Pete Howlett
Well-known member
With the difficulty for me of importing koa - no it's easy to import but with taxes and shipping a mastergrade set at $175 ends up costing me $300 I am forced to offer it as an upgrade for tenors and focus on indigenous hardwoods for my now largely European market. I have just visited a famous guitar maker's website where his koa upgrade for what I would call AA grade is over $700 seems excessive to me. Fellow builders, how do you see this going? Are we looking towards a fierce hike in prices? I've noticed less billet size koa available on eBay with some former traders of very good stuff no longer putting up billets for auction. I am out of mastergrade and have only a dozen tenor sets left of my huge stash which is cut foir concerts and sopranos - yep, I made a huge error 4/5 years ago when I thought I would be the concert king... most of it now goes into soprano kits!