Welcome to Jackson Hole Tim!  JHT’s genesis was founded many years ago  building Native American Style Flutes and Catlinite pipes.   Since then we have expanded into a few more areas all of which came our of our love for the flute.  I was blessed to grow up in a beautiful coastal town located in the middle of San Diego bay.  The small town of Coronado, California is one of the truly best places to live.  Funny how life is in that I grew up literally one block from the beach and like many of my contemporaries we all grew up with sand between our toes and a surfboard under our arms.  Having never been out of the state of California I pretty much thought I would spend the rest of my life on this beach and if things had ended up that way it would have been a pretty nice place to be.

My youth was filled with early days in Junior and High School developing talents for working with wood which continued through my high school days into my college years and beyond.  Since then I have maintained these skills by completing various projects over the years and my love for working with wood has never vanished and continues to this day.

I grew up 70’s with guys like John Denver and other great folk and country western music artists.  It was these artists that stirred in me an indescribable interest in the history of the west and a yearning to visit the western states and more specific the Rocky Mountains.  Looking back my passion for anything that talked about the history of the west and the Native American culture was strong but with no plausible explanation as to why.  My first visit to Jackson Hole and the Teton’s was when I was just 16 years old.  The pull that the Yellowstone basin has is hard to describe but once exposed to this area I just knew it had to be part of my life.

Today I live with my family in Western Wyoming just south of Jackson Hole.  I am a licensed International health insurance broker and have been for more the 35 years.  I still work in the International health insurance business but today most of my time is spent working on my art and selling lumber.  I started Jacksonholetiml.com several years ago which has become a great resource for other Native American Flute Builders.  As busy as I am I still find time to build my own Native American Flutes in my free evening hours and on weekends, holidays and a few extra days when I play hookie. 

I have reached a point in my life  where crafting these beautiful wind instruments and parts has become a primary focus.  As an award-winning artist I continue to look forward to accepting more commission projects each year.  I hope you find and enjoy the content provided to you in this section of our website and may your journey with the flutes be a magical and healing experience.

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I have developed this Do It Yourself (DIY) Educational section to help others achieve success in building or crafting their own NAF style flutes.  This Do It Yourself flute building section is provided to you as a free resource.  However it does take time and over 25 years of knowledge learned is shared in the following pages.  Please consider donating to help keep updates coming.

What is Unique About My Style of Flutes

Over the years what has surprised me the most was that there were so many styles of flutes being made out there.  Some flute makers use only hand tools, although very few.  Some are using lathes, boring machines, routers, shapers, sanding machines, files, knives, hand planes, spoke-shaves, burning rods, drills, plastics, you name it – it is being used to make flutes.  But the end result for all of these is still a flute that contains all the basic components of the Native American Flute.

My style of flute, and I  do say this humbly, is one that I find to be a very natural way to craft them.  I have yet to find any other flutes that have the aesthetics of my flutes – in fact I have not seen any that look exactly like mine at all to date.  But this is part of what is cool about making one of these flutes – you can put yourself into your crafting.

Although I started making my flutes entirely by hand and only with hand tools I have evolved a bit using some power tools simply because of the man hours it was taking to make a single flute.  I will go into detail further about the processes I go through but in short my flutes gain their aesthetics mostly from the hand planning of the flute body once it has been glued up.

I hand plane every single flute I make and it is this hand planning that gives my flutes their signature shape.  In addition most all of my flutes are crafted from a single piece of wood.  I do not for the most part put end caps on my flutes although there is nothing wrong with doing so.  I like to use a single piece of wood stock and craft the entire flute from my selection.  The exception is in the fetish selection and sometime I will put inlays in the windway area.  Be warned, building your own Native American Styled Flute can be addictive.