Steve, your mention of the differences of living/working in Birmingham vs Seattle caught my attention.
Have passed your old corner shop many times but never stopped in, too bad for me but I wasn't into guitars them. Like you said a lot of stuff going on in that part of town, must be light years different working out of a home now.
Looks like your work hasn't suffered in the move, some really fantastic builds you've shown us the past few months.
Looks like you are making some adjustment to the isolation of working alone . Sometime people think they want to work alone and it maybe right for them. But other times it happens to us not by 1st choice and that's had to deal with. One of the trouble with guys I think is we try to be stoic and not admit certain things to our determent. From your posts it looks like as word gets around that your are making some new connections, but with the sheer beauty of your guitars it would be hard to not get someones attention.
Your marketing plan to build some spec guitars seems like a good one. I would think that with your knowledge of materials and the best or maybe better combinations of them would result in just about the same selections that a custom build would arrive at. Seems like a true custom build has to have a lot of direction from the builder to steer the customer in the best direction to make it successful. So a potential custom order might be filled with a spec build or maybe a spec with some custom minor details.
After reading/viewing this forum for about a year now I think I have figured what just about every builders, either full time, part time(wanting to step up) or anything in between true marking plan is. The real plan is to make a guitar that looks so fantastic, sounds so great, and almost plays itself that some one will just have to have it no matter what, do what ever it takes to get it at some point. Sometimes you have to wonder if it's right to put such temptations in front of mere mortals.
Bruce,