We went to Kugler Guitars to meet Mike, watch him work, and find out what a luthier actually does all day.
We came away having found one of our longest-standing supporters.
The workshop first.
Mike has been setting up, fixing and repairing guitars for fifteen years, the last stretch of it full-time since moving down to Florida from Pennsylvania.
He got into it the way a lot of people get into a trade — out of necessity.
"I play guitar and I'm a lefty. So a lot of the work I do is on my own. I had to kind of fix it myself. I got the bug for it."
Asked whether he sings too:
"I fix it better than I play."
His hardest job was a 1949 Martin — taking the neck off and carving it back so it would sit properly again. Vintage guitars are his favourites.
"There's a lot of history to them, and they were built with a lot more hands-on."
His first paid job was one somebody handed him and told him not to worry about. He got it looking good, and the owner covered the cost of the tools he'd bought to do it.
"It's fun when you don't have anything relying on it."
And his advice, for anybody in Florida with a guitar sitting in a corner: the humidity is the enemy. It swells the wood, releases the glue, lifts bridges and sprouts the fret ends. A setup every so often is an oil change — strings off, clean it up, adjust the action, smooth the frets, fresh strings on.
Change strings monthly if you play a lot, every other month if you don't. Acoustic strings on acoustics. And for upgrading an acoustic, his answer was the simplest one in the whole conversation:
"Just play it. If you like the sound of it when you first get it, it'll get better — because you're opening it up."
Then we noticed the USL2 shirt.
"Ever since the Brave have been here. 2016."
He and his wife went to a scrimmage at the Polo Fields — someone had mentioned it, so they turned up.
"That was the first time we got hooked. We've been season ticket holders since day one."
His favourite memory is a match we would like to identify:
"We were down two men. We came back — was it by two goals? — and we ended up winning by a goal. That was insane. That was when we were at the practice fields, and we were right on top of everything, and it just kind of built to a head. We were like, this isn't— how do you come back from that? And we did."
Nine men, two goals down, and a win.
"It's the culture in it."
Mike set up a guitar for us while we were there, and the difference was obvious the second it was played.
Kugler Guitars has been with this club almost as long as this club has existed. If you have an instrument that needs looking at, go and see him.
