The journey of a Norfolk luthier

Thank you for taking the time to come and have a look at my website. Here you will be able to find out more about my journey to become a Norfolk based luthier.

I have always loved working with my hands with wood being my preferred medium. Whether it was making my own floats for fishing or pieces of furniture for the house I have always gained a sense of real satisfaction hand crafting my own items and not just going out and buying them. So after taking up playing the guitar, I guess it was only a matter of time before I decided I wanted to try to build my own.

Unfortunately when I first took up learning the guitar, I didn’t have the space to make my own, although I did plenty of research (I think I first ‘Googled’ making your own guitar and luthier about a week in). Several years later, my partner and I bought our first house and moved out of the City and finally had my own shed!

Now I had a space to work in, so commenced my first build an electric based around a Thinline Telecaster this was built with minimal tooling on a cramped workbench in the garden shed so cold at times there was ice on the inside. That first electric took around 8 months to complete, but the seed was sown and I wanted to build more.

Whilst I started with an electric, what I really wanted to build was an acoustic as this was where I was predominately interested. But I decided the shed was not a suitable building environment as the humidity would be impossible to control. I spent the best part of the next year building my purpose built workshop with plenty of insulation so working in the winter would not be such an issue.

Since then I have not looked back and am now developing my own designs, to create bespoke handmade instruments from my Norfolk based workshop.

Nick Tredwell