my bio

I'll never forget when I was first bitten by the guitar bug, somewhere around the age of eight or nine. I remember my dad bringing home a $15 pawnshop treasure, a mint condition Sears Silvertone guitar with the amp (all tubes!) built into the case. My brother Bill showed me my first chords and taught me the intro to Alice's Restaurant. Later on, my oldest brother Rick had hand-wired a distortion unit on a piece of Masonite - a conglomeration of old transistors and doodads from my step-dad's junkbox...and my musical tastes quickly switched from Arlo Guthrie to Iron Butterfly.

By the time I was twelve, my interests had expanded to include woodworking...or should I say I'd already dismantled the Silvertone and had the neck slapped onto a Flying-V body made in my junior high shop class. If I remember right, the ash body alone weighed almost twelve pounds.

Between then and now I've played a lot of guitar. In my young adult years I traversed the North American continent in several bands, eventually settling down right back where I started in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Woodworking and guitar, two life-passions of mine, congealed in late 2005 when I created my first original OM template. I looked around my shop and soon realized that I also needed a BUNCH of lutherie-specific tools...so I fashioned my own thickness sander, side benders, molds, and of course the "self adjusting neck jig".

I'm always trying new approaches and ideas, there is always more than one way to accomplish something in guitar building....but I do rely heavily on many of the traditional methods as well.

There's one rule of thumb I've learned to adhere to...never make a twelve pound guitar.

Thanks for reading!

Jon