This Week In The Workshop

I might stop talking about the fact I’m doing this IN the thing I’m doing soon but it’s keeping me sane so here we go. Week 4, I’m only 2 days later but between the bank holiday and just life being life here we are!

I’m going to start calling this whole blog thing ‘This week in the workshop’ with story time at the end so we’ll see if that ruffles any feathers…and on that note…the news.

I say news, it's really just the start of what’s actually been going on this week, but I don’t have the little title to start it now so don’t make it weird! It’s been BUSY this week. I’ve literally made nothing FOR anyone other than just getting the workshop resituated in its new form. Finding homes for everything from tools to materials but we’re barrelling down on a usable space again for the first time in maybe 6 weeks?

Assuming you have me on the socials you’ll have seen some bits from the workshop, as I try to keep it up to date but if not then go and have a look, I’ll repost some stuff after this as I know some of you like to see it! It's been a lot of moving, sorting, moving again, finding stuff I didn't know I had, throwing stuff away that I didn't know I'd kept and everything in between but we're getting there!

It’s mainly been a week of trying to make smart solutions to simple problems. Most people will own a hammer of some sort, a big metal thing with a hitting side and a clawing side…however I have seven. It might seem overkill and yeah okay I do have two claw hammers but they’re different! The rest all have their place and their use and half of them have been passed down to me by either my dad or my grandad, so they deserve a good home. I made a really simple hammer rack to store them all in that I had seen Adam Savage (the guy from Mythbusters) make on his YouTube channel and it was so simple and easy but honestly SO useful!

That’s about it for the shop update this week. Coming up…chopping boards, candle holders, some cool art/wall signs and maybe some NEW new stuff that I’ve not made before, but we’ll see!! I'm really excited to get back to actually making 'things' rather than what I'd just call 'workshop infrastructure'? It's great to make this place more functional and tidy if nothing else but I'm definitely craving some creative outlet right now so we're going to get back to that ASAP!!

Story time!

Continuing the somewhat chronological storytelling thread I seem to have started I’ll pick up from last week. I’d finished my first full ‘from scratch’ built drum and had started using it at my own gigs with my then band and was getting compliments on both the sound and how it looked. People asked me who the company was that made it and how much I’d paid, and I just kept laughing to myself thinking no one would actively order this or pay good money for it? Not the kind of money that drums actually cost?!

For reference, at the time the custom drum-building community in England existed but as social media was still really only just on its way up the reach wasn’t there and the only companies many people know about (myself included) were the big American names being used by all the ‘big names’ in bands like Blink-182, Green Day, No Doubt…the list goes on. Because of this, having worked on all the custom starter kits for years prior I was able to order a custom drum kit from the USA and let me tell you it cost me ALL of what I had but it was a drum kit that I’d order, totally my specification, sizes/colour/details the whole job but it was CRAZY money!

So, knowing how much that cost the idea that people would pay me for something similar was nuts but also exciting…so I made a few more drums. I did some just totally basic off-the-shelf drums to get going, they cost me an absolute arm and a leg to make because I was buying everything at retail, but I was loving it and who cares right?

From there a good friend of mine and an INCREDIBLE musician dropped me a message to say let’s hang out and talk drum ideas…he was my first official customer! Well…potential at that point, but we hung out, talked through ideas, I promised the world with no clue if I could do it or not but knew I had to take on the challenge. That person was Jake Crawford, at the time Jake was playing in a band called ACODA, he’s since gone on to play various instruments in bands including Press To Meco, Don Broco and now his new band UNPEOPLE, go and check them out on the socials, they’re dropping music soon and I really can’t wait…anything Jake is linked to is always great and I love him to death!

I sold the idea of this drum, I know his folks were nervous about him giving me all his savings to build a drum with basically no track record, but he believed in me and for that, I owe him SO much. It nearly killed me to build but here’s that drum.

That was 2012 and I remember walking into the ACODA practice space with this brand-new pristine drum in a case completely unseen by Jake or the band and the anxiety of unveiling it like I was on one of those old Discovery Channel shows like American Chopper or West Coast Customs, but he loved it, the band loved it and they went on to support me at every given change for the longest time. Jake even ended up as the artwork on my business cards for a while when he played the drum at Download Festival the following year!

That was that, customer number 1 in the books. The world felt like my oyster and the idea of making more people as happy was all I needed to push on and do more.