After my former employer decided to pay me a bearable sum each month not to turn up at the office I found myself with time, if not huge amounts of money.
My background as an amateur includes a bit of building of racing dinghies, both epoxy/plywood and epoxy/foam, and music wise playing electric bass, mainly folk tinged, although I dabble with other instruments.
The first thing I did was to write a book about railway history, as you do, but with that in the shops I thought I'd pick up a long submerged ambition to build an Appalachian/mountain dulcimer. So I ordered this kit up, and when it arrived took a look and thought ****, that's beyond my pay grade. Epoxy boatbuilding, you understand, tolerates a degree of imprecision with the use of high performance fillers etc which would be unacceptable on an instrument.
So I thought I'd build a crude cigar box guitar for practice and to acquire some skills, and bought a very cheap secondhand Peavey guitar as a cheaper source of components than buying new. This turned out to have a surprisingly usable neck (if a truly appalling body) so the cigar box guitar turned into a very small bodied semi, but unfortunately I spent about 2 minutes designing the body shape which is ugly beyond belief.
Anyway that worked, and has turned out to be quite usable as a thing to work out arrangements with, and the dulcimer followed.
While thinking about another project a good mate presented me with a hardly started ESB4 kit that for complex reasons he wasn't going to progress, which is what brings me here.
Sorry about the essay, I fear I'm prone to that.
I'm in SE England BTW, but am technically an expatriate Australian although I've been here since early childhood.
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