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Intermediate & Advanced Furniture & Cabinetmaking Course (2 to 13 Weeks)
If you already have some woodwork skills (either as an amateur furniture-maker or in professional carpentry) I am able to offer intermediate and advanced furniture and cabinet-making courses designed to suit your existing skills, and fit in with your own time availability. These last between 2 and 13 weeks.
The shorter intermediate courses (2-6 weeks) revolve around making a fine dovetailed box (2 weeks), an oak side-table with traditional joinery, shaped parts and basic veneering (4 weeks) or a more complex version of the table or sideboard incorporating a hand-dovetailed close-fitted drawer (6 weeks). The emphasis on these courses is the development of a particular set of machine- and hand-skills, so you will be making to designs provided by me (budding 'creatives' can however interpret the same design 'brief' with their own aesthetic nuances).
The longer courses are of 8-13 weeks' duration. In addition to the inclusion of a wider range of advanced techniques through making a more complex cabinet, the particular emphasis on these courses is the development of design skills - from simple concept sketches through to fully-resolved scale drawings - in the creation of your own cabinet design. This gives students practice in both creative drawing and professional visual presentation, and also a grounding in the costing and quotation process of bespoke pieces for their own clients.
The course starts with design work: exploring and resolving solutions to a specific design brief set by myself. The hardwood needed is then purchased (we hand-select boards from a local yard), followed by roughing-out and preliminary miling. While the still oversize components are settling down in the drier workshop climate, attention is given to fine-tuning your own bench-planes and bringing your hand-skills up to the requisite standard.
The bulk of the course is then spent making your high-quality cabinet, through which you will learn and improve upon a wide range of skills: high-quality traditional and modern joinery, carcass construction, shaping, laminating and veneering, drawer and door-making, edge-details, the fitting of cabinet hardware, assembly methods and hand-finishing techniques.
Finally, within the duration of the whole course, I’m able to advise students in a variety of aspects of professional furnituremaking, including small workshop economics, basic marketing, exhibiting and client-care.
See a detailed student’s testimonial of his experience of an advanced course in my workshop. | 
