New Boot Camp Courses Teach Woodworking Tools and Techniques

If you’ve taken a course on Popular Woodworking University, you know how much fun it is to learn new skills on this interactive platform. You can watch instructors demonstrate woodworking tools and techniques. You have the option to ask your instructor questions and communicate with fellow students in the course discussions. There’s a gallery in most courses where you can post photos of your projects.

A typical course is between four and eight weeks long, which gives students time to work through the material and build a project along with the instructor. We’ve been thinking that there are some tips and techniques that could be demonstrated in a shorter course, and that’s why we’re launching our new Popular Woodworking Boot Camps this month. These new courses will be one week long and will cover topics like dust collection, work holding, hand drafting and more.

In Hand Drafting with Bill Rainford, you’ll watch videos from Bill’s 2014 webinar.

You’ll get all the same interactive features in these boot camps that are available in our longer courses. You can ask questions, share comments with other students, post and view project photos and get the full course experience in a condensed format.

Boot camps are now available for enrollment, and the first courses start April 15. We have Shooting Boards with Steve Branam, Hand Drafting with Bill Rainford and Dust Collection Systems with Steve Johnson on the schedule. Soon, we’ll be adding boot camps on finishing, work holding, cabinet design, Japanese furniture forms and more.

In Shooting Boards with Steve Branam, you’ll watch video segments from Steve’s recorded webinar that will take you through the basics of building and using shooting boards. When the course is over, you’ll know:

• What a shooting board is and what it does
• Several styles of shooting board and the purpose for each
• What goes into making a shooting board and what materials you should use
• How to shoot end grain, edge grain and miters

Hand Drafting with Bill Rainford will introduce you to the tools and techniques used in manual drafting. Drawing by hand can be fun, fast and is a helpful skill for any woodworker. You’ll watch video excerpts from a recorded webinar and complete several skill-building exercises. We’ve put over two hours of video into this boot camp to give you a complete understanding of basic drafting supplies and skills.

All boot camp courses include discussions, where you can ask questions and share your thoughts with other students.

If you’re getting ready to purchase a dust collector, you’ll want to check out Dust Collection Systems with Steve Johnson. This course covers the basics of how dust collectors work, and will give you a solid understanding of what you need to consider before making a purchase. We’ve built this course from Steve’s March 25 webinar, and in addition to the videos and the PDF of Steve’s presentation, you’ll get a custom decision making template that will help you buy the right dust collector for your shop.

Head over to classes.popularwoodworking.com to see our course catalog and to enroll in one of our new boot camps.