HOWTO Design a Woodshop Class at i3Detroit

WIP

This is a checklist of what to work through when designing a woodshop class at i3, based on Osama's experiences teaching and taking a variety of classes over the past years.

Goal and Audience

This is most important aspect. Is the primary goal to teach skills or produce a take home project? Check this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/s/bRPi9G5EX1

You can spend an entire day at Woodcraft and elsewhere taking an introductory course on woodworking. You will go home with a perfectly milled square piece of wood. This is very educational but only useful if you wish to pursue woodworking. Conversely, you can attend a woodworking class such as our cutting boards classes where the emphasis is on the experience of designing a board and turning it into a reality. While attendees learn few skills on how to operate a table saw and planar in the process, they are not ready to use these machine completely unsupervised, nor are necessarily interested in pursuing the craft. There is no right or wrong answer, but you must define your target as it'll inform your other decisions about the class.

I've been guilty on more than occasion of trying to do too much in a day. While I have the recipe down for the cutting board classes, other ones are still WIP. We ended several classes either with incomplete projects or staying till after 6pm. I've offered and in some cases continued to work with attendees on the class project after the class is finished, either that same day or on a different day. Being realistic about scope and what can be accomplished in a day, accounting for a class, some mistakes and recovery, breaks, late shows is WIP for me.

Think scale

I've found that classes should not exceed 4-5 people. Despite this, building a project in a class requires different thinking than making your own project:

• Safety: I would not allow attendees to do something I wouldn't allow my kids to do. For instance, how do you get someone who's never used a router to be safe at the router table? What has worked for me is to go first (tradeoff: end up building a project to demonstrate steps, has additional benefits, see below), man the machine exclusively and obsessively when it is being operated (tradeoff: learners may make mistakes elsewhere), taking numerous shallow passes in a round robin fashion (tradeoff: slower progress), being careful with bit selection and operation (tradeoff: more steps, which is again slower progress), and standardizing as much as possible, e.g. two choices of edge profiles (tradeoff: less artistic freedom). None of this is bad, but just explains the inherent tradeoffs necessary to keep attendees safe
• Bottlenecks: This could be either machines or instructor. If everyone is lining up to use a machine or get help from the instructor, it'll slow everyone down. This is partly unavoidable, but finding ways to have attendees get busy in different ways makes for a more entertaining class. I've done a couple of turning classes in the past where we shared a single lathe. These were for take-home projects, so sharing work on the same item wouldn't have made sense. I don't think the format was really workable for a class. Perhaps if people arrived 45 minutes apart, it would have made for a different and better experience.
• Foolproof workflow: Assume that if anything can go wrong, it will. Recent example: if you are producing a thin strip or two for miter splines, making things for a one off is different than if you need to produce a dozen or more. We end up needing quite a few strips due to class size and waste/mistakes when cutting them at the band-saw. This example and others have led me to produce several jigs that I may not need otherwise. I spend a lot of time trying to come up with an optimal workflow, and tweak it as we go along
• Mistakes: Everyone will make some mistakes. How do you help attendees recover? How do you keep the class going, especially if it is centered around a single project? What has worked for me is to make a project along with everyone else, and give it away if an attendee makes a mistake that completely ruins their project so they continue the class. In other cases, I tried to improvise a recovery step, but not always successfully.
• Customization: Finding an appropriate tradeoff where attendees can make special requests vs keeping everything standard should also be thought out. E.g. when making boxes, we use the same wood and build the same dimensions. This helps with setup such as stop blocks and router table. However, I allow attendees to customize where they want miter splines. We make the same style lid, but I provided a choice of routing profiles and handle designs. I've had attendees try to customize too much, which slows the class down. Finding the appropriate balance gets tricky

Supplies

Knowing what to buy and where to source materials is critical for having a repeatable predictable class schedule with happy outcomes for everyone. Some of this goes back to the first point above about the audience. If your attendees pay $$$ and show up to a class expecting to take home a keepsake box, it shouldn't be made from Pine or even Red Oak, IMHO. I started out building with Pine but abandoned the idea. The additional cost to produce something worthwhile seems like a better option for most attendees. In all cases, I purchase wood ahead of time for all attendees so we can have a consistent experience.

This also entails taking responsibility for some consumables and carrying extra, for instance: packing a bunch of masks for sanding just in case we cannot find any at the space, always having own bottle of Titebond type-3, making sure there is sandpaper in the required grits and so on. I've been in other workshops where instructors had their own supply cabinets, but implementing this in a space like i3 brings its own challenges.

Storage and operating at i3

Being mindful of others at i3 is important. For instance, alternating on weekends where expansion isn't happening helps. Giving plenty of heads-up notice and finding ways to share the woodshop is critical to making sure nobody feels left out.

Storage is always a challenge. We can usually store projects overnight with no problem. Storing projects for longer (e.g. a week) would be challenging. Additionally, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to store all the jigs and other supplies that I purchase for classes. Figuring this out is still WIP.

I keep a close eye on the woodshop slack channel ahead of classes and will often show up to make sure everything is in order. Tim and others are great at keeping machines in operational order. Keeping an eye out for where we can solve bottlenecks is important. For instance, we added a couple of sanders tucked away for cutting board classes. That ensures we don't end up trying to run the class with only a couple of operational ones.

Finishing

Figuring out what to do here is still WIP. Sanding properly and finishing takes time. With classes like cutting boards, finishing is integral to the class so we spend the second half of the class planing, sanding, and applying finish. With other projects, it is less clear where to draw the line.

Registration and Pricing

Generally I refuse to run classes without Eventbrite registration. People tend to be far more committed when they put down $$$ to attend a class, and Eventbrite is very helpful in that regard. The additional fees are relatively minor.

Pricing a class can be difficult. We are using numerous consumables in the shop on top of wood itself, so woodshop classes are never going to be free or cheap. I shoot for 50-75% of the price of a comparable class at commercial places like Woodcraft and Rockler. Having different pricing for members vs non-members makes sense as members are already paying a monthly fee. However, I've found that some claim to be members when they're not in fact paying members, at least as per CRM. This causes awkward conversations. I haven't found a solution to this issue yet.

The ideal class size is 3-5 attendees. This can likely go up if there are more instructors and we have multiple stations but I've not done that yet. I first pilot a class with 2-3 people, typically from i3, before advertising it outside. This givens me feedback on whether we have a workable workflow and where the pain points might be.

Both commercial spaces and makerspaces add a clause that a class may be rescheduled if there aren't enough attendees. So far that hasn't happened but we should add such a clause to our classes.

I've found it helpful to create a Wiki page for every class. This is useful for record-keeping. I also build and email the page to the attendees ahead of time so they have an idea what to expect. Recently I started adding classes to EventBrite myself, and am developing a nice template in the process with various FAQs that I can just clone to new instances.