Hi, everyone -

I have a couple of invitations for OLFer's in the Los Angeles / Orange County area. I'm a member, officer and past president of SIMSCal (Stringed Instrument Makers of Southern California), and newly registered member of the OLF.

My/our first invitation is to check us out at www.simscal.com

We have about 25 members of mostly amateur steel string and classic guitarmakers. Several of us are graduates of the Orange Coast College (OCC) guitarmaking program. This year, we will have a couple members showing at Healdsberg. – Jim Ellsberry and Monica Esparza. Last year, Jim, one of our officers showed his arch tops at the Newport Guitar Festival; two members - Monica and Chris - attended Jose Romanillos’ guitarmaking seminar in Sequenza, Spain; and several other members attended the Guild of American Luthiers convention in Tacoma. Some of the membership are really into guitarmaking.

We teach guitarmaking, both steel string (Bob Mattingly method) and classic (Jose Romanillos method) guitarmaking with about a half-dozen students in each group. The steel string class is taught by Eric Nichols, who taught guitarmaking at OCC for 10 years. Monica, who, in addition to being an OCC guitarmaking graduate, has taken Jose Ramanillos’ guitarmaking seminar for the past 3 summers, teaches the classic guitarmaking group.

In addition to this, SMSCal has quarterly meetings, which have included some excellent “hands-on” demonstrations”, such as, a French polishing demo in 2005, featuring Ron Fernandez, where everyone in attendance French polished a 6” x 6” piece of spruce or cedar. In 2006, we had an inlay demonstration, featuring Jimmi Wengert (Kathy’s daughter) and R. C. Allen, and also a hands-on intermediate rosette-making demo, where attendees routed the rosette channel and glued-up a few rosette-sticks into a simple pattern. Et cetera. Equally important, these meetings are social get-togethers, an opportunity to “show-and-tell” our latest projects, share our latest “discoveries”, and generally hang out with other guitarmakers - which is always a cool thing!

Thanks for looking.

Larry McCutcheon