A student's typical day
It's a lovely day and I drive in to the workshop. Devon is a very beautiful county of England and one of it's most attractive features are the winding lanes with leafy fields on either side. I rent a room shared in a house with one other student so we share the car journey, usually getting in around 8.45 in the morning. Both David and Daren have already been here from about 8.30 and one or two students are already here making cups of coffee and getting started. I've been here nearly three months now and I'm well on the way with what is one of the main teaching projects in the first half of the year. We started off learning how to use planes, saws and chisels and how to sharpen each of these tools. David took us through a whole series of exercises cutting mitre joints and dovetail joints and planing to achieve exactness. All of this made me feel much more confident with how to use a bench plane and how to sharpen and use a set of bench chisels.
It seems to be all about accuracy and planning, cutting, marking to a very high degree of exactness and slowly I'm getting the hang of doing that. I'm now making a cabinet makers workbench which will be the best cabinet makers workbench in the world. The top is Maple, the legs are Iroko and it will be made to workshop standards. Infact, everything we do here is to standard. We start off with simple stuff then move on to more tricky stuff when we have got the hang of it. I've done the morning in the machine shop. Daren is very hot on safety and have repeatedly shown us how to safely operate the planer, table saw, jointer and the band saw. Later on in the course he will show us how to use the spindle moulder, though I've not got that far yet.
10.30 is "Dimblebie" time. We gather during the tea break in the top workshop. There are five bench rooms in the main workshops and the Dimblebies take place in the largest and lightest room. Sometimes it's David, sometimes it's Daren, doing the Dimblebie. David tends to talk about design, marketing, and business management, and one of the best series of Dimblebies he's done is a series that lasts nearly two weeks that covered his work right from Art School to present day including bankruptcy and rebuilding a business from nothing. He uses slides to illustrate the talk and describes the constructional process used in each piece of furniture he displays. Daren talks about technical things like veneering or sharpening a saw, turning a burr on a scraper. Each Dimblebie will be specific and exhaustive. They usually last only about 15 or 20 minutes, when people ask questions they can go on a little bit longer.
Later in the morning, had a visit from David who is supervising my work. We spent about ten minutes talking about how I was going to joint these two pieces of wood together to get a perfect joint. This is a butt joint, but quite a long one, over six feet, and the edges of these two boards have to perfectly match up. They've come off the machine ok, but David wanted me to finely fit the joint with a hand plane, explaining how to slightly hollow the boards in the centre to get a perfect fit. Sometimes he's with me for ten minutes, sometimes less, sometimes there are a group of us around a drawing and he's with us couple of hours. David or Daren, or both, seem to keep an eye on me and see what it is I've got to do, then talk me through the process. If I need further help later I usually go off and find one of them, though I don't always have to because there's usually another student who's started the course only three or four months ahead of me and their knowledge of doing similar stuff is pretty fresh so I may ask one of them.
We know that both, are fair game in both the mornings and the afternoon, but we try to let them get on with making a bit more in the afternoons. Sometimes David is busy with meeting clients or prospective students and sometimes he is away at exhibitions, I then go and find Daren. They seem, pretty regularly to get cover, Duncan Roberts a maker from a nearby workshop, who trained here seems to come in pretty regularly. The workshop officially closes at 6.30, and the machine shop is shut at 6 o'clock, but there seems to be students here working most evenings and most weekends. The arrangement is that we are allowed to use the facilities of the workshop unsupervised provided no machines and power tools are employed. David gets ratty if he comes in on Monday morning and all the milk has been drunk and nobody has swept up, but as long as we treat the place properly, like our own workshop, and lock up, we're able to get on with quite a lot of work outside of normal workshop hours.
One of the things I like about this place is that although the first few months of the course are fairly structured we are allowed to work at our own pace, either going faster or slower than the people we started with. Once we've done the few key teaching projects they have here, we are encouraged to make what pieces of furniture we would like to do. David gets involved then, usually on a one on one level helping you design furniture to include skills that I would want to learn and taking account of what else is happening in the workshop. I think the thing that makes this place different for me is that it's not just a teaching workshop; there is usually furniture being made here that is really inspirational.
Duncan and Daren, are working on furniture for clients and it's fantastic to see these world class pieces of furniture being made while we are here. I came here wanting to see whether I could be more creative. David runs an Art class one some days when we have a model to do life drawing and water-colour painting, he talks about client presentation drawings, perspective and classical proportions, all the time using his own background and experience to feed us with information that hopefully will set our businesses going off successfully
This is a very short year, but it is very full. What we get out of it I think depends a lot on what we are prepared to put in. This is not like a school or a college, it's more like a real workshop, working for 50 weeks a year, not 3 short ten week college terms. A year is a very short time to learn all of the things involved with making furniture, but David and Daren are here to help us make the best of our time in a very full and, hopefully, very productive year.
