The Big Orchard is a close-knit family business in the heart of West Yorkshire. For nearly 40 years we have made professional drawing office equipment, paper storage and specialist lighting and inspection equipment. We sell across the UK and ship worldwide, from a single drawing board for a student to a full classroom or a container load for export.
Our drawing boards, plan chests and light boxes are made by our own team at our factory in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Most products are made to order. Shop products arrive fully assembled, and UK delivery is free.
BEAM is our flagship range of LED light boxes and inspection tables. It comes in sizes from A4 up to 2A0, as bench-top boxes or free-standing light tables. The A2 BEAM gives an edge-to-edge working area of 620 × 440 mm, with 12,000 LUX screen brightness, 5500–6000K pure white light, stepless dimming from 10 to 100% with a memory function, IP64 ingress protection and a 50,000-hour LED life. It is built for quality control and inspection work. Artists, photographers and designers who want a consistent, bright work surface use it too.
Our portable drawing boards and drafting tables are made to see students through college and professionals through their whole career. The A1 Priory counterweight board has 13 angle stages, is delivered fully assembled and comes with a lifetime warranty. We also supply the MDM professional drafting machine, made in Italy by Emme.
Our wooden plan chests are handmade for A0 and A1 paper. Our metal plan chests store drawings flat under lock and key, and you can design your own colour combination in our 3D visualiser. Both suit offices, studios, archives and home workspaces.
We make our own twin column stands.
Orchard boards last for decades, and we help keep them working. We supply spare parts and repair and restore older boards, including new wires, straight edges and replacement weight cups, and we have tracked down handles for superseded plan chest styles. Customers have brought us boards that were 25, 30 and even 37 years old.
We also design and build one-off equipment for specialist jobs. Recent projects include:
Our customers include schools, colleges and universities; students; architects, engineers, designers and artists; photographers; film and television; museums and archives; and manufacturers who need industrial inspection and quality control. We also supply resellers, and have offers for education and government buyers.
When you ring us, you get straight through to our team.
We design products to last for many years, and we repair rather than replace wherever we can. This is the biggest thing we can do to cut waste.
We also plan our delivery routes efficiently and reuse packaging wherever we can.
Call 01924 291333 (+44 1924 291333 from outside the UK) or send us a message. We deliver worldwide.