Craftsman Ave

Our instructor, Arjun, was very knowledgeable, patient and thorough. He gave every student attention and guidance to help us each craft a nice piece of woodwork. I was very happy with my side table and would love to take more classes at his studio.

Arjun seems like a nice guy you would want to grab a beer with, but he was not prepared for the class at all. He was very disorganized and the class was not well structured. For example, we had to cut out joints from various sizes of wood and instead of doing all long pieces at once and then all short pieces at once, limiting the amount of time he had to reset the saw, he went group by group. This meant he constantly had to reset the saw and it took longer than necessary to get that piece of the project done. Also, he forgot some steps and students that had glued their pieces together had to unglue them to complete the missing steps. This all could have been avoided if some minimal planning had gone on before class. There was no prototype of the final project to give his students a visual, instead he talked for an hour about wood. Moreover, he mentioned he was tired because his young child kept him up the night before. He did look really tired. While I have lots of sympathy for that since I have three kids, it was unprofessional to say. And if you are that tired that you can’t plan out the class, then maybe you should have canceled and refunded us back the money. He knows his stuff and I hope he takes some of these suggestions to heart because he can create a wonderful woodworking class in the future. The final project was beautiful and this class can be outstanding with some forethought and lesson planning.

The class is poorly organized, nothing had been prepared in advance. A lot of time was being wasted by the instructor setting up equipment, looking for drills, failing to find charges for drills etc. Meanwhile the students just stand there... We also had to make a trip to Lowe’s because the lumber for our project hadn’t been purchased beforehand. As a result, the class took over 4 hours instead of promised 3. In addition, you can only apply your newly learned skills if you have access to the heavy-duty fancy equipment pros use. I still have no idea how to make a stool if I only have a regular saw, a drill and a hammer. So, the workshop is ok if you just want to get a general idea of how things are done, but it’s not very valuable from a practical perspective and also unnecessarily long.

It was great. Kevin was obviously very knowledgable. And he is a great teacher. He took the time to answer questions and demonstrate and still kept on point with the project. I especially appreciated that he treated us with kindness and was very approachable. Woodworking, especially power tools can be intimidating and he really made me feel safe an supported. He is an empowering teacher which is the best kind there is! Thanks for a great class. I'd love to take another one soon. Monica

The teacher was very engaging, gave us all individual attention, carefully explained the steps, and repeated them when necessary. He made the class fun and informative!

Had a great time. Excellent teacher. George was great, very informative, good-spirited and helpful.

Overall it was pretty fun and informative but it's 4 hours that could be done in 2. Most of the time 4 out of 6 people have to just sit around waiting to use equipment since there is only 1 of each piece of machinery.

The class was fantastic, very hands-on. As other reviews said, it did get a bit bottlenecked for the welding and blowtorch stations, but very informative and fun, all the same.

The teacher was an hour late and smelled of alcohol when he arrived. The class went over by two hours.

I had a ton of fun at the class. Taras (the teacher) was great in helping us explore our ideas both in terms of design and production; in particular I liked the way Taras pointed each one of us to the proper techniques and tools to go from the sketch to the real object. The speaker is now proudly seating on my shelf, it works like a charm.