The newest addition to the team, Don, has been an avid tinkerer and DIY guitar aficionado since his early teens. In 2009, at the ripe age of 14, he decided to stop hopelessly wishing for those expensive guitars on the top shelf at your big box guitar shops, and learned how to build them himself.

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   As with many luthiers, this began with simple tasks like swapping parts in and out of his guitars. This soon reached a tipping point where he, being a young teen, couldn't justify the cost of bodies/necks/pickups he needed to assemble the guitars of his dreams. The only solution was to build them from scratch. This dilemma was compounded by his deeply rooted affinity for utmost accuracy and vintage-correct construction, to the point where - for some of the guitars he truly wanted to own - nobody on the planet made them. So, in addition to learning the ropes of general guitar construction, he began pulling together all of the research necessary to make truly accurate recreations of his favorite guitars.

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   In doing so, he began to make waves in various communities for his efforts eventually being considered the go-to guy for certain replica kits. Some customers would even come back for more generalized orders, which only expanded his toolkit.

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   After a few years of solo work, during which he produced kits for many of the same customers that Locke Custom Guitars had built a rapport with, Locke Custom Guitars brought Don on to manage the Custom Shop and to expand their neck offerings.