When we moved from Vermont to California at the end of 1989, I brought with us parts of one or two Sympitars that were under construction at the time. Sympitar #3 is pictured here; it was finished in a tiny shop Suzy and I set up in an old storeroom adjacent to Suzy's Dad's workshop. Ken Norris (Suzy's Dad ) was an old-school, hands-on scientist/naturalist/marine biologist/professor with many varied interests. He loved to tinker around his home, and his workshop was a wonderful, messy place full of old tools, whale bones, interesting scraps of wood and so on. He had a functioning band-saw and drill press; we added a cheap table saw and a re-sawing bandsaw.
This #3 Sympitar had 12 internal sympathetic strings and 6 main strings: the set-up I would stick with for several more Sympitars. This one had a lovely Western Red Cedar top and walnut back and sides.
One day I went up to the top of our road to get our mail, and there was this Brazilian guy standing there on the other side of our locked gate. In very broken English he asked if I knew Fred Carlson. He'd just flown into Los Angeles and driven up the coast, using GPS to try to find me (how did he even know my addess?).
Turns out he was a guitar collector (and yes, from Brazil!) and wanted to look at my instruments. I led him down to the house, where I showed him the new Sympitar. He had a guitarist-friend accompanying him, who tried it out briefly. Then he asked me "How much do you want for it?". I was a bit in shock, but I said $4,000. He said he wanted it, but could I replace the tuner grips on the sympathetic tuning pegs with ebony (as I recall they were clear plastic)...I didn't have any ebony grips on hand, so I removed some from another instrument and put those on while he waited. Then he took a cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket and proceeded to pull $4,000. out of it, in hundred-dollar bills. We shook hands and they drove off, and I've not heard from him or that instrument since.
He got a good deal (and he knew it!)...I was still functioning under the theory that I should get at least minimum wage for my work, but that it wasn't fair for me to get paid much more than others of my friends did...and I had a lot of poor friends! Somehow we survived!

Sympitar #4 was the other one I had begun in Vermont and brought the parts along to California in 1989 when we made that move across the country.  The back and sides were made from (presumably Vermont) Bird's-eye Maple:  one day an older gentleman showed up at our Vermont workshop to drop off a fiddle needing repairs.  When he came to pick up the instrument, he brought with him an old, dust-encrusted piece of wood he'd had stored "in the loft of his barn" for years, which he gave to us, thinking we might have use for it.  It turned out to be the most beautiful, quarter-sawn "Bird's-eye Maple", eastern sugar-maple or hard-maple with the amazing pattern of tiny knots known as Bird's-eye figure.  I think I managed to get two guitar's worth of backs and sides out of that chunk; one of them was Sympitar #4.  I combined that wood with a top of Sitka spruce, and used the same maple for the neck.  I had both this instrument and the previous Sympitar around for a brief period, during which I thought to invite guitarist Alex DeGrassi, who had been instrumental in helping refine the design, and who I knew was interested in perhaps owning one, to come down to Santa Cruz and check them out.  He chose the maple and spruce version to take home, and has made some wonderful music with it over the years.  It was at Alex's urging that, as well as increasing the number of sympathetic strings (eventually ending up with 12),  I incorporated a damping mechanism so the sympathetic strings could be turned on or off while playing. 

Marvelous world-musician multi-instrumentalist Todd Green came across Alex performing on his new Sympitar (I can't remember where), and called me up to see if he could get one to try out.  I sent him Sympitar #5, the "Moonphase Sympitar" (so-named after the free-form celestial inlays around the sound-hole), which as I recall had African Bubinga back and sides, and a top of Sitka spruce.  This was the beginning of a long relationship with Todd, who went on to commission several of the more interesting projects I've done, and once  year or so brings me a van-load of various unusual ethnic stringed instruments from his performing collection, that need a little (or a lot of!) TLC.  It's been a wonderful learning experience...where else would I have gotten to work on a Turkish "Yali Tanbur" or a "rebab" from Uzbekistan, to name just a few of the instruments Todd has introduced me to.