Instructor - Greg Horton

• January 8 - February 5, 2025 6pm - 9pm (5 Wednesday evenings)

A weekly evening class, our Basic Skills Course is designed to provide a strong foundation for beginners, helping build excellent fundamental woodworking skills. Unlike our other Beginner Classes, which are project-based, Basic Skills is process-oriented, focusing on the proper and safe use of woodworking machines, hand tools and core techniques. The class has been created to help beginning woodworkers develop safe, accurate and efficient woodworking techniques that lead to successful, satisfying results and minimize many of the frustrations that occur when learning on their own.

Basic Skills meets one evening each week over a 5-week period. Through weekly lectures, demonstrations and hands-on work, participants will learn and practice traditional techniques essential to high-quality woodworking and furniture making. The course concludes with participants making their own cutting board, using skills learned throughout the course.

Basic Skills topics include:

- the vocabulary of woodworking

- gaining and practicing the safe sequence of steps to take a raw board and accurately mill it to a specific size.

- developing an understanding of wood, how it behaves and ways to help control it, purchasing wood and selecting grain for projects

- important layout and measuring skills, working with story sticks and layout tools

- sharpening plane blades and chisels

- understanding how to set up and use hand planes

- the use of a variety of hand tools and insight into which tools to consider buying

No tools required.