2008 in review. Continued 1.

Mid April I went to Farnham malting to show my guitars. This event was one of the shows put on by The Sussex Guild,by its members. It was a very nice venue for a show. I have been a member of the Guild for several years. This year 2009, I am taking a year's sabbatical to concentrate on developing the business of making and selling guitars. Due to this I will not be taking part in any Guild shows during 2009.

The beginning of may I spent time in the workshop working on repairs one of which was this upright double Bass. As the photo shows the heel had split and made the instrument very difficult to play. I will display some photo's of the repair later. The repair consisted of removing the neck and making a new section to replace the split section and re-applying lacquer to match the existing lacquer, all this in my tiny workshop.

All this work went on while I was building an OM cutaway in figured English walnut for my father in law who lives in California and being videoed by Harry and Alan, prize winning members of a local amateur video club. When the publishing embargo has ended I will be uploading the video of the guitar being made, to You Tube.

The weekend of the 24th of May I went to the Chippenham Folk Festival. It was wet and wonderful again. I sold a Baritone guitar, the one featuring Terry Lees on the Recent Works Page.

The end of the month saw me going off to California to spend time with my family and especially my dad who'd just been in hospital, it was lovely to see him recuperate after his surgery.This is us together the previous February at San Juan Baptista, California. Dad will be 89 this year.

During the following weeks I worked on the bass and Tom's Mandolla and prepared for the next show which was the Sidmouth Folk Week at the end of July.

This was my second year at Sidmouth and it turned out to be an adventure, just like the previous year. 2007 we had to put up with the farmyard smells and in 2008 we had 1/3 of the marquee given over to the bar in the main auditorium. Needless to say the floor plan was of little use. It became a first one in got the space situation. Unfortunately three of the stands had to be accommodated out in small tents outside the main trading area.

Just prior to going to Sidmouth I had completed the Bass project and was able to re-unite the instrument with its owner. This is what it looked like after the repair was complete. It turned out that as I took it to bits for the repair I found that at least three previous repairs had been done to the heel.