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I'm Don Parker. I'm a 57 year old lawyer in Charleston, West Virginia. You can Google me to get professional info.

My wife is a Presbyterian pastor with a Doctor of Ministry in Worship and the Arts. My daughter works at an art museum. I am not a great guitarist, but I play well enough to back up my own singing (and that of others), which is my main artistic endeavor (other than building guitars). I play/sing a lot of church music these days, but have done plenty of secular music over the decades, and still have the occasional opportunity to do so. The church music thing is a steady stream; secular stuff is here and there.

I built my first acoustic guitar in 1996. I just now finished #8. It doesn't take me over 3 years to build a guitar; I just get busy with other things (work, family stuff, church stuff) and go through long stretches of not building. But I think that is more of a past condition; I see myself picking up the pace from here on out.

I've lived in Kentucky; Indiana; California (LA South Bay); London, UK; Washington, DC; and Wild, Wonderful West Virginia. I will likely never retire, but I can see slowing down (or dying) after another two decades of doing what I'm doing.

I have not sold any guitars yet, but I can see myself getting there in the next few years. I will never expect to make anything other than a little spare money from this very engaging hobby. My main goals are to make things that are useful and beautiful, and that will outlive me. There are worse ways to spend one's free time.

Grew up in Battle Creek, went to college in Ann Arbor, left in '90 and lived in the south ever since.

30 years as a Manufacturing Engineer, primarily metal cutting / CNC work including a stint running my own shop. Played guitar since college. Started fooling more with woodwork instead of metalwork at home six years ago when we moved to TN. Got interested in building my own acoustic, 6 guitars later, here I am working on #7.

I'm with Ken above re: finishing. When I built motorcycles, whether to race or a custom, I always had someone else do paint and body. It's probably why building an electric doesn't interest me - it's mostly about the paint and body, and less about the woodwork.

Edit - Chuck Skarsaune, 54, married to the right one this time for going on six years.

Ha! Similar to me Colin but I'm still in the patch. I build very slowly with only about 30 instruments under my belt after almost 20 years but have gotten a new drive and plan to do a lot more volume wise. I admire the work you put out.

Brad Goodman
Goodman Guitars “They’re good man.”
61 years young
Married for 34 years (two of the best years of my life..)
Seven kids – yes,same wife

My lifelong passion/love affair with Guitars started when I was about 10 years old. I found an old Harmony guitar that was broken and took the tuners off and used them for my first build which was a triangular shaped plywood and pine guitar with a 2 x 4 neck which I nailed on.
As soon as I strung it up on the front lawn of my house the string tension just pulled a neck off- that was the first in a long,long ,long ,long line of failures.
Then when I was 14 years old I was taking guitar lessons from this guy who started repairing and building Guitars and I ended up working for him seven days a week( I only went to school half a day)for four years.

When I was 21 I owned an antique store and kitchen remodeling store.
After that I was a tile man and then I was a superintendent for a house building company.

For the last 20 years I have been a Building Inspector for a Municipality. I am about to retire in three months and 16 days 22 hours and 14 minutes- but who’s counting?
Throughout all this I have been building and repairing Guitars on a professional level.

I consider myself a "traditional" builder.
I build arch tops, flat tops both X braced and ladder braced, nylon string and solid body guitars.
I sell my guitars through music stores and direct to customers mostly by word of mouth.

When I moved into my current house 28 years ago I built my dream (nightmare? )Shop .I am mostly a power tool guy, I have a lot of them -big ones.
Now that I am retiring I will supplement my income building and repairing guitars but I won’t have to “Do it on the side” which is really nice can’t wait!

I really enjoy this Forum.. There is very little "bickering" compared to other forums I have been on and I feel there is a mutual respect no matter the skill level of the person.

The two most important techniques I have learned here years ago that have vastly helped my building are go-bars and concave sanding dishes.


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Wow... this is a lot to read through. I admit, I had to skim a lot of it cuz... well, there's a LOT of it. I'll try to be brief.

