Steve Wellcome:  

I worked for Digital Equipment Corp, first as a programmer then as a technical writer. When DEC imploded and pieces got sold off in the late 1990s, my group got sold and bought by three different companies in two years. Eventually whoever owned us realized they had no idea what to do with us and laid off the entire group -- 60 or so people -- on Sept. 11, 2001. It was quite a day. I then got a job with a company that makes time clocks. I was the documentation department of one. The commute was 70 miles one way. I did that for 4-1/2 years before my wife got a job in Maine. I quit in 2007, we moved to Maine, I got some contract writing work, and all was well, until I got diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. I retired, figuring I had better things to do with my time than work. That was around 2008. Thanks to the miracles of modern pharmacology I'm still reasonably functional. I've been building guitars, though not the one in the photo above. That one was built by a friend of mine, luthier Carter Ruff of Subterranean Music Works in Bath, ME. He built it from wood salvaged from a church pew after the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick burned in June of 2011. I completed my first guitar in August of 2015. It's similar to a Martin OM. I just completed my 2nd guitar in February 2016. It's considerably smaller, about the size of a Martin 0. Both guitars sound very good. [June 29, 2017] I've been building more instruments. The latest is a 10-string bell cittern, which sounds amazing. If you search YouTube for "Jud Caswell Beggarman" you'll get a video of my friend Jud playing a cittern (not mine). The design was invented by Nikos (Nick) Appolonio, a luthier in Rockport, Maine. Nick built the one Jud is playing. Jud loaned it to me for a couple of days so I could take the mea...Expand for more