York College

The Oak By Design joinery team usually has 1 or 2 apprentices working and learning within the team.

They usually work for 4 days in the workshop during term time and have a day learning at York College on the Architectural Joinery Apprenticeship course.

As part of the final third year of the City and Guilds course, the apprentices need to have a basic awareness of a CNC (computer numerical control) machine.

Fortunately, for our apprentices, we have a CNC machine, so they get plenty of the opportunities for ‘on the job’ training.

However, some of the apprentices on the course work for companies that don’t need, or have a CNC machine. Barry, our Operations Manager, was recently approached by Joe Clancy, the Construction Assessor at York College, to ask if we could offer some basic CNC Awareness Training for 3 students whose employers couldn’t offer the training.

We were really pleased to be able to help out, and recently welcomed Dave, Ian and Tom to our workshop, and they spent the morning with the Oak By Design team being shown the CNC machine ‘in action’.

The machine is used for a variety of uses, and can be used to speed up some of the more laborious tasks such as repeatable, complex work, including oak frame components, curved elements and intricate pockets.

We use the CNC for manufacturing certain components, which require multiple precise set ups including external door and window multipoint locking systems.

Barry gave the students a tour of the showroom. Our showroom highlights the majority of oak products that we regularly manufacture. We have a full-size glazed oak sunroom, open oak porch, oak trusses, oak staircase, and RSJ covers, etc.

He then showed them around our workshop, showing the full ‘journey’ of the oak.

We use air dried oak and kiln dried oak for our oak products, and these are stored separately according to the thickness, and the type.

He then showed them how the timbers are selected, how we plane them and which piece of wood working machinery was used, and why. The students obviously already had some knowledge of this, but were interested in the aspects of working with oak.

We use a lot of traditional methods for timber framing, including mortice and tenon joints, together with oak pegs, using dry joints, which don’t therefore require adhesives etc.

Josh, our CNC ‘expert’, gave each of the students the opportunity to use the CNC machine to engrave an oak chopping board for themselves, so they managed some ‘hands on’ work.

Speaking to Joe afterwards, he said that the 3 students had returned to college, quite excited about what the machine was capable of. One had commented, “Joinery is not going to be what we thought it was!”

Joe felt that the morning had given them lots of ammunition for their portfolio of work and that they had thoroughly enjoyed the visit to the workshop, and being able to see the CNC in production, and being able to engrave the boards.

They enjoyed seeing the different elements of the manufacturing process with the different types of oak from their tour of the workshop and showroom with Barry.

He also said they really appreciated learning about the CNC machine itself from Richard, as he had explained everything really clearly and informatively. Possibly a new career in teaching for Richard?