The Ridgewing shop is aligned with the four points of the compass. This is the view to the north just after a nice big snowstorm, and the air outside is frigid and crisp and delicious.

Northern light is beautiful to work with, as it consists entirely of blue sky and is broad and diffuse, casting no shadows, illuminating a work surface evenly. Conversely, direct sunlight carries the full color spectrum, with a bias toward the orange-red, and behaves optically as a “point source”, casting strong shadows that force your eyes to adapt to light and across the work surface. On the plus side, especially in deep winter, direct sunlight also has a strong infrared component, which means WARM. In mid-winter, WARM is good.

On the left edge of the window is a string of every business care I have ever carried over the last 35 years, and it is more than a meter long. Besides using it to remind me of where I have been, I have used it to show my kids that life is not like a canal you should follow, but rather like an ocean over which you crisscross this way and that from one adventure to the next, including wins and losses, joys and sorrows. “See these first five?  If these hadn’t all failed I never would have gotten to this one. Remember how cool that was? And here is where I had to commute five hours each way every weekend for a year to an out-of-state job, which totally sucked except they taught me CAD design! So all the rest here would never have happened without that one….”. All leading up to the last card which of course is Ridgewing.

Moving to the right, there is a little forest of various flavors of super-glue, and through the window behind is the clothes line where we put those solar infrared rays to work on freshly washed clothes, plus spray-paint the occasional guitar part. The somewhat cockeyed chicken coop up to the right almost looks like a proper Swiss chalet under all that snow. The little drawers down below contain the many small parts of various sizes and types used in the Ridgewing guitar. On top of the drawers is the kind of random collection that a flat space in a small shop typically attracts – a box of unknown machine parts, a foil-wrapped bottle of UV-cure glue in a baggie, a Plexiglas template for cutting out the veneer for the self-tuning headstock, a headstock-mounted guitar tuner, the mold pattern for making a regular headstock mold, a box of 3D-printed parts from Shapeways, a dislocated drawer with some aluminum  and carbon-fiber headstock levers, an unused silicone mixing bucket, and some black and some gold-plated Strap-Lok parts. To the right hang a set of new carbon-fiber frames ready for priming, with a set of needle files and a grandchild’s water painting hiding behind, and below are the tops of a vertical forest of files of every size and shape.

And this is just the view looking north.