Ellis Seal had a midlife crisis in 1998 and started experimenting with building carbon fiber guitars in a back yard shed. Finally it got so bad, he quit his job as a design engineer at Boeing and with a little money from an equally crazy investor started to produce guitars. The idea with carbon fiber was building a guitar for which you didn't have to worry about humidity or temperature or clumsy friends or even banjo players (and we all know how dangerous they can be).

We were repelled by the idea of a carbon fiber guitar especially after having played such instruments by other builders whose instrument's only real good points were that they were wonderful in a bar fight. But a customer of ours bought one and brought it in to get it set up and we had to admit, it was a hell of nice guitar even though it wasn't made of wood.

The same customer had taken the guitar to the Swannanoa Guitar Week and when he was ready to go home, whipped the gig bag on to his shoulder. Well, being the lovable idiot that he is, he discovered that he hadn't zipped the gig bag. The clue was seeing the guitar fly in a graceful inverse involute arc 20 feet onto a tile floor. The result was one popped brace which we fixed in about 15 minutes in our shop.

CA sent us some guitars to try out and we thought that they sounded like real guitars and nice ones at that. They were very playable with a nice feel and their travel guitar, the Cargo turned out to be the best travel guitar made by anybody. This sold me on CA Guitars and we were delighted to become a dealer.