From the article on Geoff Wooff that Ross linked to:
At 16, he began a formal engineering apprenticeship. By his mid-20s, he had worked as a machinist and draftsman, adding concertina and tin whistle to his repertoire on the London folk club scene in the 1970s.

By the time Wooff's own career took off, after moving to Australia in 1976, the craft was all but dying.

"I had wanted a set of pipes for several years and my then wife, Joan, being a very typical Australian, said, 'You're supposed to be an engineer, why don't you make your own?' " Wooff said. "But you can't start from scratch. You need something to model your work on. It's a very tricky piece of equipment."

Fate was on his side. Just as he bought a lathe and a supply of wood, a second-hand dealer turned up in Perth with a box of uilleann pipe bits. It looked like a mess, but piecing them together, Wooff found himself assembling a flat set made by Harrington of Cork in 1852.

An interesting article, and one which glosses over his concertina playing and some of his pipe background.

As a concertina player in Melbourne in 1976 I met Geoff around that time, when he was financing his presence in Oz by selling a swag of concertinas he'd brought from England with him and restoring others brought to him by players; there weren't too many restorers (or even players) in Melbourne at the time. Geoff also played Northumbrian pipes at that time.

The story he told was that he'd got hooked on their sound and ordered a set from a fellow whose name I can now not recall but whom I recognised then as almost the doyen of Northumbrian pipemakers. In the time after he'd ordered them and before they were delivered, Geoff sat at his draughting table and, using a fingering chart and a pencil, taught himself the fingering of a series of tunes. Quite impressive, I thought. He also said he'd arrived in Melbourne with an ambition to make himself a set of Northumbrian pipes out of ivory; he'd already collected most of the pieces required.

Around the time he moved to Pakenham Upper (forget the jokes, it was then a rural township but is now one of Melbourne's outer suburbs) he bought a lathe and discoverd his first set of uillean pipes in great need of repair; he made the central blok that receives all the connections out of a piece of redgum that had been used as a firehob for several years and was well seasoned. At around that time ivory came under the aegis of IUCN and Geoff started concentrating on coming to terms with uillean pipe playing.

He moved to Dianella (in Perth) for a while and discovered a decrepit set of pipes in the UWA Museum and, bargained for access to them in return for restoring them. While doing so he took his calipers to both his restored set and the museum's set and measured everything measurable, trying to determine what the makers were trying to achieve. Not long after he returned to Victoria (to near Warrnambool and Port Fairy) and concentrated on pipemaking.

It wasn't long before he'd exhausted the capacity of the Australian market for uillean pipes and was complaining about the lack of prospects. I pointed out to him that there was an even larger demand for the simple system flutes favoured by players of Irish music but nobody was making them and he already had all he needed to make them. To overcome his reluctance I offered to "patronise him" in the honourable sense of the word; I became the proud owner of Geoff Wooff Flute #4.

Not long after this he left for Ireland and lost touch. But all that time, even though he concentrated on pipes, he retained an excellent mastery of the English concertina.

Cheers, Rowan