Peter Coombe mandolins and guitars Small Businesses

I am basically a musician turned luthier. After 16 years of making mandolins after work and on weekends, I moved into a new house and workshop in Bega and became a full time luthier in 2010. Computing used to pay the bills, but after being downsized by my employer, the mandolins (and now guitars) are playing a much larger role. Quitting the 'real' job was the best thing I ever did. I started playing music at the age of 7 and played the piano for over 13 years. In the intervening period I have played guitar, recorder, piano accordion, button accordion, violin (complete failure) and mandolin and am presently trying to get back into playing piano again. I bought a beautiful sounding grand piano and the cost of the thing is a good incentive to play it. The good sound helps as well. I started playing the mandolin around 35 years ago on a factory Bowlback bought in Germany, but eventually it was obvious the instrument was somewhat limiting and my better half was complaining about the sound. Fortunately, a musician friend visiting the USA brought back a vintage 1918 Gibson A1 for me. I played this instrument for over 8 years in various dance bands and loved it to death. It is one of the better vintage Gibsons and is somewhat battered but structurally sound and stills sounds great. In all that time I only came across one other mandolin that came close to the Gibson in tone and playability. Around 1993, a number of people who had seen my old Gibson started asking me where they could get a good mandolin for a reasonable price. After doing a bit of research, I came up with the answer - no idea. All the music shops had Korean imports that looked OK, but were absolutely dead tonally and difficult to play. Anything decent, e.g. vintage Gibsons, on the second hand market were outrageously expensive; about 4 times what mine had cost. Now this situation from a musician's point of view is not good (where are all the mandolin players?) and got me thinking that maybe I could do something about it. At the time I was building high quality hi-fi loudspeakers and was getting rather sick of working with MDF and chipboard.