Workshop

Welcome to my workshop.

My workshop is located in the centre of the picturesque city of Ripon. Walk-in customers are welcome.
 
The fretted/fretless bass on the right of the picture is a Jim Fleeting Custom Bass: it has a koa top, wenge fingerboard and EMG active electronics. Prices for my custom guitars and basses begin at £1750 – please contact me for more details.

Inside: as you can see, instruments that pass through my workshop are treated with the utmost care and attention. My workbench is covered with thick, soft carpet, which cushions the instruments as I work upon them. A neck-rest made from padded chamois leather supports this Minarik guitar. The electronic device in the blue plastic case is a digital strobe tuner, which is accurate to 1/1000 of a semitone. It puts other tuners in their place. I use the strobe to set a guitar's intonation, as part of a deluxe set-up.

I'm using an inspection mirror and a light, to inspect the interior of this acoustic guitar. Its owner had noticed that a section of the top had become "springy" to the touch, and brought it in for an assessment. (I'll provide assessments and quotations for any instruments, free of charge.)  The inspection confirmed my suspicion: one of the guitar's braces had become unglued. Prompt attention was required: the worst case scenario was that the brace would separate completely and the top would crack. Some delicate re-gluing and clamping put paid to the problem.

My workshop is fully stocked with accessories and components, ranging from bone blanks (from which I carve custom-made nuts and saddles) to pegs and machineheads. This enables me to complete repairs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I am restoring this Jackson "Super Strat" for one of my regular customers. He bought it for a bargain price, but disliked its grubby brown finish. Here it is, stripped down: it has been sanded to a fine grit, ready for the first coats of lacquer to be applied. To obtain the perfect finish, five coats of lacquer will be applied every day for five days, with daily flat sanding. After the guitar has hung to cure for two weeks, it will be wet sanded and buffed until it shines like glass. It is going to leave my workshop with a black-to-blood red sunburst, to match its owner's drum kit.

I can work from your own designs, or from my own, to create custom inlays from abalone, mother-of-pearl and other materials. For an example of my custom inlay work, see the bridge and headstock of the acoustic guitar I made here .

Here's one I restored earlier. A customer asked me to renovate her old violin, so that she could pass it on to her young granddaughter. The instrument had been stored in her attic for 30 years. The soundpost was missing, the bridge was broken, the pegs were loose, the strings had rusted and the body was layered with grime and dust. I replaced and fitted the missing and broken parts, and spent a long time cleaning and polishing the violin from top to bottom. All the instruments that pass through my workshop receive a complimentary clean and polish. In this case I used Hidersol –a creamy, abrasive-free polish- to clean the body and make it gleam again. As you can see, the results were rather striking.
 

This is a don't-try-it-at-home moment: resetting a soundpost inside a violin. Get it wrong, the soundpost will slip and you'll spend forever trying to fish it out of the violin's f-hole, before trying all over again.

My collection of oils, glues, polishes and potions.

According to my luthiery teachers in America, you know you've "arrived" when your toolbox is bigger than you are.   It doesn't help that I'm six feet tall, but I'm getting there…