I'm about to turn 50, and have spent the last 30 years in IT from networks, to development to management and executive stuff. A couple years ago I dumped the "career" to find a work from home programming job that has flexibility and pay. This has allowed me to get into making guitars after over 25 years of doing furniture as a hobby.

My amazing wife supports all my madness, and my two daughters help with the guitar business (one is my artist/designer and the other is marketing/sales/accounting). We can be found at www.vineguitars.com. Or, more interestingly @vineguitars on Instagram or my personal feed at @terrencemitchell, where I post progress on current builds for our customers.

I've been serving my current local church for 16 years, mostly on the platform as a worship team member, thought I did run FOH for some years and had a recording studio back in the day. I'm a total hack at guitar playing, but if I practice a good bit I can absolutely destroy a saxophone solo, which has been my primary instrument for 35 years.

Interesting thread...

My name is Brad Combs and I'm a... nope - not gonna do it.

I'm 45 this Saturday and live in Cincinnati, OH. My wife is super supportive of my shop time. My son is a teenager now so there's all that goes into having a teenage young man in the house.

I've spent the majority of my professional career building embedded systems for all sorts of industries. The day job is currently Microsoft for the last 14 years and before that I co-owned an embedded systems company primarily working in the trade show and museum industry. My focus today is AI and enabling companies to build AI solutions, so you can partially blame me when you're bowing down to your AI overlords in the not so distant future.

How I got here - When I was around 35 I set a few goals for myself to achieve before turning 40. One was to learn to play the guitar. I took lessons for around 4-5 years. A few years into taking lessons I got interested in the idea of making instruments. My father is a carpenter so I've been around tools my whole life and I'm a maker at heart so thought - I could do that! So I bought a ukulele kit and glued it together with my son. I then built a kit guitar from an LMI kit. The rest is history. I'm hording tools, wood and jigs and building in the evenings and on weekends. I've built a number of guitars and uke's over the years and continue to learn and build all while having a great time. I'm spending some time learning CNC at the moment which will keep me entertained for quite a while I'm sure.

Like Brad G said above, the OLF is a good place to learn and much much less noise than Facebook groups, etc...

Brad

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I'm Ed Haney. I'll turn 69 in 10 days. Hard to believe I joined this forum in 2009.

I took the last 5 years off from building guitars (never thought I'd be away that long - 2015 to 2020) to do some real estate investing in rental houses for retirement income.

When I turned 60 in 2012 I gave my retirement notice to my engineering/construction employer. But they asked me work part time and I did so, a couple of days a week, until 2016. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering which I never practiced. However I did practice general engineering and managed engineering and construction work for many years. I also did some general management work. Technical things come easy for me and I enjoy working with tools and my hands. I'm detail oriented as most of us are.

I've been married to the same woman for almost 39 years. She is very supportive of my guitar building hobby. I have a daughter who is married in Dallas with a great husband and 2 young boys, my grandsons. My son is almost 36 and I have been working with him to teach him the real estate business so he can do most of the heavy lifting from now on (I hope please Lord!). He has an almost 5 year daughter and they live with us. She loves to go into my shop. So my household is busy.

I started playing guitar in college and have mostly played in church over the last 35 years. I still really enjoy playing. When I turned 50 I got reenergized in learning and started focusing on fingerstyle. I only owed 2 guitars then - my first guitar which was a cheap Yamaha FG-200 and a 1969 Martin D35. I started buying guitars to try and then selling and buying something else. I bought about 65 guitars over a 10 year period and sold 59 of them. All of them needed to be setup and some needed repair work. So slowly, out of necessity, I learned more about guitars than just how to play one. I enjoyed working on them and decided I wanted to build one. First I had to build a small shop in my garage since I had no good place to work. Then I bought tools and built jigs and fixtures and built my first guitar, a scratch build where Matt Jacobs and I re-sawed the mahogany wood. I've never built a kit.

This forum has been extremely valuable to me and I appreciate all the knowledge I've acquired from the kind people here. There are so many very smart giving people here that I am thankful for.

So thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

My day job is “rocket scientist”. I support a well known missile program. I help make sure the bad guys have one last oh crap memory. I’ll not say anymore about that then this. I build and play guitars because I’m massively artistic and creative. My grandparents made sure I would be able to support myself. Science interests me. But creating interests me just as much. Something like an engineer with a creative problem.

I will add that this site has Been the most effective therapy I have ever had. I discovered my inner creative here. And so many helped me. Forever grateful.

Hi. I’m usually reluctant to share much online but I feel it’s only polite to chime in here and at least introduce myself and offer my thanks to the terrific people on this forum who’ve helped me out.

I’m a retired (since 2015) electronics engineer in eastern Massachusetts. I’ve hacked around at playing the guitar since the late 1960s but I’ve never been very good at it. Ownership of antique houses and admiration for fine design and craftsmanship led me into woodworking which I’ve slowly learned and practiced for a few decades. Craving a creative outlet in midlife, my interest in music and guitars re-emerged and in planning for retirement I aimed to put my interests together in building and playing guitars. I’ve been taking lessons (playing) from a friend and fellow builder who is a fine musician and excellent teacher as well as a fine instrument maker. Thanks to those lessons I feel I’m finally learning to really play which enhances the enjoyment of building immensely. I’ve also connected with New England Luthiers where I’ve met some really great builders, some of whom are well known here, and have learned a lot from them and just enjoyed the heck out of the social aspect.

So far I have built guitars only for myself but I expect some of them to find their way out of my household at some point, if only to make space for more. I’ve done a few repairs for friends and folks who couldn’t afford to pay for repairs and I’ve fixed up a few eBay acquisitions for donation to good causes. I hope to do more of that, maybe donating some of my builds.

Around here I’m much more likely to post questions than answers (so many of you know much more than I do) and I read the forum regularly and learn a ton so I sincerely thank you all for sharing what you know.

-Bob

I first posted to this tread http://luthiersforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=16360 in 2008, when I was 58. Now 71, retired from my day job in 2014.

I joined the OLF as burbank in 2005, when I built my first, an EIR OM from an LMI kit, thinking I would save some money. The guitar was a success, but the saving was a failure. But I did end up with a shop full of tools.

I had done instrument repairs in the 70s to get through school, then worked for Apple in Silicon Valley for 11 years, doing systems integration and machine design for Manufacturing R & D, mostly working on assembly robots. I was part of a layoff of 4,000 when they sent manufacturing overseas about the time I met my wife, so I moved up here to Eastern Washington where she has a good job and I had none. We lived in Japan for a year, then when we returned, I got a job running a computer lab for a small university here, retired from there after 15 years.

I'm currently working on guitar # 30 or so. Sold most of them locally, a few across the pond. I started out with steel string and switched to classicals about three years ago. Currently designing a new rosette for a Torres style classical for a professor of music, who used to review guitars and write for Acoustic Guitar Magazine. He seems to think I know what I'm doing. I hope I don't prove him wrong.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Hi. I'm Herry Tze. I live in Malang-Indonesia. I'll turn 59 next July. I have a wife and 1 daughter married and have 2 grandchild (5 years boy and almost 3 years girl) also 1 son still studying at China. I'm here from Aug 2010. I'm Pastor but also coffee roaster as my business. I dont play guitar, but I can play conga, harmonica and percusion in my church. I've done my #8 guitar (any model guitar) and now building 9th just a hobby. I'm enthusiast in guitar building or wood working. Cannot fast to build guitar because of busy time for a business and church service, but I enjoy this life. And this OLF forum very great fun for me.
Thanks.
Herry Tze.

Hey ya'll I are James Lindley From Southern Illinois . Grew up in Mississippi n/e corner and left for a two week vacation in 78 ...... still on vacation i guess. 60 yrs old 2 kids 4 grandkids and married 33 years to a wonderful lady who will tell you I am certifiably nuts.. we own a welding, and industrial supply company and i have been building approx 15 yrs now. Hope one day to figure it out.
Like to Golf and drink beer , Better at the latter than the former by a long shot

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