of it. You probably won't keep going and further injure yourself beyond whatever you did initially. This can still be scary - your chisels need to be sharp, and if you do something really dumb, this can still result in something fairly severe. But power tools (with exceptions like the SawStop) don't know if you got hurt. They don't care. They just keep going.
This is a very important point.
For anyone interested in woodworking or just starting out, I'll expand on this a bit:
Some of the dangers are quite obvious: Spinning blades that are sharp enough to cut wood are sharp enough to cut you. SawStops are nice for protecting you from this at the table saw, but they don't make a bandsaw, router, etc. etc. etc.
Some are fairly obvious if you've got a solid physics background and are thinking about it, but might not occur to you: Kickback from the table saw, ejecting a piece of wood at you at high speeds. Similar concerns with a router. Lathes are great at turning pieces of wood into deadly projectiles.
Some are non-obvious: Lots of people take angle grinders and use them to power carve wood. This isn't super scary if you follow general safety practices and are using reasonable discs on your angle grinder, but there's also some out there that are basically miniature round chainsaws, and angle grinders can kick back in ways that aren't super intuitive if you're not experienced with them. Couple those together, and if the teeth of the chainsaw disc catch on you, the tool will basically ride along your body in the direction of the rotation. This has resulted in them climbing up people's chests, necks, etc.
And there's the long term stuff. Dust is huge. If you use power tools, you must invest in respiration and dust collection - the long term use of them without it will kill you.
In general, with hand tools, if you screw up and injure yourself, that's the end of it. You probably won't keep going and further injure yourself beyond whatever you did initially. This can still be scary - your chisels need to be sharp, and if you do something really dumb, this can still result in something fairly severe. But power tools (with exceptions like the SawStop) don't know if you got hurt. They don't care. They just keep going.