Who we are... What we do
About the Southwest School of Woodworking
The Southwest School of Woodworking is Arizona’s only comprehensive woodworking school, dedicated to teaching and preserving the principles of craftsmanship through serious, hands-on instruction.
The school was founded in 2013 by a group of professional woodworkers who became concerned about the lack of woodworking education in our high schools and technical schools. We believed that important skills — working with your hands, understanding tools, and building things properly were slowly being lost, and we wanted to help preserve those traditions for future generations.
A Tradition of Craftsmanship
Our director began woodworking as a hobby in the 1970 ‘s while working full-time in the aerospace industry. Over time, that hobby grew into a lifelong passion, eventually leading to the opening of a professional cabinet and furniture shop in 2008.
Visits to local high school woodshops between 2010 and 2012 made it clear just how quickly traditional shop education was disappearing, and the Southwest School of Woodworking grew directly out of those experiences.
We modeled the school after some of the finest woodworking schools in the United States while also drawing inspiration from the great European traditions of craft education, where students learn through hands-on practice, close instruction, and steady development of skill over time.
Hands-On Instruction
Our classes combine traditional hand-tool woodworking with modern machine woodworking. Students learn far more than how to simply complete a project. We stress how to work accurately, safely, and thoughtfully,:
- sharpening a chisel
- tuning a hand plane
- building fine furniture with carefully fitted joinery.
The school operates from a fully equipped professional workshop in Phoenix, Arizona. We keep our class sizes small, with a maximum of nine students, allowing for close individual instruction in a supportive and welcoming environment.
Our students range from complete beginners to serious hobbyists and professional woodworkers looking to refine their skills. While most students come from Arizona and neighboring states, we have also welcomed students from across the country and abroad.
More than anything, our passion is to bring people into the long tradition of craftsmanship, a tradition built on patience, precision, creativity, and pride in making something real with your own hands.
See What Our Students Are Saying...
The heart of our school is our three-part Fundamentals of Traditional Woodworking series, which is designed for beginner or self-taught woodworkers seeking a strong foundation in the tools, methods, and philosophies of our craft.
It focuses on developing hand tool skills and learning to understand the behavior of the wood. Students get hands-on practice in marking out, joinery, assembly, design principles, and more, as they build several small tools and other useful projects.
In Fundamentals II students progress to power tools and learn how to integrate them with hand tools for maximum efficiency. During this class, every student builds a classic bench that incorporates different joinery techniques and allows them to employ their new skills.
Fundamentals III brings together both hand and power tools to give the students a cohesive experience of furniture making. The centerpiece of the class is for each student to work from plans to make a Shaker-style table from solid wood with a dovetailed drawer, mortise-and-tenon aprons, and tapered legs.
Students who complete the full Fundamentals series should have a solid understanding of woodworking principles and will receive a Certificate of Completion to commemorate their achievement.
Outside of our Fundamentals series, we offer a wide range of classes that include everything from short Weekend Workshops to extended Master Classes.
Guest instructors include some of the foremost woodcraft professionals working today, who teach classes in topics including Marquetry, Advanced Veneering, Furniture Design and Construction, Carving, Turning, Finishing, and more.
In addition to skills classes, we offer Project Classes that give students the opportunity to build a more challenging design under the guidance of a professional woodworker.
Our workbench class, for example, features an heirloom style bench with a solid four-inch top that is mortised into the legs, fitted vices, legs with mortised and tenon stretchers, and a tail vise (wagon vise) that incorporates hand-cut condor tails.
The Rocking Chair class allows experienced students to push their skills with features including bent laminations, advanced joinery, complicated fit-ups, and hand-sculpted seat, arms, and rockers.
