Catching up, part 2

I've been working on PGM's guitar:





The purfling on this critter was a bear! Herringbone is no big deal, but the thin maple and bloodwood strips to set off the maple binding were incredibly difficult for me to get in place. I simultaneously tried this binding scheme on another sycamore guitar, and it didn't go so well. But, that guitar has a cutaway, and that's where its problems arose. I eventually abandoned it in favor of a simpler binding scheme on that instrument. This one turned out just dandy. For giggles I rubbed it with some alcohol, just to get an idea of what finish will do to it. The redwood gets darker and richer, the sycamore yellows a bit, but its figure takes on a three-dimensional quality. This darkening makes the whites in the herringbone appear whiter. It's all very dramatic.

The redwood top is very responsive! It's more resistant to puncture wounds than western red cedar, but is also more brittle and quite fussy to work with. But it's very pretty, and a lovely match with the sycamore and the binding/purfling scheme. PGM has ordered up a 13-fret neck with slotted peghead, a nice cocobolo fretboard with flame maple binding. I can't wait to see this!

I'm commencing to work on necks for all these bodies. Neck blocks are attached to the eclecto guitar and the tailpiece sycamore guitar.

More soon.

Catching up, part 1

Since the semester ended, and now that my shop is re-configured in a still suboptimal but more ergonomic fashion, I am quite occupied breathing unhealthy dust and super-gluing my fingers together. There are many guitars underway.


I created a second non-cutaway half to my small jumbo exterior body mold, and can now build bodies such as this. It's 20-1/2" long and 16" across the lower bout: big relative to the smaller instruments I've built so far. This is some of that killer cocobolo Todd Taggert has managed to find and sell at Allied Lutherie. It's so beautiful, I bought a second set. I paired it with a carpathian spruce top. Gorgeous stuff, feels much like German spruce to me. The grain is irregular, and it looks like adirondack red spruce to me. I just pulled the ropes off and sanded it down after binding with some sycamore. The look is very traditional, with the herringbone purfling. I am very excited about this instrument.

Here's a view of the side and the top:



Mr. Sandmoen of Flat Creek (just north of Lynchburg, home of the Jack Daniels distillery) ran a pet crematorium we had sad occasion to use several times some years back. He and his wife are super nice people, transplants from Minnesota. (Minnesotans, to me, are like Canadians -- smart, friendly, funny -- never met one I didn't instantly like). He cut five big black walnut logs for me, which I gladly dragged back to Sewanee. Finally I've gotten it cut into boards. I don't have the means of cutting back and side sets, but I can get necks out of it. I knew a guy (whom I'll call Gorthauer) who used well cured walnut for necks. This stuff is at least five years old. Gorthauer used it almost exclusively.

I also bought some of Todd's extra cool birdseye maple and bearclaw spruce. Too much wood, too many guitars to build, too little time.

But I'll give it my best shot.