John Lloyd Fine Furniture

This course is designed as a practical introduction to working on and restoring antique furniture and will cover many of the main areas and techniques required for repair and refinishing. Ideally students will have some woodworking experience or have attended our ‘Sharpening and Tuning’ course, so that structural repairs and splices etc. can be attempted with confidence. This course is, however, equally relevant for the complete beginner who can use the course to enter the world of furniture restoration and gain the confidence of working on their own furniture in...

If you have any sort of urge to move on from straight lines and get a few curves into your woodworking designs, Laminating is going to be the vital technique that you will need to master. In essence, laminating is a pretty simple concept, after all it’s just combining thin bits of wood with glue and holding them in the desired shape until the glue has set. As with most simple things though, there are tricks and techniques that will give you a head start and guarantee success. Moulds &...

The Additional Skills Week is the perfect follow-on course to the Skills Week or Skills Weekend, if you have the basic skills under your belt, this will give you the chance to review and refine those critical cabinetmaking elements of planing, sawing and chiselling. We will then build on those skills with some new techniques, including some laminating and veneering, to make an elegant dovetailed jewellery box. The cornerstone of all cabinetmaking is accurate planing, a little revision of basic technique, some gossamer thin shavings, will be followed by preparation...

You will learn: The fundamentals of cabinet-making will be covered, including the following: • Planing techniques, dealing with ‘wind’ and ‘cupping’, flattening wide boards and squaring narrow edges • Preparing a ‘face side’ and ‘face edge’ • Using shooting-boards to plane narrow edges • Using squares and gauges • Cutting and planing timber to a fine tolerance • Exercises to develop the effective use of saws and chisels • Setting out and cutting accurate joints Tools A basic set of prepared tools will be provided for the duration of the...

This is not just cutting dovetails for sake of it, it’s more about training your hands and learning core cabinetmaking skills. Cutting dovetails happens to be a very good way of judging how you’re progressing in this quest which ultimately just relies on good, solid technique and an in-depth understanding of the process and the tools that are required for success. Having said that though, if you make furniture, it doesn’t matter how wonderful the design is, or how perfectly the veneers have been matched, if there’s a drawer to...

This course is appropriate for both the complete beginner, and the more experienced restorer or furniture maker, who is perhaps lacking in confidence, or would like to look at a new approach to an old subject. Whilst this course is described as “Traditional” hand finishing, it is in fact hand finishing using mainly traditional materials, but with an up-to-date slant. The methods that John teaches for ‘French Polishing’ use simplified techniques which have evolved in our workshops over the years and make the process very approachable and less confusing. All...

Time to make your first piece of furniture! Or, perhaps, time to make your first accurate, crisp, precisely-made, piece of furniture. This is a great follow-on course from ‘Skills Week’ but will also happily stand alone if you have at least a little woodworking experience. Successful furniture making is based on good design, well thought out construction, and accurate execution of all the many components and joints that will be brought together to create, not just an elegant piece of furniture, but an elegant piece of furniture that doesn’t fall...

The Cabinetmaking Skills Week is the course you’ve been waiting for. If you’re a complete beginner this will give you the perfect grounding; if you’ve been woodworking for a while, this will be a great tune-up, sorting out any bad habits and reinforcing fundamental skills. Everything in Woodwork is based on Sharpening so this is the initial focus. You must have a sharpening system at your fingertips that works for you; we will look at angles, the exotic and not so exotic steels used for blades, high speed grinders, water-cooled...

This course is aimed at the woodworker who may have some experience but who wishes to learn how to tune or ‘fettle’ a basic woodworking tool-kit and how to sharpen blades to ‘razor sharp’ using a combination of grinder and bench stones. If you have never experienced the joy of working to very fine tolerances, using a plane that is well set up, with a razor sharp blade, this course will be a revelation! The main purpose of this course is to emerge with a set of tuned/sharp tools that...

This is the unique opportunity to acquire the critical skill-sets that are required to make exceptional furniture to a professional standard in the shortest time possible. Maximum Learning ~ Minimum Time ~ Affordable Price Although this course is perfect for the absolute beginner it is also completely suitable for the keen amateur or professional who has been working with wood for many years but who wants to raise their game to make high quality furniture. Whatever level or experience you might have, the starting point will be the same, you...

No, actually there’s nothing wrong with veneer – this is not a cheap alternative to ’Real Wood’, Veneer is your big opportunity to make beautiful, decorative things using a vast selection of beautiful, sometimes outrageous, different woods from all over the world. Veneer allows large projects to maintain consistent colour and figure throughout, and the production of dimensionally stable panels that won’t be tempted to fight with any solid wood components in the near vicinity. In short, Veneer opens up a whole new world of woodworking opportunities, both structural and...

Although we spend a lot of time and energy perfecting our ‘Vital Cabinetmaking Hand Skills’, when making things from wood, we also need some ‘Vital Cabinetmaking Jigs’ to help us in our quest for consistent precision and accuracy. There are also some ‘Really Useful Tools’ that, apart from being ‘Really Useful’, often aren’t available to buy, and in any case, they’re fun to make and really rewarding to use. Included in this course is our ‘Ultimate End Grain Shooting Board’, this jig has been tweaked and refined over almost 30...

The main elements covered for each machine will include safe working practices, adjusting/setting up, choice of blade & blade changing, jigs and dust extraction: Band-saw Dimensioning timber components Cutting dovetails, circles etc. Design & use of a point fence Cutting veneers Cutting tenons Table-saw with sliding table Dimensioning veneered board material using the scoring unit Cross cutting and cutting short lengths using the sliding table Removing a waney edge Cutting timber to dimension using the rip fence Planer-thicknesser Surface planing techniques to remove wind, cupping etc. Using the fence to...