Thread: Australian Guitar Tonewood (.com) is LIVE !!

Hi All.

This is just an announcement to the broader woodworking community - Australian Guitar Tonewood has a new online shop now open, servicing luthiers both locally and globally. Herein you will find a range of Australian timbers for instrument makers, that you won't find elsewhere.

You can find it here -

http://www.australianguitartonewood.com

and you can find and follow us on Facebook here -

http://www.facebook.com/australianguitartonewood

A bit of background for you - This project has been a long time in the making. Originally started a good 7+ years ago, it was put on the back burner due to other commitments, being worked on only in the background as time allowed. That changed about six months ago and I've put a lot of effort in those months to get it to where it is now. I'm very happy to have it live and functioning for the past month, with many sales through, shipped and with very positive customer feedback.

Our aim was to offer the largest variety or range of quality Australian timbers, specifically milled for musical instrument construction, in one online shop. I wanted you to be able to see clearly what you were purchasing, to be able to buy from afar with confidence and have the best possible shopping experience in this industry. Erm, sounds easy right?? Just as well no-one told me just how much work would be involved in achieving that! I was determined though because I would have loved this to exist in my early building days and we have such an amazing array of timber in this country. On that note, we are not jumping on any bandwagons here - personally I've been building instruments for 20 years now and am working with others in the timber industry that have specific knowledge and experience in this field - having been timber suppliers to the luthierie industry for many years.

The shop is not about volumes and often items listed will be one of a kind or in very limited quantities. This is due to the way we operate, on a small, ethical and sustainable scale, endeavouring to offer many unusual, rare, or difficult to process species. The upshot of which is, if you see something you like - buy it! We can't always guarantee stocks of some of our unique offerings. Staples are likely to be available continually and include Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) and Gidgee (Acacia cambagei), though the exact range will fluctuate and likely there will be species you have not heard of before, or if you have, had not seen available. There is plenty of great rare and unusual timber in stages of processing and stock is updated as it is finalised, ready for sale.

You can sign up in our shop as a customer and thereby get email updates of new stock, blog posts or specials and the like. It's a good way to keep up to date. With respect to the blog, I will update this as time allows and intend to include details on some of our unusual species, harvesting and processing, and feature builds of customers instruments - some woodwork and general luthierie interest stuff.

Feel free to contact me if you have any special requests or are chasing anything you can't find on the site - it is possible we can help.

Finally, if you like what we are offering and trying to provide the community at large, you can help us out! We would be very appreciative if you would "like" our facebook page and share our online shop details through your social networks, blogs, forums (like the luthiery section here!), friends, fellow luthiers and the like - this will go a long way to get our business more widely known and help get us to actually show up in google searches. The better the business does, the more we will be able to offer, which benefits us all.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the shop and I'd be happy to hear any feedback you may have.

Cheers all,

Jeremy.