After more than thirty years of working at woodworking for a living…and after having written a dozen books on the subject that have sold more than three-quarters of a million copies…Jim Tolpin is now teaching woodworking for a living at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking located at Fort Worden State Park and Life-Long Learning Center.

 “While my books do impart a good deal of what I’ve learned over the years, I feel its time to get more personal about it. For this reason, I helped found the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. Here I get to talk to students face-to-face and show them hand-to-hand the joys of working with wood.

Now I'm getting a real kick out of showing people how much fun it is to work good wood with really good hand tools into beautiful, functional objects. I decided to call my entry-level furniture-making class: "Experience the Joy of Woodworking" after seeing how delighted people were to discover how quickly and efficently it was to work wood with mostly handtools. All it took was learning a few  basic techniques of sawing, planing and chisel work and some dedicated practice time. One of the main benefits of taking my course at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking is that each student is provided a professional-grade, Swedish-made bench stocked with a complete set of superb hand tools--from Starrett combination squares to Lee Valley planes and chisels to high-quality japanese saws (and even a leather apron!) You need only show up with an interest in learning to create a lovely piece of furniture without making a whole lot of unnecessary and hazardous noise and dust."

The photo on the right is of my last project completed in 2007--an interpetation of a late 1800's "Bow-top" gypsy caravan built in England and once featured in a National Geographic article. I did all the joinery and detail work with hand tools. You can see more pictures by clicking on the "Gypsy Wagons" button at the top of the page.