Tom Wray is an expert when it comes to wood.
The local entrepreneur started his career in the woodworking industry in 1984 with his own company, Acorn Wood Designs, helped launch the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing at the University of British Columbia in the mid-'90s and has been custom-making guitars for about 30 years.
The collection of wood in his basement workshop is neatly stacked in piles of planks, collected and gathered from around the world - Indian rosewood, German spruce, African mahogany.
It will all be shaped and moulded, varnished and shipped back out into the world again, transformed into something not just beautiful to look at but beautiful to hear.
And it takes time. The average guitar takes Wray three months of full-time work to complete, and most take longer than that.
"You have to be really pernickety," he says. "If the idea is to get the best sound out of the guitar, you can't rush it."
Wray guitars start at $3,500, but the average goes for $5,000, and Wray's latest project went for $11,000.
Whatever he earns from his handiwork, though, Wray says he does it more for the pleasure of crafting the instrument he knows will come to life in the hands of a talented musician.
"What I love the most is when somebody orders a guitar, they wait for months to get the guitar, and then they come down here, and I put it in their hands and then I watch them play the guitar for the first time," he says. "That's where the big satisfaction comes from."
All told, he has created between 40 and 50 guitars from scratch. In recent years, he's discovered a niche building custom models for people with special requirements due to physical limitations or special needs. His current client has particularly large hands, so Wray is making his guitar with an extra-wide neck.
"I'm getting more known for being able to help people with physical problems," he says.
Another customer asked Wray to make a guitar for him with a smaller neck to take the strain off his severely arthritic fingers. Wray estimates he will be able to play for an extra five years because of the specially tailored instrument.
There are many ways he tweaks his designs to improve the sound and form, but Wray's signature modification is the rounded top where the musician's right arm sits over the body of the guitar. Rather than the awkward feeling of the 90-degree angle, Wray discovered a more ergonomic shape that has no effect on the sound quality but greatly improves the comfort of playing the instrument.
"I developed that for a guy in Ontario," says Wray. "He plays music and teaches, and he was developing shoulder and elbow problems."
Most of Wray's sales come through word of mouth. He also brings a handful of his instruments to summer music festivals. In August, he'll have a booth set up, as he does each year, at the Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival at Deer Lake Park.
