Getting Started With Making Guide Monthly
Making Guide Monthly is a print and digital publication focused on the maker community. It covers DIY projects, electronics, 3D printing, woodworking, and similar hands-on interests. The magazine ships on a monthly basis and includes project builds, tool reviews, and technique breakdowns. You can subscribe through their website or find single issues at major bookstores and maker fairs. If you want the digital version, head to their official site and create an account. The download link goes to your email after purchase. It arrives as a PDF, usually within 24 hours. Reading on a tablet works fine. I've also printed selected articles from the PDF and pinned them to a corkboard in my workshop for quick reference. Don't bother trying to extract individual pages with free PDF tools — the file structure resists most of them. Use a proper extractor like pdfplumber or just print the pages you need directly from the viewer. I ran into a specific problem a while back. The issue was that the digital PDF included hyperlinks that pointed to external resources, but some of those links were dead or redirected to archived pages. This happened with a project from the October 2023 issue that referenced a GitHub repo which had been deleted. My workaround was straightforward: I used the Wayback Machine to find a saved copy of the page, then cross-referenced it with the project's Instructables page for the step-by-step instructions. It took about ten minutes and saved me from abandoning the build entirely.
What's Inside the Magazine
Each issue typically contains around fifteen to twenty projects. They range from simple weekend builds to more involved multi-week electronics assemblies. The editorial team tries to balance difficulty levels so beginners aren't completely lost but experienced makers don't find everything trivial. The project descriptions include bill of materials, required tools, and estimated build time. Build times vary widely. A simple LED nightlight project might take you an hour. A custom mechanical keyboard enclosure with a microcontroller could take you two full weekends if you're doing it right. The tool reviews section is where I pay the most attention. They test things like rotary tools, laser cutters, soldering stations, and multimeters. The reviews aren't sponsored, which you can tell because they don't shy away from calling out products that overpromise. I've bought two soldering stations based on their recommendations and one based on a warning they published. The warning one saved me money. It was a budget station that overheated after thirty minutes of continuous use. I read about it in the March 2024 issue and decided to stick with my older Weller instead.
Practical Things to Know Before You Commit
Subscription cost runs around $35 to $45 per year depending on whether you go print-only, digital-only, or both. Print subscriptions include shipping, which can get expensive if you're outside North America. I live in the UK and the shipping added about twenty pounds to my annual cost. The digital-only option doesn't have that problem. If you're international, go digital and save the postage. One thing the magazine doesn't do well is cover open-source hardware development. If you're into designing your own PCBs or contributing to projects like KiCad or FreeCAD, you won't find much of that content here. The focus is more on consuming existing projects than creating new ones from scratch. That's not a flaw in the magazine itself, but it's a gap in coverage. For that kind of content, you'd be better off looking at Hackaday or the Arduino forums. Another practical note: the magazine occasionally publishes projects that require components that are hard to source. I remember a project in the June 2024 issue that called for a specific display module from a Chinese supplier. By the time I ordered it, the part had been discontinued. The editor's note in the August issue acknowledged the problem and suggested a compatible alternative, but the fix came two months late. When a project references obscure components, check availability before you start building. Digi-Key, Mouser, and LCSC all have search filters for lifecycle status. Use them.
Get the Full Details
How to Get the Most Out of It
Don't buy every issue if you're on a tight budget. Skim the table of contents first. The project previews are usually enough to tell you whether an issue is worth your money. Some months are stronger than others. The summer issues tend to be lighter because the editorial team is smaller during that period. Winter issues usually pack more meat into each project because there's more time to work on them before the holidays. Save the project files when you download the digital edition. The PDFs get large, and I keep a folder on my external drive organized by year and month. I also print the bill of materials for any project I plan to build and tape it to my bench. It's easier to grab the right resistor when you can see it pinned to the wall than to flip back through a forty-page PDF while your soldering iron is hot. If you're new to making and you find the projects too advanced, start with the beginner tag on their website. They archive older articles there and some of them are genuinely good entry points. The project called "Your First Circuit Board" from the January 2023 issue is still relevant and uses readily available components. I'd recommend it as a starting point before you jump into anything involving microcontrollers.
