13/10/2025
When I first had the idea to build a guitar 20 years ago I rode my bike down the road to the local wood shop where I metwoodworker and arborist Steve Crouch. Steve had just lost his best mate George Kinnear shortly before and wasn't too excited about me or my guitar making ideas. He said to come back the next week and so I did.
We carried on like this for a little while until he abruptly took me up to the house where he and George flated. George, Geo, was a classically trained cabinet maker from San Diego who aldo decided moving to the furthest corners of New Zealand was a great place to raise a family.
Well, George made a guitar before he died and made it from a beautiful set of black wood that he milled with Steve in Kaitaia. He had just resawn all this blackwood into guitar sets before he died and had them all lined up around the room on display and Steve didn't have the heart to put them away.
Steve let me take a few sets and I made my first guitars from them. It felt like destiny and I couldn't have been more excited. At this point Steve had loaned me a few tools to help get me started and this shoulder plane which belonged to George has been in use daily ever since. ( I later had the pleasure to have Georges son, Ethan, to my shop where I tried to give it back but Ethan told me to make good use of it.) Although I'm not using it to trim the shoulders of hand cut tennons it is put to good use trimming down back braces or making things to make more things.
As the years passed and I needed more income I trained as a cabinet maker with one of the best, Wayne Grbic, who it turns out was trained by George.
I only help out very rarely in Wayne's cabinet shop anymore but I did today. I was going to be making some curved shelves clashed with pvc tape ( like binding) and this can't be done on the machine trimmer. It was a great opportunity to bring in the shoulder plane to take off the bulk before using a 1 inch chisle to trim it flush.
As I was using the plane it all hit me how it came full circle.
And now I've also got all kinds of Nrw Zealand native wood that Steve and George had milled in the 90's.
I never met Geo, but I think we'd get along!
