Hi Bob,
sounds like a great hobby or is it a lively hood?
As a lad I lived in a small town and next door for about six months a year lived a middle aged couple who lived in Hong Kong for the remainder of the
year, they were very wealthy. Us kids always considered Mrs Buyers to be mad and treated her as such and no-one wanted to be caught alone by her husband.
No evidence mind, its just what us kids knew.
He died and she rather lost it. I was a few years older then and had been dragooned by my mother and other neighbours to help her with a few chores
and also company, it turns out she wasn't mad after all, but lonely, eccentric and old. Amongst the things I learned was that her husband was a true
craftsman in wood and would hand make violins form timber gleaned from old pianos and other sources. The noises that my brother, sister and I had heard
were not him strangling his wife but tuning and testing the violins he made.
All those years I had shunned him and yet had I known he might have been a friend and a marvellously skilled teacher.
Craig