The Guitar Designer's Workshop

Metal for Sakura Guitar

Work continues on the metal plates for the Sakura guitar. The task of making the pieces has taken the better part of three days but they are looking great. 

The pickup adjustment will take place directly from the top plate, so they needed to be drilled along with the control holes. Around the edge the mounting screw holes needed to be countersunk.

After smoothing the edges and drilling, a brushed finish is put on the metal before it is to be nickel plated and engraved.

I had the foresight to cut a second top plate because I'd been talking to a client about another guitar that would use one. It's a guitar that I'm calling "Hell's Half-Acre" and I can't wait to get going on it. Stay tuned!

Taking a Break

What a difference a few days can make here in New England. My last post was about being locked down by the snow, but now it's sunny and (relatively) warm. Accordingly, I took a few hours out of the day to stack up what will hopefully be the last of this winter's firewood.


It was a bright, crisp afternoon—the kind that makes you feel great to be alive and privileged just to be outdoors. I worked at a steady pace piling up the logs, breathing deep and stopping every so often to look at the trees and sky. Just a few steps away was our suet feeder, which attracts larger birds. As I labored, wrens, bluebirds and thrushes flitted back and forth from the nearby trees to the feeder. A noisy group of three downy woodpeckers alternated with the bluebirds and wrens for a shot at the food. At one point I grabbed my camera and got a photo of a bluebird patiently awaiting his turn while a male downy woodpecker feasts.

Once the last of the firewood was stacked I went inside to finish up the drawings for the cherry blossom guitar. The shape of the front and back plates had been finalized so it was time to cut them out of steel. My first step was to make paper templates from my drawings so I could check the shapes with the actual guitar parts.

Then it was time to get medieval on a sheet of .059" CRS. I had a piece that was just big enough for two sets of plates, and with a little luck I'd be able to cut them without problem. This thickness will allow the engraver to go deep without denting or puckering the plates. I chose steel because of its magnetic properties. Aluminum is fine for laser or chemical etching, but it messes with the inductance of the pickups in a way that isn't as kind as copper or steel. Besides, I'm going with hand engraving—steel will yield better detail.

Here I am checking the overall fit before drawing out the shapes on the metal.

Using some spray adhesive, I fix the templates to the sheet so that I can trace the outlines with a scribe. I want to get the material into more managable pieces. 



 After transferring the shapes, I roughed out the blanks with an air shear—not my first choice of tools, but it works. This gets me close enough so that I can finish the parts on the bandsaw and then the spindle sander. which is a job for another day.

 

Morning (Guitar) Visions

More snow.
Fuzzy white branches like tarantula legs of soft snow blanketing my view from the morning window. Otherworldly and calming.

Sipping my espresso, black and deep, while I let my subconscious wander in the reservoir of guitar experience and memory. It is my process.

The notebook, pen, coffee and guitar. What more do you need?

 
A black crow silhouette on the evergreen above the shop.

Why am I sharing this process? Why not just post photographs of finished guitars—shiny and proud?

In the words of Martina Navratilova, a consummate athlete who won fifty-four Grand Slam tennis titles, "the moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else." When someone who knows what it is to cross the finish line first says this, I imagine she knows a thing or two about how to get there.

So, this is the quiet time when I let my thoughts spill out onto the paper. I am living for the moment I am in.

I am reminded of Kerouac's "Method." 

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

 

Carving a Niche: Crow Guitar Neck Shaping

The snow has let up for a while, which means we can get back to making more cool stuff instead of raking snow off the shop roof for the third time. I wasn't really too worried about collapse, but it was a good excuse to go out and play with big-boy tools in the snow. Out here in the woods it's really beautiful and the morning light on the trees takes your breath away.

I've always marveled at how guitarists find it perfectly acceptable to take a brand new instrument to their tech for a setup. In my opinion, a guitar that needs fretwork out of the box wasn't made properly in the first place. 

It's been six weeks since The Crow's neck and fingerboard were bonded together—just the right amount of time to do the final relief on the back of the neck. The idea is to let the neck twist or move completely before you radius the fretboard. I'd done a study of neck twisting years ago, and the results were quite interesting. I used two groups of ten necks—one in the shop and the other in a controlled environment. Every day I used a vernier clinometer to measure the amount of twisting that had occurred, and the data was put into a spreadsheet. Just to make sure that the results were correct, I repeated the same test six months later. Same conclusion.

All of this was to put some real numbers to what I'd speculated all along by the seat of my pants. It all comes down to a sort of actuarial exercise depending upon how much risk you want to take with your guitar. There is a point where the risk of a twisted neck becomes "acceptable" compared to how many warranty claims you're willing to remedy. In the case of a guitar I make today, the risk I'm willing to take is zero—so I go for the full maximum time. That means that the neck and fingerboard assembly will sit on the shelf  for the full eight weeks. This is the true point of diminishing returns as far as I'm concerned—and the data backs it up.

Now that we're at the six week point, I take the neck down to its final shape using a cabinet scraper and then sandpaper. At this point the "normalization" process is almost complete. The fingerboard is still flat, and that's the secret to the whole thing. In two more weeks, after all the twisting has finished, I'll cut the final radius on the fingerboard. Because the wood has done all the moving that it's going to do, the playing surface will stay true for the life of the guitar. An added bonus is that I won't have to "true" the frets, which is really just "truing" the neck called by another name.