Hamer Guitars: The Ultimate Hamer Fan Resource! Amazing Custom Guitar Designs by Jol Dantzig. Handmade Guitars

Good Morning American Guitars

I like Saturday mornings even when it means rolling into work before the sun rises. The hard part, getting out of bed, is over and now the world is mine. Out here in rural New England there isn't a lot of traffic at this hour; and there's a special kind of solitude that descends on me as I negotiate the miles of curvy two-lane road that leads to The Workshop.

 Frost crunches underfoot as I walk to the door and take out my key. I can see just the slightest hint of daylight creeping over the roof of our 175 year-old mill building, the front of which is bathed in a freakish amber glow from the sodium lamp overhead.

I glance at the clock and then hurry on my way, work-boots thumping across century-old maple floors, flipping circuit-breakers and pushing magnetic start buttons—firing up the tools of the trade before the crew arrives. 

 Today's main objective is to put a little milage on the custom orders that are in house. We like to take a week or so off around the holidays this time of year, so it's important to put the instruments into a sequence that takes advantage of the extra curing time. 

 By the time I've made my rounds, Gary is already in the spray room tacking off the B12A that Dave has just completed. There are about seven instruments in various stages that need to be attended to, and Gary will begin with the ones that get the first nitro base coats. Then there will be some to color, and some that need topcoats.

As I write this, the light outside is chasing away the dark and I'm listening to the clank of the steam pipes and the creaking of the roof as the temperature changes. Most of the world is asleep at this hour, but we're making cool stuff. Yeah, it's too early for a weekend—and I love it.

Twelve String Bass Build Continues

It's been a good day in The Workshop and as you can see from this photo Dave has done a great job of blending the neck joint on our B12A build. The feathered edge where the cutaway meets the maple of the neck has turned out really well with a nice straight edge.

 
It's touchy to build a neck with a full-width tenon on an instrument that has a deep cutaway like this as the body and its binding strip has to be feathered down to nothing at the point it "disappears" at the neck. Narrow tenon necks hide the joint under a shoulder, but don't get the advantage of the added vibration transfer of this kind of joint—that's why we like to do it.

Let's just turn back the clock a few days because I want you to see the huge slab of mahogany that this bass was made from. Here, Dave and I are going over some details for another custom build that we have in the Workshop, and we're using the body blank of the B12A as a drafting table.

 
Older growth mahogany in sizes wide enough for a single piece bass or a Standard model are getting hard to come by. We've got a pretty good stash and are always accumulating more when we get a tip on some good stuff. We'll come back to this in a day or so to show you more so check back. 

Inside the Cutaway

Today's peek into The Workshop reveals Dave at work on another blended neck joint—he's getting pretty good at this. Well, that's what we do here in the shop isn't it? This one take a special kind of touch however. It's a B-12A "acoustic" bass, and the inside of the cutaway exposes the side of the neck within the joint for a considerable amount of distance.

What Dave is doing here is feathering the blend with a piece of sandpaper rolled on a dowel. This gives him precise control of the amount and location of his sanding. The reason that's important is because as he sands the cutaway back he's actually exposing the neck along a line he creates with the sanding. His goal is to make the break point between body and neck a perfectly straight line. If you think it's as easy as it looks—well, it just aint! We'll come back to this build later to see the result.

Chambered Music. An Evolution of Sound

Beginning in the late 1980s we've added chambering to our list of sound tweaking tools—and when the Artist model was launched it became mainstream with us. Those early examples of hollowed-out guitars were just solid body instruments with a pocket (or holes) cut into the mahogany back and then covered by the maple top. The Artist added the f-hole, but it wasn't until after we'd made the move to New Hartford that we really started taking the whole chambering thing to a new level. Of course, the Newport and the Improv were logical extensions of our quest, but let's concern ourselves with the semi-solid guitars for this post.
 

