On Fridays and Saturdays, you’ll almost certainly find Gert Bos in his home workshop. There, he spends hours working with iron pins, organ pipes, bellows, and blowers—with extreme precision and full dedication, as if he hadn’t already spent an entire workweek solving technical challenges. He enjoys both his job as a senior toolmaker at Quooker and his passion for instrument building. In fact, calling it a hobby hardly does it justice. He prefers to call it, quite fittingly, an encore. “All my passions come together in it: technology, music, wood. It’s pure passion.”

Building a harpsichord As long as he can remember, Gert has enjoyed working with his hands. “As a child, I built birdhouses and loved model making,” he says. “I’ve always had a curious mind—I want to understand how things work.” At eleven, his mother signed him up for organ lessons, and by nineteen he was playing as a church organist. “But,” Gert explains, “at some point my interest in the instrument itself became greater than in the music.” In 1989, while working as a precision mechanic and raising a family with two children, he began building his first harpsichord. Many organs in various forms followed in the years after.

‘Impossible’ doesn’t exist His first instrument took him eight years to complete. After that, there was no stopping him. He took a course with instrument makers and has now built seventeen instruments of his own. “I’m critical—I keep going until the instrument sounds exactly how I want it to.” The same applies to his work at Quooker. “My motto is: ‘impossible’ doesn’t exist. I’m always looking for ways to achieve what I have in mind.”

He shares this mindset with Niels Peteri (one of Quooker’s founders). “Many of my direct colleagues at Quooker have a passion they dedicate all their free time to. One colleague is crazy about motorcycles and builds very special bikes himself. Outsiders may not always understand constantly working with technology—but as technicians, we understand each other.”

Published on 01-07-2024