I asked Matt Flaherty of Texas Toast Guitars for his hot take on the first Great American Guitar Build Off while it was still happening around us. He gave me a distinction I have not stopped thinking about since, and which I have since used to describe my own work.

Handmade is not the same as homemade

His words: you can spot them from ten feet away.

Building an electric guitar, he says, is basically an eighth grade shop project. Anyone can do it. A homemade one can come out looking a bit dodgy and that is fine, that is what a first guitar is. A handmade one has craft in it. It does not look like somebody sat down and thought, I am going to make my first guitar. It looks like it was made by someone who has been doing this.

What made him proud this year was that the entries were all in the second category. No homemade guitars, only handmade ones. He said he is glad they did not try to run the big version in year one, because the build quality this year is what carried it.

For the record, I put myself firmly in the homemade camp right now. Knowing which camp you are in is the useful part. It gives you something specific to close.

How the contest actually works

Hundred dollar entry fee. One person wins all of it. This year that was four thousand five hundred dollars, and they keep their guitar too.

That last part is a deliberate change. The first time around, the winner had to sell the guitar and donate the proceeds to charity. Good intentions, but they decided it should not be mandatory. His prediction was that whoever won would donate it anyway, which tells you something about who enters these things.

Where it came from

They competed in the Great Guitar Build Off that the Crimson Guitars crew ran back in 2020. It seemed worth continuing, so Crimson kept doing theirs and Matt decided to do one a little differently. He added the word American, because they are, and he added a rule that the guitars have to physically be in the same room together.

Technically this was year five. Functionally it was year one. The previous four happened in his shop, which he describes as dusty and small compared to this facility, or one year at Odyssey Beer Works, which was fun but is an operating taproom with music and noise and other things going on. Getting a proper venue with all the guitars laid out together changed what the thing is.

On community

He compared it to NAMM and was careful not to knock NAMM, where he sees friends he only ever sees there. But this is more intimate, and everybody in the room is at minimum a hobby guitar builder.

He also brought Paul Richards and his family over from England and immediately made them eat biscuits and gravy. They went back for more the next day, so that worked.

The plan had been to get Paul to do some pro wrestling style trash talk with them. It fell apart because Paul is genuinely nice and they were trying to be nice and nobody could pull the trigger face to face.

I asked what it was like as somebody showing up for the first time and getting talked to by everyone. His answer was, why wouldn’t I talk to you.

Would he do it again

His line: if you had asked me on Wednesday, absolutely not, this is so much work. By the time we spoke he had enough amnesia to say yes.

What next year might be

This year every entry had to be identifiable as a Telecaster. He is not doing that again, and he is specifically not doing Strat, because everybody assumes Strat.

I pushed for Jazzmaster, being a Jazzmaster guy. I have built two of what I call Jazzcasters, Tele pickup configuration in a Jazzmaster body, because I am tall and the bigger body fits me better. He pointed out the hardware gets fussy fast unless you go Mastery, which solves it and costs.

Then he floated the idea I liked best. Move away from Fender entirely. Maybe require semi hollow at minimum, which opens up creative f-hole and cutout work. Or better, make the rule about what you cannot do rather than what you must: no Fender body style, no Gibson body style, it has to be original.

That is a much harder brief and it would produce far more interesting guitars.

We talked again after the event about what it actually took to build the thing, including the venue that would have cost thirty thousand dollars. That conversation is here.

Find them

• Texas Toast Guitars, Arvada, Colorado
• Milehouse Studios, Paul Richards

Follow along

One guy in a small shop on his father-in-law’s property in Lindsborg, Kansas. IT Director by day, maker by obsession. Equal parts problem solver, craftsman, and curious human. If you’re the kind of person who takes things apart to see how they work, or watches people who do, you’re in the right place.

Uncut shop sessions go up on YouTube and I stream on Twitch. Everything is @carverwoodworking. There is merch in the shop, or you can buy me a coffee.