 

Our first change was to modify the Studio's chamber size and add the undercarve to the top. Most chambered guitars (including the original Artist models) are hollow underneath but only arched on the outside. By getting the dimension of the top over the chamber down to a consistent thickness we were able to gain some amplitude and noticeably shift the resonance of the guitar. This led to more experimentation with shape and size.
 

The Talladega is the most obvious recipient of the data that we collected—its horn-shaped form and rounded corners serve to reduce standing waves.
 

Talladega Pro Chambering

 

It's exactly the same thing speaker enclosure builders do. Our collaborations with fellow luthiers and aerospace engineers brought us up to speed on several important fronts. An in-house laser vibrometer was at our disposal as well. It's a device that lets you take a "movie" in real time of the vibration patterns on the surface of the instrument. Pretty cool stuff. In the end, the techie tricks only served to attach hard numbers to what we were learning by ear.
  

Talladega first sketch

In the case of the Talladega, we were trying to tailor the sound of the guitar to accentuate the articulation of the notes without becoming too hard or harsh. The Double-D pickup concept was going to have plenty of mids, but we wanted the guitar to be capable of the kind of twang that country and roots rock players could dig. Also, the Tally is capable of combining the two pickups in series for a big humbucking sound, but we didn't want the bottom to wash out either. The Talladega Pro is somewhat different in that it supplies a warmer, darker tone for players who are jumping to humbuckers from bolt-on Strat-type guitars. I think that in both cases, we've succeeded.

Another instrument that has benefitted from our attention to chambering is the Standard. We'd made some hollowed-out versions, mostly to reduce weight for clients, but we hadn't really attempted to "tune" it in the process. Clearly, weight was becoming an issue for some customers but we wanted to offer more as long as we were at it. 

The first version prototypes used various locations and sizes of chambers, but the thing that we kept running into was that when the chambers got big, the feedback got uncontrollable and unpredictable. What a surprise—any Jazz-box player could have foretold that. It was becoming clear that a series of smaller chambers was going to be the ticket, but just when we thought we'd got it right another problem surfaced. The Standard is a big instrument and it's relatively thin. The body is made from a single piece of mahogany and is already prone to warpage. On a smaller guitar you might not notice it, but over the wingspan of the Standard it was becoming a problem. The solution came from an unusual source.

Improv top bracing 

Over the years we've been involved with developmental luthierie with our friends and partners in the acoustic world which includes the study of bracing patterns and top stiffness. Hundreds of deflection tests and dozens of brace pattern changes must have engraved themselves into my subconcious. What we came up with is an "X" brace pattern that maintains the stiffness of the instrument's body in all directions while yielding a weight loss of about 1.4 pounds on average. The series of small chambers of varying size reduces the tendency of any single resonance to get out of control at higher volumes, yet the response time to pick attack is noticeably heightened. It looks a little like fish bones.

Standard chambering

In the end it worked so well, we've made it a "permanent" change. Well, as permanent as anything at Hamer is I guess. For the purists who want that original deep, heavy resonance of the original, we still offer that too.

SuperPro Guitar on the Level

Just a quick post at the end of another busy day. As I passed through the finishing area I caught Todd on the leveling bench with a custom order Monaco SuperPro. If you look closely, you'll see that it's just a little different than stock.

We'll have to turn back the clock on this one and give you a full rundown on the build and the back-story soon. 

Neck Blend Completed

It's lunchtime here in New Hartford, and it has been a busy morning. Dave has finished the neck blend on the Standard model and with a new coat of pore filler it's up on the rack to dry for two days.

 Looks pretty nice doesn't it? This one is getting a bit of an unusual paint job, but that's for another day. Now it's time to finish eating and get back to work.

Morning Blend

Starbucks' ain't got nothin' on our man Dave. He's up with the roosters and in the shop before the sun comes over the mountain to the east. He's already working on the neck blend that he started on Friday and he's determined to finish it up. He's got it roughed out with the scraper and files to the point that it's all about the hand sanding. 

