I wasn't too sure if I was part of that bunch of bastards that were mentioned by Kiwigeo so had a good look at my posts since I joined, 20 posts over three years, most of them in the last few months and no intro post in there, I guess I've been drinking the p*ss after all
so here goes.Where to start... originally from Montreal, Canada, life-long woodworker, did carpentry and cabinet making in high school, started playing guitar at 13, bought my first three book on lutherie in '86-'87 (Bill Foley's, Roger Siminoff's -both useless- and Melvyn Hiscocks' -amazing!) However I didn't use them until '97 when I built a new Northern Ash body for a '74 strat neck I had, its now officially the heaviest strat in the world! I was hooked on lutherie as soon as I built that body but life went on and I didn't have a chance to build anything else until I started my first scratch build, a 5 string bass in '03. I haven't stopped since then. At first I was only doing one instrument per year though.
I Migrated to Australia in '05 and wanted to start selling basses to fund my hobby, I had no tools besides a router and drill at this point. So sold my first custom to a guy in the US in '05-'06, he wanted a 9 string bass, I gave him a price he couldn't refuse, I was definitely very keen on the challenge of doing something like that. In between all that I was hanging out on Talkbass and the Ubeaut woodwork forum, went to a couple of get togethers in Brisbane of TB members where I showed the 9 string and got a job building a 6 string fanned bass from there. That's about the time I figured out that forums are a great way to promote yourself and that my target market, Australia, didn't have a proper bass forum so I started ozbassforum.com I guess the rest is history by now. I had sold two customs before Ozbass and that was really hard to do, lots of quotes, lots of emails and lots of disappointments. The forum changed all that since I could show my stuff to local guys.
The bass lutherie thing has been a full time job away from work for almost 4 years now. For the first two years every single week-ends were used for builds as was practically every vacation, sometimes I had to take time off work to finish instruments, it got to be a bit too much so I slowed right down for the last year or so. The original dream of being a full time luthier lost its glamour pretty fast, especially a bass luthier, the market for bassists must be like a 1/10th of the guitar market, no way I could earn a decent salary from it and it's majorly stressful. So I came to the realisation last year that my regular day job its pretty darn good
its great to have someone pay me for doing not very much at all on a day to day basis 
I work in engineering.... I finally decided I needed a bit of ME time after 4 years of major stress and am taking a lutherie sabbatical year for '13, I've stopped taking orders and will start again at the end of 2013, in the meantime I'm certainly not going to quit lutherie as I love that stuff, it relaxes me big time when I work on it (only when I'm late for orders I get stressed) I'm planning on building a dreadnaught for fun this year and maybe try an acoustic bass too so I'm in the process of getting geared up for building acoustics after 9 years of just doing electrics. I've already bought about 6 books on the subject + several videos, so I'm certainly well prepared. I love the Robbie O'Brien dowloadable course, I pretty much paid and downloaded the chapters I wanted to see, no point in paying for fretting/neck learning material. I also bought radiuses dishes from stewmac - can't be stuffed doing them myself- and built a go bar deck, got the gear for building a few more jigs and stuff.Anyway, that's the story so far stay tuned for an acoustic build in the new year, too busy finishing off 3 basses right now
, I'm off to the barbie
