School Discounts at Timberbits
10% off, purchase orders on 30 day terms, and free project guides for the workshop.
Schools get 10% off at Timberbits. It sits on your profile and comes off automatically at checkout on eligible items, so there is no code to remember and nothing to claim afterwards. You need a profile registered with a school or government email address, the school address as the shipping address, and you need to be logged in before you start the order.
If your school buys on purchase orders, you can do that too, on 30 day terms.
Here is how to set it all up.
The discount at a glance
| Who | Discount | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| A school, through a profile registered with a school or government email address | 10% | Orders placed for the school |
The discount sits on the school profile and covers orders placed for the school.
What the discount excludes
The discount does not apply to:
- Incra, Tormek, Bessey, Vicmarc, Henry Taylor and Hamlet
- Sale and clearance items
- Items already on bulk discount pricing
- Gift vouchers
Everything else is eligible, and that includes Festool. Festool is excluded from our Men's Shed and club discount, but not here. If your department is buying dust extraction, track saws or sanders, the 10% applies.
Start here: register a profile
The discount sits on a customer profile, so the profile has to exist first. Register at timberbits.com/_myacct/register.
Three things matter:
- Use your school or government email address. Most are .edu.au, but not all. A personal address like Gmail or Hotmail will not qualify.
- Use the school address as the shipping address. It needs to match the school the profile is registered to.
- Fill in every field. Full name, address, phone number. If details are missing we cannot set the discount up.
Setting up the discount
- Register the profile with the school email address.
- Call us on 02 9788 3383 or email sales@timberbits.com.
- Tell us the name of the school.
- We add the 10% discount to the profile.
Example email
Subject: School discount setup request
Dear Timberbits team,
[School name] would like the 10% discount applied to our school account.
The school profile is registered as:
Name: Jane Smith
Position: Head of Technology
School: [school name]
Email: jane.smith@[school].nsw.edu.au
Phone: 02 1234 5678
School address (also the shipping address): [address]Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your position]
[School name]
Paying by purchase order
If your school orders on purchase orders rather than by card, send the PO to sales@timberbits.com. Payment terms are 30 days.
Create a quote first and put the quote number on the purchase order. It is not compulsory, but it is worth the two minutes. The quote locks in the items, the quantities and the prices with the discount already applied, so the PO your finance office approves matches the order we pick, and nothing bounces back for a price query halfway through term.
You can build the quote yourself from your account. This short video walks through it: how to create a quote.
Ordering for a class
A few things worth knowing when you are buying for a class.
Order earlier than feels necessary. Materials that arrive in week 4 of a term you planned around week 2 are a problem no discount fixes.
Buy the class pack, not 24 individual kits. The pen making bundles are built for exactly this. The Fancy Slimline Pen Builder Pack is 20 kits with bushings and backup tubes, which covers a class with spares for the ones that do not survive first contact. The Bulk Starter Blank Pack gives you 25 blanks across five timbers for practice runs.
Check your mandrel taper before you order. The Pen Kit Beginner's Set comes in MT1 and MT2 to suit different lathes. If you are not sure which your workshop lathes take, our guide on working out whether you have MT1 or MT2 walks through how to check. Ordering the wrong one is the most common mix-up we see.
Order spare tubes and blanks. Students crack blanks. It is part of learning to drill. Spares mean a student keeps going instead of watching.
The full range is at Pen Turning Starter Sets and Bundles.
Free guides you can use in class
Two of our workshop guides are free to download, print and hand out. No sign-up, no email capture.
The Complete Pen Maker's Guide covers the full build, from cutting the blank through to pressing the components in. It is written for someone making their first pen, so it assumes a lathe and not much else. The troubleshooting section is the useful bit for a classroom: why a pen comes out oval, why components do not fit, why the mechanism will not extend the refill. Those are the questions you will get asked, and having the answers on a page beats fielding them one at a time across six lathes.
The Thin CA Finishing Guide covers the high gloss finish in full. Worth knowing before you plan around it: the method runs to around 20 coats and wet sanding through to 12,000 grit, which is more than most single periods allow. Plenty of teachers run a friction polish in class and save the CA method for students who want to take it further.
Kit instructions holds the instruction sheet for every pen kit and project kit we sell. Each kit has its own assembly order and its own drill bit and bushing sizes, so the sheet matters more than it looks. Print the one for the kit you are running and put a copy at each station. It saves the same question being asked twenty four times.
One note on the pen making guide. It is written for one maker at one lathe with the tools to hand. A class of 24 on six lathes runs it as a rotation instead, with blank cutting, drilling and assembly happening off the lathes while others turn. The sequence in the guide still holds, it just gets spread across stations.
Using your discount
Log in before you start the order. The discount applies at checkout on eligible items. If you are not logged in, it will not come off.
Not sure what to order, or how to run the project?
Tell us what you are trying to teach and we will help you work out what to buy. That might be how many kits a class of 24 actually needs, which blanks drill cleanly for beginners, what to order as spares, or whether a project will fit the periods you have. If you are planning something and want a second opinion before the PO goes in, send it through.
Call 02 9788 3383, email sales@timberbits.com, or send us a message through the contact form.
Teaching something you have not done yourself?
It is a common spot to be in. You are handed the workshop, or the syllabus shifts, and you are teaching a skill you have never had time to properly learn.
Wood Academy is our teaching workshop, and it is open to teachers as well as students. Classes are hands on and taught at the bench, one step at a time, covering pen turning and woodturning, box making and joinery, and machinery use. Plenty of teachers come through to get a skill under their own hands before they put a class on it, and a day at the bench is worth more than any amount of reading.
Have a look at what is running at Wood Academy.
Why we do it
School workshops are where most people meet a lathe for the first time. A student who finishes a pen they are proud of remembers it. Cheaper materials mean more students get that go, and more teachers can afford to run the project again next year.
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