Week-long Short Woodworking Courses

Are you fed up bumbling around your workshop not knowing how to do accurate work?
This is your chance to really gain control of woodworking hand tools; get the satisfaction of doing it right.

Get guidance from our genuine experts on a Rowden Atelier short woodworking course. These intensive, week-long woodworking courses provide a thorough introduction to the basic principles of woodwork, allowing you to hone your technique and create more precise, professional work.

• Classes will be small (maximum 5) and are led by Jon Greenwood, Jonathan Walter or, for weekend classes, Ed Wild.
• Get behind the bench at our quality furniture building workshop. Students have the benefit of experiencing – if only for a week – the extraordinary place that is Rowden Atelier.

Rowden is set in the heart of the beautiful North Devon countryside; so while you have your woodworking course your family or friends can enjoy a break of stunning coastal walks and beautiful Devon landscape. Surf beaches are nearby at Bude and Westwood Ho! and RHS Rosemoor garden is just outside Torrington.

ONE WEEK BASIC SHORT WOODWORKING COURSE

WE PROVIDE ALL THE TOOLS. YOU GET THE CHANCE TO SEE IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THIS ‘WOODY STUFF’.

People make a big fuss about sharpening; it is an important doorway towards allowing you control of the cutting edge. Less push and shove, more control. We will show you professional methods – without honing guides.

You will learn to properly use a bench plane and chisels. These are quite correctly called hand tools, so how your hand and body relate to them is critical to their use. You will learn to hold them properly, how to stand correctly at the bench, and work with your whole body, not just your forearms. Bench planes are used to get timber flat. We will teach you how to create a dead flat surface, plane an adjacent flat surface at right angles, and create a dimensioned component, all with these simple tools.

You will learn to be responsive to the material, to this particular bit of wood, you will learn to cut it the way it wants to be cut and why that is important. You will gain control of the process of removing fine shavings, a tenth of a millimetre of wood at a time. In this way, you will have, in your own hands, access to creating quality joinery.

In the space of a week, our short woodworking course will teach you will make simple joints to exact dimensions, entirely by hand. Your aim will be to achieve the perfect fit – one piece exactly inside another, and the work has clean, oil-polished surfaces and chamfered shiny corners. Depending upon the amount of work needed on your tools, you will also have sharpened some, if not all of them, and set a plane up to work correctly and learning why planes may not have worked for you in the past.

Learning to use hand tools like these is the way into quality work. With this knowledge, you will be able to practice alone to take these skills to the next stage. You should know that you will not need to come to this week with any of your own hand tools, but you can work with your own tools if you prefer.

This is what Derrick Wilkinson had to say

“Overall, I think that the week was a great success. I came away rather humbled by the high standards that you demand, and greatly appreciative of your humour and your patience with me when I made my all too many mistakes. The friendliness and professionalism that imbues your workshop was a great pleasure.”

– Derrick Wilkinson