Hey! Those are actually within reach! I still have to get in the black financially, but it looks possible!
Ah...pain. Let's you know you're not dead.
Not a professional gunsmith, just an amatuer, but a professional collector for sure. I used to buy guns about every five minutes, back when work was constant. Laid-off you see. A distressingly common ailment these days, but I expect regular employment this week, no less.
I started out as a machinist, building ultra-precision high-vacuum manifolds for use in Hewlett-packard mass spectrometers. That got me into metal working, and I did that for a couple of years until it got boring. Stainless tubing has a personality, though. And when you pull a "T" out of a straight tube, it gets downright ornery. That job gave me a very good grounding in metal-forming, as it was a small shop, and I performed ALL the operations neccessary to make these things, except welding the parts together, as I was the only guy there! Did it all on surplus military machines off of Navy ships, that were built in 1942! i'm also an excellent polisher, a skill that's easy to learn, and difficult to master. Polishing is the LAST step for metal gun parts, and screwing up at that point is going backwards. Not something that's acceptable in my work.
From there I bumbled into retail store fixtures while working for a custom designer. All sorts of weird stuff at that job, and lots of odd materials. Woods, acrylics, laminates, sheet metal, foam casting, the works. After that, I went into straight-up cabinetry, working for a small custom shop building kitchens and fine furniture for affluent folks in the Bay Area who had too much money. Did that for eleven years or so, and built a lot of fabulous stuff. Cabinets by the yard, beds, over-the-top conference tables, custom furniture for the rich folks and their yuppie friends. The dot-com boom kept me busy. From there I got hired by a union stair shop, where I was a senior shop carpenter (union term) building staircases that would make your eyes water out of large pieces of rain forest/I mean "exotic hardwoods". Think long curving staircases in giant mansions, with elaborate handrails and wild paneling. Neat stuff, as stairs are regarded as the top level of carpentry in the woodworking industry. Stairs are essentialy one solid unit after they're installed, and it's like building a jewelry case 15' tall, that has to fit right the FIRST time! I've built a lot of fine jewelry cases back at the fixture job, and those skills definitely came in handy! I got the carving skills from the custom cabinet shop initially, as we made a lot of "Neo-classic" furniture, victorian/chippendale rip-off stuff, with lots of frilly decoration. From that, I got into carving for myself, and do it as a hobby when I can't go shooting. For fun I have carved Hobby-horses, except they have dragon heads, or ducks, or other kinds of fanciful critters, (did one unicorn, the "normal-ist one of the bunch.) sort of like miniature carousel horses, but the heads only. Closet poles for the bodies, with a wooden wheel set in to the end. My cousins kids are probably the envy of their friends, and thos toys are heirloom quality. I like to make treasures, as they will be permanent contributions to the beautiful things in the world, and no-one will throw them away. And I build stuff to last. I expect the things I make to outlast me, just like fine antiques outlived they're makers.
This combination of skills drew me to guns, as they are the ultimate expression of artistic wood and metal craft. Though about custom knives for a bit, but when I started researching it, I found out there's about a million custom knife makers in the world. Harder to wow the folks with all that competitiion around, and basically, knives are just to easy. It's easy to spend more on a gun than on some of the staircases I built, and those were a looong way from cheap. Most ran about $65,000-$75,000 each. Those exotic woods cost, and stairs are fairly material intensive.
I've made 4 sets of handgun grips so far. the ones on my Webley are wild. I'll put a picture of them up one of these days. I've yet to actually make a rifle stock, but I've got a special piece of walnut stashed, just waiting for me to get my own shop set up. You wait. I'll be making stocks that'll curl your hair one of these days. (Gotta make some sort of a sample thingy to send off to Tony Galazan, or maybe Rigby in Paso Robles, and offer them my services, provided like how their shop is set up. That's how I get jobs these days. I interview the employer,and see if THEY impress ME, not the other way around.
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Ultimately, I would like to build fine double guns in the best English tradition. I'm VERY persnickity about quality, and I know now that I'm one of the best in my field at what I do. That came as a revelation, as I discovered that most professional wood guys don't much care about quality beyond "good enough to get it out the door", an attitude that I find reprehensible. I think It has to be done RIGHT, not just good enough. That, and the attitude of "not enough time to do it well, but always enough time to do it over" utterly fails to win points with me.
That attitude must pay, as people pester me for side jobs all the time, which I usually turn down, as forty hours a week on other people's work is enough for me because I have projects of my own to do! I can't complain too much about that, though. Side work has been paying the bills lately.
