Background

A few years ago I was in the market for a new guitar and, like many of you, was very particular about what I was looking for. Although I love many factory guitars and still own a few, no factories made what I wanted. I started doing some research and discovered custom luthiery.

Having worked in the 80s as a carpenter, I decided to build the guitar I wanted myself. While that guitar certainly had some flaws I was amazed at how much I liked it. What's more, I was amazed at how much my friends liked it.

As often happens serendipity had its way with me. I had been in the airline industry since the 80s working as a pilot for a major airline based near my home in Pennsylvania. In early 2005 I learned I would be furloughed for the third time and a business was born.

My barn, which houses my shop, was built around 1815. The barn was rebuilt completely in 1999. In the summer of 2005 I began to upgrade my shop and outfit it with the specialty tools needed for luthiery. My shop is now temperature and humidity controlled which allows for a stable environment, a necessary ingredient for working with guitars.

I'm fond of traditional guitars but I'm not a purist. I'll use whatever technology seems to be the best for a given task. I use white, yellow, epoxy, super and hide glues, each being suited for certain tasks. I own a dozen hand planes but I use power tools when I can to improve quality and consistency.

My design philosphy is fairly simple:

• I build guitars that I would like to have myself and have a passion for. I believe you have to be passionate about what you're producing or you end up building widgets with the focus on making money rather than guitars. If you're bored it shows.
• The guitar is a system that produces sound according to the laws of physics. If I've made a design decision it's usually based on that theory.
• Playability is an extremely important yet often overlooked facet of guitar building, one which most factories cannot afford to optimize. The absolute maximization of playability is one of my most important goals.

As an example, I use a bolt-on neck system. This allows me to do a neck reset in an hour or two without removing frets, steaming the dovetail, adding shims to recreate a new dovetail, hammering in a new fret, leveling that fret, etc. This allows me to adjust the action on one of my guitars easily if the wood has settled or shifted (as all guitars do to some extent over time) and have it back to the musician quickly at a fraction of the cost of a dovetail neck reset. In fact, the first neck reset on one of my guitars, if ever needed, is free. Some may argue that there is a difference acoustically between the two systems but, according to physics, there just isn't.

I do my own finishing. I enjoy the process and I have control over a very important component of the guitar. I use traditional nitrocellulose lacquer and apply 6 to 8 coats to the top and 10 to 12 coats to the rest of the guitar. The guitar is then wet-sanded and buffed to a high-gloss finish.

I believe my guitars speak for themselves and I hope you get a chance to play one.