 He's got it down to about a 220 grit right now so it's slow going. He just keeps running his well-trained fingertips over the surface to identify any inconsistencies in the shape—then he sands a little more. This ain't his first rodeo folks, so he knows where he's going by braille. 

We'll stop back a little later to see how he does.

Week-end Wrap-up

It has been a very hectic week here in New Hartford and the weather has been crazy too. Yesterday it hit 67 degrees here, which is pretty insane seeing how it is supposed to snow tonight! 

Dave is making good progress on the Kahler-equipped Standard—here's the blended neck joint after being roughed out with a spindle sander.

 The rest of the blend will be done with sandpaper, taking in excess of an hour to complete. Quite amazing when you compare it with the time it takes to bolt on a neck. You can see the area he's working on from its different color. That's because the guitar was already pore-filled which darkens the wood. The lighter area is where the raw mahogany is exposed.

About twenty five feet from Dave's bench Todd has a Standard 12-string bass up on the leveling bench. This one has a quilt maple top that has been finished in our transparent black. It's a difficult finish to get exactly right. For the longest time I wasn't happy with the hues that black stains used to achieve their "black." But after lots and lots of experimenting, we've hit upon a solution that looks exactly right.

 Our process avoids the "dirtiness" in the pores that you see on inexpensive jobs. Another nice touch on this instrument is the matching headstock overlay which turned out rather well. The ivoroid binding really sets it off too.

We use a double truss rod arrangement on these 34" basses to counteract the tension of twelve strings and allow twist control as well. Todd is about to hand sand the headstock with a smooth block in order to get the finish dead flat.

A quick look inside the spray booth finds some "stock" models in progress—a Monaco III, another Standard a pair of Talladegas and a Monaco. There's always something cooking, but everything will have to simmer over the weekend while we chillax. See you next week!

 

Workshop Wednesday

A quick scan of The Workshop on a busy Wednesday reveals more than a few projects underway. The guys are as busy as Santa's elves, moving steadily along with our clients' dream guitars. At one end of the shop Todd has just finished buffing a Standard model built from African Limba and finished off with a golden yellow "Korina" lacquer.

 
Wait a minute! What's up with that? Left-handed Standards always take me back to the very first time I saw this shape. The familiarity of the form is temporarily suspended and It's almost as if I'd never seen one before. 

This particular instrument was ordered with tortoise shell binding, and it's a great combination with the color of the guitar. Todd is now methodically assembling all the hardware, which is gold-plated, before moving on to the wiring bench. Each step of the way our guys are careful to take all the time the job requires and they don't rush anything.

A few steps away Dave is prepping a neck joint on another custom Standard. Tom has just finished the neck which features a maple fingerboard. Gary put a few light coats of nitro on the fingerboard before the frets were inserted, and now Dave is ready to join the two parts.

 

Regular readers will have seen our video of how we fit each neck in a precise way that can only be done by hand. The neck socket on the body is undersized, and in this case it's Dave who will open it up to fit the neck perfectly. But wait... there's more!

Here's the dry fit, and look... it's a Kahler trem! Yes folks, we still do 'em just like yester-year. I've still got my favorite Pepto-pink Kahler-quipped Chaparral with a built-in Nady transmitter. That thing rocks! 

Well, enough of my yakkin' let's turn it up to eleven and get these people their guitars. The holiday break is almost upon us.

 

NightFire Talladega on the Wing

After a nice Thanksgiving break, we're back in the workshop and doing damage like always. There are lots of fun projects in house right now, some of which we'll be looking at shortly. But right now, let's roll the clock back to just before the holiday. Our Talladega with the NightFire finish was being buffed out and then assembled on Todd's bench.

 In went the Double-D pickups, four-way switch, volume and tone controls.

In this shot  you can see the matching headstock overlay—a slice of the same maple that's on the top of the guitar, and the abalone faceplate inlay. Even the tiny "USA" inlays are individual pieces! This order called for Schaller tuners, still the highest quality, hands-down. Our client wanted some impressive binding, and Dave came through in a big way. It's hard to do properly, laying each strip on  over the next, but that's the way we do it, instead of using pre-laminated plastic with the stripes already in them.

