I'm new here so I thought I'd say g'day and tell you a bit about myself - prepare to be fascinated.
I've been playing guitar for 20 years - some electric bust mostly acoustic - and my guitar idols include Tommy Emmanuel, Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges.
Living in Newcastle I spend a lot of my time and money at "Muso's Corner", which is where I first met the now retired luthier Jim Williams. He used to work at the store as a guitar repairer I believe. I chatted to/pestered Jim occasionally and played a few of his guitars, but it was his lutherie book that got me interested in building guitars. So 15 years ago I bought a bunch of timber from Gillet Guitars, cobbled together some tools and got started on my first guitar.
Then of course I had children and my lutherie career came to a screaming halt.
15 years later a mate of mine told me about the Australian Guitar Making School in Toronto (alongside Lake Macquarie), and I signed up straight away. So far I have completed my first guitar (a torres style classical with fan bracing), and I'm now onto my second.
Recently I've been obsessed with the John Bogdanovich DVD series (ask my wife) and I'm now building a John Bogdanovich classical. I went so far as purchasing John's classical mould kit and his wood details kit. I put together a YouTube video which shows the contents of both in case anyone is interested:
youtu.be/
Right now I've just finished building a side-bending jig (amongst several others), and I'm looking forward to giving it a crack (bad word probably).
My long term goals are to create Newcastle's first guitar brand/manufacturer. I'm not sure what that means just yet but I really like the sound of it
If I could quit my job tomorrow and build guitars, I'd be a happy man.After much deliberation I came up with a name for my guitar brand: say hello to "Malu Guitars". "Malu" is short for "Malubimba", which is a mis-spelling of the traditional Aboriginal name for Newcastle (thanks a lot Wikipedia). So "Malu" is Aboriginal for "Newy". I was pretty happy with that
Here's a logo I threw together:
Anyway, enough banging on. I'm really excited to be part of this forum and I look forward to getting to know you all.
Cheers,
Wayde Christie.
we have a couple of Novocastrian members, I'm sure you will come across them soon enough if not already ..Cheers
