Spring 2026
May 18-22

Build a bookcase using pre-industrial artisan techniques in this five-day workshop. Get ready to break a sweat, learn to produce dados, surface finish with hand planes, refine your layout skills, and understand how to use cut nails for case construction. 

Please note: It is important to have reasonable hand strength and physical stamina to be successful in this course. Much of your time will be spent standing, cutting joinery, hand planing, and hand sawing.

Starting with a pile of milled boards, we will work through the entire process of building a bookcase using primarily hand tools in this five-day course. 

With so many woodworking courses, there are large barriers to going home and repeating the project you just built. The need for large, expensive machinery, dust collection, and endless gizmos and gadgets. For professionals, the investment in this equipment makes sense and leads to repeatable efficiency, but for the hobbyist who wants to build their own furnishings, it can be out of reach to have a large shop space and thousands of dollars of equipment. In an age before industrial-level machinery was available to the average consumer, people furnished their own homes with handmade goods that ran the gamut from rustic to refined. Think of this as a course in furniture of necessity or democratic furniture. Casework for the people!

Course Objectives

Working from a set of rough parameters, each student will build their own bookcase. This course relies heavily upon dado and cut nailed joints, which can be applied to a wide range of casework. While this is a project course, we really like to emphasize the process, and we hope this will be the first of many pieces of furniture you make in the future! 

For this class, we will be bringing in a bunch of 4/4 lumber that will be milled and prepped in advance. This allows us to focus on layout, joinery, decorative details, and assembly. Many species work well, but in our area of the world, we like to work with alder, poplar, cherry, beech, and a few others. The exact species selected for this class will depend on the available supply. 

Learning Outcomes

This class is going to be packed with lessons on hand tool woodworking, with a few other side topics introduced throughout. 

• Dimensioning with hand planes 

• Story stick layout 

• Hand-cut joinery 

• Edge detailing and decorative details with hand tools

• Intro to generative geometry 

• Finishing surfaces with handplanes 

• Sharpening and tool setup 

• Discussion and demo of finish options

Tools 

Required:

PTSW will be providing all the tools needed for this course. However, if you have any of your own tools, it is valuable to get comfortable with them, and we can even help with set up and sharpening during the course. Bring along any tools you already have.

Suggested:

Here is the bare bones recommended kit for this project. We’ll be using a few other shared tools, but these will be the most useful: 

• Jack plane 

• Block plane 

• Smoothing plane

• ½” and ¾” bench chisels

• Router plane

• Square (12” combination)

• Joinery back saws (rip and cross cut)

• Panel saw (20” western crosscut handsaw)

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to raphael@ptwoodschool.org.

Prerequisites

Open to All. This course will be fast-paced and physically demanding. It is recommended that you have some basic hand tool practice, such as one of our weekend hand tool classes, but mostly, it is important to have reasonable hand strength and physical stamina. This course includes 48 hours of classroom time, much of which will be spent standing, chopping mortises, hand planing, and hand sawing. For the more experienced folks, it will provide an opportunity to deepen your knowledge and experience with hand tools. If you have questions about whether or not this course is a good fit for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out to raphael@ptwoodschoool.org.

Class Information and Registration

Classes run 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Monday through Friday in Building 315 at Fort Worden. Map
Please read our What to Expect page for general information about the School.
Please also read our Registration Policy.
Please sign up for the waitlist if the course is full.

Class size: 10
Cost: $1,000
Materials Charge: $100