Next, Todd hand wired the electrical components, all of which have been specially sourced to our specifications. Old-school cloth covered wire, custom-taper potentiometers by CTS, and the Sprague "orange drop" capacitor get hooked up inside the control cavity using lead-free solder. The whole deal is sprayed with a nickel based shielding paint that we import from Belgium—it's the best there is. After sealing things up with our anodized aluminum back plate door, Todd cut the nut and strung it up.

 

In the set-up room we set the action, neck relief (.010" at the 8th fret) and then play test the guitar for a while. It's at this point that pickup heights can be set to balance the tone and output. I like to put the neck pickup down a bit lower than usual on the bass side with the Double-Ds. This cleans up the bottom end and keeps it from being too flubby. At the same time keeping the strings close on the higher strings fattens them up relatively. The bridge pickup has quite a bit of magnetic pull due to the large alnico polepieces and a large copperplated steel plate underneath—that how it gets its ultra-twang. You have to be careful not to get it too close to the strings or ghost tones can occur, which make the guitar hard to intonate.

 

Here's a nice shot of the ivory nut and the abalone Victory inlay at the first fret, another nice option. Todd has done a great job slotting the ivory. We use a graduated spacing that gets wider as the strings get thicker. Your fingertips feel the space between the strings, so our method evens that out as opposed to evenly spacing the centers. The result is the trademark Hamer feel that makes this Talladega such a joy to play right out of the box.

Speaking of playing, our covert cam caught a little set-up room jamming just before it went into the aforementioned box. Enjoy!

 

This Wheel's On Fire

Todd has finished blocking out the Nightfire Talladega and has it on the wheel this morning. He started the third and final sanding with 400p sandpaper, and gradually reduced the grit step by step  until he finished up with a micron paper that leaves the lacquer hazy but almost glossy. The next step is to use a yellow Menzerna buffing compound on a cotton wheel.

 

 We use an 18" diameter wheel with an rpm of 1100. We calculate Todd's "feed" speed at about 25 ft/min. which gives us a face speed of about 5200 ft/min. By listening to the sound of the wheel against the work, Todd can vary his pressure accordingly to control heat buildup. Typically, we see a temperature of about 150 degrees F. By heating the lacquer, we're actually moving it around and smoothing out the scratches. Too much pressure and the finish will melt and ripple when it cools. Not enough pressure and the haze doesn't burn off.

In about an hour Todd will be ready to go to the hand polish and seal the finish. We'll wait a couple of days to see how the finish settles out before going back to do our final inspection and final wax. It won't be long now!

Quilting for Comfort on a Cold Day

It's getting cold here in rural New England, witnessed by the field jackets stuffing the coat rack just inside the workshop door. Inside, it's warm and a pleasant humidity—perfect for guitar building. Just the same, if Tom feels a little chill, he can cover up with a nice quilt like this one. Now doesn't that warm your heart?

 

If this wood looks familiar, it's because the maple top is from a nice batch from the same tree that yielded the one Tom made a few weeks back. If you are the new owner of this guitar now you know that there's a fraternal twin sister out there someplace. Will they ever meet?

Wednesday Workshop Custom 12 String Bass

As the mornings get darker and the air gets chillier, we find the guys engrossed in their work. Dave is putting the string nut blank on the twelve-string bass that we saw earlier.

We use a black material that we call Lubritrak. It's a tough, slippery material that allows the strings to glide smoothly through the slots. We pioneered the idea of a self-lubricating nut with the introduction of this material in the early 1980s. It works great for tremolo guitars too.

After he bonds it down, Dave will file the nut blank to the proper width, height and shape. The next step is to stamp the serial number into the back of the headstock with a press. Dave gets the next available number from the book and loads the press with the stamping dies.

As Dave pulls the lever down firmly, the dies press the number into the wood. In this case, it's a maple neck. The second line will be the letters U. S. A. because that's what we're all about. 

