Hi Steve
Sorry for taking a few days to respond---we went camping over the weekend and I just logged on. You just asked me about one of my favorite things in the world, and I have to intentionally limit myself.
When I was 15, I wanted to go to Berklee to study guitar. The local guitar shop hosted Taylor Guitar Clinics at least every other month and introduced me to fingerstyle guitar. I really wanted a "great" steel string (this has become a very relative term). Couldn't afford one. At some point during the summer that year between 9th and 10th grade, I went to Alta Vista and searched for guitar making. The rest is history, really. I started at least five before finally finishing one. I spend at least an hour a day talking about lutherie on forums, with mentors, or in real life. My friend apprenticed under a classical guitar maker in Germany and teaches a guitarmaking woodshop class for a local charter school. I was able to help him out last year. So much fun. These were 5-8th graders, and he had them doing things I never thought possible.
I focus on acoustic steel string guitars, but I've done a few amps, a few electric guitars, and a few drum kits, too.
What kind of music do you play? I played in the jazz band through college, but I went to a small private school that focused on choral baroque, so it wasn't anything great. I started taking lessons again in Jan as a mental get away, and finally got started in fingerstyle 15 years later. We started with a few simple celtic pieces to get my fingers moving again, and we're working on a few Christmas pieces now.
I wish I had better pictures of my work. I take quite a few during the process, but not many of them completed.
This is my second. A mahogany and lutz spruce OM-sized guitar.
My most recent. This has a lutz spruce top and tiger myrtle back and sides. I'm very proud of this one, tonally. It has a very present low end and warm, focused trebles that are pretty even up the fretboard.
The project I'm working on now in a shared "makerspace" shop I belong to. My wife asked me to make this for her one day when I had a set of koa down to admire. The back and sides will be the koa I had down that day, with a redwood soundboard. It's an original design (previously all of my guitars used Jeff Traugott's "Model R" shape, which he traced for me one afternoon in his shop and gave me his blessing to use), and I'm being mentored through it by someone who's guitars I very much want to emulate.