MONTREAL -- Luthier James Klym holds up his right hand, and shows the missing fingers, cut by a table saw years ago.

“I had an accident and cut off half my hand,” he said sheepishly.

Most people with such a run-in with a table saw would likely not turn to woodworking as a future career. But Klym think a bit differently than most.

“I didn’t have a good guitar,” he said. “So I thought to myself maybe I could build one.”

He instantly realized that building an electric guitar was much more challenging than he thought, but he kept at it, turning what started out as a fanciful hobby into a career.

Now he works with a team of six people in a St-Henri co-op, turning out six-strings under the company name JK Custom Guitars. They can turn out 10 guitars a month. Some of the clients he’s listed include Simple Plan, Alice Cooper and AC/DC.

“Every day at work is a new day, a new difficulty to overcome,” said Maya Taylor-Barnett. From Kahnawake, she was polishing the body of a black guitar body as she spoke. “With the amount of creative brains in my community, it could be a good opportunity for a lot of us,” she said, referring to the art of guitar-making.

As the pandemic got underway, Klym changed up his guitar-building patterns. Instead of doing purely custom work, he started “lines” of guitars that he sells to retailers.

Currently those lines are being made with recycled skateboards, giving them a natural-wood look with lines of random colours imbedded into the wood.

This Christmas, one of his co-workers had a wish for the guitars she was building:

“I just hope that the guitars we build and send to different families actually get played and appreciated,” Taylor Barnett said.