Thailand, 1965. My Dad was a Navy Seabee, so we moved a lot. My sister was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1965 and we moved to up country to Chiang Mai the next year. I was rocking those little red shoes.

I used to shoot primitive archery, about the same time I started learning to make guitars. I never won a tournament, preferring to come in fourth a lot. For the record, we put the bolt in the apple and then put the apple on my head.

I do a lot of electric guitar workshops for teachers, and previously for high school students. This is what the parts look like when we get started.

Every new make of electric guitars has to make a switch monster. A quick search reveals approximately a squillion circuit possibilities and it’s good for new builders to get one of these out of their systems. This one was made by one of my undergrads and he swore that all the controls worked. There was hardly enough structure left to bear the string tension, but he was pleased. It was a great learning experience for him, so I was pleased as well.

Fender Cupcakes — When she was young, my daughter started calling my grad students my minions (this was long before the movie). My wife was enlisted to occasionally send baked good in for the minions. Turns out they are pretty much powered by cupcakes and chocolate.

Through an unlikely series of events, I got tickets to see Weird Al Yankovic when he was at Purdue and got to be part of the meet-and-greet after the show. Jim West is his guitarist. It was a great show and the level of music was impressive. From what I could tell, Al and Jim seemed like nice people.

In the summer of 2017 I did a two-week class at Universidad Nacional in Medellin, Colombia. My hosts were wonderful and there was no resource they had that they didn’t give me. However, improvisation was sometimes needed. Here is a group of bodies hung from an upturned shop table. It worked just fine.

Here’s two more of my ergonomic guitars. This was the first one I made. The top was from a 2x12 from the lumber yard and the rest of it was from scraps I had. I think I figured it cost about $25 to make. The top was really thin and it sounded OK.

I made this one from some sugar pine shipping pallets and scrap wood. It has eight strings because I had a set of mandolin tuners I didn’t know what to do with. Scale length is 22”.