Joel Stehr has built his custom acoustic-guitar making business one piece of wood and steel string at a time.

A mostly self-taught guitar crafter, he runs his Spokane-based business, Stehr Guitars, from his South Hill home. His musical pieces of art have been sold to enthusiasts and collectors from Hawaii to New York and as far away as Singapore.

Stehr has been working full time building guitars for the last three years, and now expects to make about 15 guitars a year. Even at a prices ranging from $2,800 to $4,000 each, he says he has enough orders to keep him busy for the next 14 months. He became profitable last year.

Today's sales represents a far-richer cord than the $450 he got for his first guitar, which he sold on eBay, though that sale helped to launch his fledgling business, netting him five additional orders from people who had seen the listing. Since then, Stehr slowly has funded the business himself, cutting back on expenses and using savings to outfit his home-based shop with equipment and wood to build more guitars.

With his reputation growing, Stehr says his customers now come via word-of-mouth, and through his Web site, at www.stehrguitars.com.

When a customer contacts him to place an order, Stehr collects a deposit to hold the current price and to pay for the materials needed to build the guitar. He builds each guitar to suit, and says he'll do anything a customer wants as long as it won't ruin the sound of the guitar.

One customer, for example, wanted two sound holes on the face of a guitar on opposite sides of the fret board instead of the usual one hole below the fret board. This created a stereo effect, Stehr says. Another customer wanted to build a nylon-string guitar, but with the dimensions of a steel-string guitar.

"Clients can have as much or as little involvement in the design as they want," Stehr says. "Each person I work with I become friends with, because it's very personal to design their guitars."

Stehr usually buys the wood he'll use in creating a guitar in instrument "sets," from lutherie supply companies. The craft of making stringed instruments is referred to as lutherie, from the French word for lute. The sets of wood are rough-planed and "book-matched," which means they're cut in half and opened up like a book so the grain pattern matches up in the middle.

He sometimes, however, buys billets of wood locally and makes his own sets. Buying wood that way gives him wonderful opportunities to try different things, he says.

"The cool thing about making custom guitars is I have so many neat choices of wood that aren't available from the big producers," because they are too expensive to produce in volume, Stehr says.

Stehr chooses woods based on what kind of sound they produce. Rosewood, for example, is a great choice for making the sides and back of a guitar, he says.

Choosing wood for the face, or top, of the guitar is probably the most important selection of wood in producing a good sound, Stehr says.

Spruce and cedar make good tops, as does a currently popular wood referred to as sinker redwood, which comes from old redwood trunks that sunk when loggers a century ago were floating timber down rivers.

"Lately people have been pulling those up and drying them. Those are great for tops," he says.

To make a guitar's side, Stehr takes two pieces of wood, planes them to a thickness of about 3 millimeters, and heats the wood, which is enclosed in protective wrapping, to 350 degrees Fahrenheit while he steams the pieces. He then bends them into shape on a mold and joins them at the neck and bottom.

For the back, he glues together the two book-matched pieces, adding braces to them, and cuts the back into a shape that will match the sides exactly. He follows a similar process for the top.

The top is the part that really determines the tone of the guitar, Stehr says. After the braces are affixed to the top, he carves the braces down into specially designed shapes that help create the sound of the guitar. As he carves the braces, he taps on the guitar in different spots. He says he "carves a little, and taps a little," until it's just right.

"There's a point where it starts ringing," he says, and he can tell what the guitar will sound like when it's finished. "That's the best part."

"It's a fine line," he says. "If you go too far, it makes the top loose and the base sounds muddy. If it's too tight, it sounds too 'bright.'"

Once the body is assembled, Stehr adds decorative bindings around the edge, fits and carves the guitar's neck, glues on the fret board, and adds the frets, which are made of gold or nickel, and are the metal ribs against which the strings are pressed while the guitar is played. He buffs and finishes the guitar's body, adds steel strings, and tunes the guitar.

Each guitar takes between two and three months to build, but he usually has several going at once.

"If the glue's drying on one, I move on to the next," he says.

Crafting a career

Stehr says he's always been artistic, and has always been determined to do what he wanted to do, trying his hand at photography and the food-service industry, before returning to guitars.

He says his appreciation of guitars and music began when he was a child.

"I've been a musician for most of my life," says Stehr, age 30.

He played in a punk-rock band called Pigweed from 6th grade until about five years after high school. It was through the band that he was introduced to guitars, but ironically, he played the drums for the group.

He says of his love for the sound of acoustic guitars: "My friends thought I was crazy, because a lot of my favorite music was Cat Stevens and Simon & Garfunkel."

Stehr began teaching himself to build acoustic guitars in 2000, and later took a course in the craft at the American School of Lutherie, in Portland, Ore.

He says the coursework put him "two years ahead on the learning curve," helping him to refine some of his skills and to become more efficient in his processes.

Stehr says if he can just build guitars for the rest of his life, he'll be content. "With each one I do, I learn something new," he says. "There's so much to learn about building."