Working with Nate and Scott, it took about six months of heck to get the first Ridgewing Guitar done. And it felt very, very good. Parts ended up being relatively easy to make compared to the molds that made them.

Nate managed the shop, and served as technical lead and trouble shooter. If something didn’t fit right (a common problem during development), he would cool-ly burrow into the problem, analyze it, and fix it. While in the background I was freaking out.

Nate rented the apartment we had over the shop, which worked out very well for everyone. His commute was going down the stairs, and I had to work extra hard to be in the shop before him, which is one of those basic boss things you’re supposed to do. Most times when I left at the end of the day, Nate stayed.

Here Nate was setting up the camera for taking some brand new guitar pics, using the 10-second shutter delay, which I guess worked. The bench to the left was never this neat, except when we were taking pictures. Those to the right rear are closer to reality. My grandson’s latest hot-melt gluing project is on top of the cabinet above the squeaky-clean bench.

After working for Ridgewing, Nate moved to Connecticut and got a dream job as Shop Manager for Yale University’s architecture school. Talk about cool toys!

Never having worked on guitars before working at Ridgewing, Nate was seriously bitten by the Ridgewing guitar bug, and continued to do great guitar work. He designed and built this incredible solid-body electric guitar with traditional body, electronics and bridge. But he equipped it with a Ridgewing neck system (you can just make out the set screws in their aluminum bosses at the front edge of the neck pocket), just the kind of hybrid experimenting I had hoped the Ridgewing system would inspire. This gave Nate the best of both worlds – a very traditional and incredibly beautiful electric guitar to play, but when you heard a police whistle, it was easy to break down, pack up, and scoot.