The bass is now well on its way, but some of you are probably wondering what this twelve-string bass business is all about.

Thirty Two years ago, bassist Tom Peterson threw in the towel trying to get his Hagstrom 8-string bass to function properly. Cheaply made, with only four bridge saddle for eight strings and a thin, flexible neck, it just wasn't cutting it for Tom. When he approached us, first to improve the Hagstrom, then to build a replacement—we thought it was a fine idea. When things escalated to twelve strings, we had our doubts. 

Tom's idea was to create an instrument based upon the ancient Tiple—a guitar-like instrument with four courses of three strings each. Each course, or group, would have a standard bass string as the root and two more strings tuned in unison one octave higher. Tom's band, Cheap Trick was basically a trio with a singer, and the big sound he anticipated would be perfect to fill things up and act as a de-facto rhythm guitar as well as a bass.

The Tiple made its way here from Spain by way of Columbia as early as the sixteenth century. Tiples were made by many builders in the US such as Martin (pictured above) and Regal, in the early part of the last century. To be honest, we thought that the force of twelve strings on a bass would compromise the neck. We negotiated Tom down to Ten strings for the first whack at it. The plan was to triple the top two courses and use the standard eight-string, double configuration for the lower two courses.

Thus, in 1977, the first Hamer multi-string bass was developed and built. It wasn't as easy as just going out and buying the parts—they had to be made. I designed a bridge and tailpiece based upon the Thunderbird hardware, but with eight individual saddles so that Tom could intonate the octave strings separately from the low ones. I found a guy with a small machine shop to help make it, and then drove it over to the chrome plater down the road. These are still the guys who make them today! The bridge was a major improvement over original eight string. Incidentally, we constructed an eight-string electric mandocello for Rick Nielsen at the same time, and here's a photo of the two instruments together at the time of completion.

Tom took that first ten-string on the road, and when it stood up to the rigors of touring, it was time to make the world's first twelve-string bass. But that wouldn't even be enough for Tom, but that's a story for another time.

Hamer Monaco Graces Keb' Mo' CD Cover

Regular readers of this blog will recall Keb' Mo's visit to the workshop. He'd already been a convert to Hamer, having comissioned a pair of Monacos after his first taste of a Korina Newport.

 

Originally outfitted with Lollar P90s, Keb found the noise level a little too much for his taste so he upgraded the guitar with a set of hum-cancelling Duncans. It didn't take long for "Big Red" to become his main stage and recording guitar.

To our delight we discovered that Keb' has a new CD out featuring some live tracks as well as new studio material. We're certainly flattered to see "Big Red" on the album cover too!

 

Thanks buddy, we're proud to be a part of your team. 

Genuine Materials for Genuine Guitars

Another week is upon us as we get on with the business of creating genuine and authentic American instruments. We like to use premium materials for their beauty and depth as well as their functionality. This morning Dave is trimming a neck with mother of pearl pieces—the biggest ones he can find. In this case, it borders a black ebony fingerboard and matching ebony headstock faceplate.

You can see the finished effect on the headstock curve at the bottom of the photo. Take a close look and you'll notice that the curved piece there is so long that you can't even see the end here. Think about how large the blank had to be in order to cut that curved piece from it. The easy way out is to use a bunch of small pieces and just angle them one-by-one around the curve. But that wouldn't be our way. Our clients are buying the effort not just the effect. Most people wouldn't know the difference, but we're not making these instruments for them.

Another place where we spend more time and money is the string nut. Reclaimed and fossilized Russian ivory has a depth and glow that is far beyond bone or synthetic materials. Not only is it cherished because it is rare and beautiful, it has a hardness and lubricity that helps the string slide through. Here, Todd has just finished setting up a Newport with a Brazilian rosewood fingerboard. We use a graduated spacing that increases as the string gauges increase. Your fingertips sense the space between the strings, not the center of the string. That's why or guitars feel so friendly to play. As always, it's the little things that add up.