Located in Allen Park, Michigan, a town established in the shadows of Detroit’s towering automotive producers, my shop is my own little manufacturing oasis. Over the years, it has gone through quite a few incarnations while always maintaining the same close-to-home, personal feel. I don’t have a production line or any employees, and I think that is reflected in the quality and consistency of my instruments.
Every instrument that I produce is built from start to finish within the confines of these walls. I’ve developed my own building process that you can follow through my build journal as well as some older tutorial blog posts that I’ve written in the past. Since all of my instruments are custom built, there is no real typical process; the requirements of my clients dictate how each instrument will be produced.
While I don’t generally build replicas of existing guitars, I have from time to time created instruments inspired by famous designs. There are a lot of vintage-style guitars that people tend to gravitate towards, but that also suffer from some rather crippling time-revealed design flaws. I try to correct on these flaws by using new technology to improve the existing concepts without losing the soul of the original design. Reliability and playability are important in every instrument I build, and sacrificing these to maintain a “traditional” build process defeats the purpose of having a custom-built instrument.
My goal is to take the instrument that you have in your head and work with you to translate it into a high quality, great sounding instrument that will inspire your playing for years to come.