Course: 12 Week Woodworking & Joinery

The IBTC Woodworking & Joinery Skills course is an intensive course focusing on a range of woodworking and joinery skills suitable for everyone, including those with no previous experience.

Forming the foundational element of our 47-week boatbuilding course, the Woodworking & Joinery Skills course is the backbone of our college and the knowledge and skills taught are at the core of our boat builders’ development.

With particular emphasis on learning through practical exercises, you will be instructed on how to:

• Use a wide variety of hand tools
• Identify the different woods used in boatbuilding
• Recognise faults and flaws in timber
• Use adhesives correctly
• Recognise and use appropriate screws and fastenings
• Select woods suitable for specific jobs

Guiding you through the course will be our highly experienced and well respected tutor. Many students comment on how his style encourages them to achieve a very high standard efficiently and effectively.

By the end of the course you will have produced your own:

• Mallet
• Oil stone box
• Spirit level
• Bollow plane
• Oar
• Grating
• Hardwood tool chest (attache case)

Today’s boat builder needs a wide variety of skills. You must understand the proper use of wood and G.R.P. (glass reinforced plastics), and must have an understanding of how engines, plumbing and electrics systems are installed. You must know how to cost your work. You must be aware of new technology and yet be able to repair or restore boats built fifty years ago or more.

Being able to build a boat beautifully is not enough. It may give tremendous self-satisfaction, however, at the end of the day, it must also lead to being able to provide reasonably comfortably for yourself and your family. It is for this reason that the IBTC, uniquely, ensures that its instructors are not only expert in their professions but also have real world proven, successful, experience in the boatbuilding business.

The IBTC Concept of Training Experience has shown that training opportunities limited to just two or three boats is totally insufficient – which is why the IBTC always has a wide variety of boats, both large and small, at different stages of construction at any one time. This ensures that there is always a boat available and at a stage which will enable trainees to build skills in a truly systematic and properly structured way. You do not have to wait for a boat to reach a certain stage of construction before you are able to move on, and you are always able to continue to the next stage of learning once you have satisfactorily completed each exercise. It is a very important concept of IBTC training that the boats built, repaired or restored as training exercises are only worked on whenever they present the opportunity for appropriately timed exercises for students. High standards of accuracy and finish are set from the start of each course. Our concept of training enables our students to cover and learn the wide range of skills in our training programme in the shortest time possible. It ensures, too, that by the end of their course, you will have the ability and confidence to build, repair or restore a boat. Almost all learning is through practical exercises, (learning by doing), with the essential knowledge element fed in by instructors at the relevant moment. This huge amount of practical experience is one of the many reasons why IBTC students remain head and shoulders above others.

On completion of this course many make the decision to progress into the boatshed for our full 47-week Boatbuilding course.

Interested in our Boatbuilding course but not sure if you can commit for a whole year? Get in touch with us to discuss options for doing the course in agreed learning blocks over a timescale that suits you.

Bursaries of up to 50% are now open for UK citizens between the ages 18 to 40. To apply please fill in our bursary form.

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