The top for this guitar comes from some an assortment of flitches that came from a stand of cedar trees that died when the Bull Run river in Oregon flooded many years ago. Robert Ruck got two life time supplies of it. One of the supplies was bought by Jerry Roberts in Nashville. I bought it from him several years ago and it has been the soul of this guitar build.
Here is a full length of the guitar. This build has a 640mm string length which has become my favorite scale for this design and these woods.
I recently started using a thin bone veneer in the back of the bridge tie block to give the holes some extra protection. I have noticed that almost every guitar develops quite a bit of wear from the pull of the strings over several years and the thinner carbon trebles are especially brutal to their string holes. So this will maintain the hole shape.
For almost two years now I have been using a 12 fret truss rod that is adjustable at the headstock. It's simple enough to execute and there is no negative impact on the sound of the guitar. It actually gives the instrument a bit more heavy sustain I think. I strung each guitar in this batch up and made all the adjustments to the neck releif and string height well before starting all the detailed finish work.
I have recently chosen rosewood over curly maple for binding this model for a more subtle contrast.
This rosette is a 20 x 20 pattern that I doodled in an excel spreadsheet amoung many others several years ago. These take an enormous amount of time to complete. It almost makes more sense to make a lifetime supply in one batch then simply one - three years worth of rosettes. Only problem then is...you have to be real confident in the design, because you're going to have to live with it for a long time ;)
The outer ring on the rosette and the purfling around the top actually is bought from LMI. Normally I like to make all my design elements but I went to visit my friends at Gallagher Guitar Co. one afternoon to check-up on a classical project I helped them with and they had used this purfling on the project. I really liked it and thought it would be a nice look and not a bad investment for all the time it saves gluing those pieces of wood together.
So this time I used a Birchwood Casey tru oil finish on the neck and added their wax on top of that. It was a bit of an experiment to improve the feel of the neck and I am interested in seeing how it ages.
The end graft.
And the headstock.
And the back.
And a little veneer to the back of the headstock is a nice way to dress up a scarf joint. The tuning machines are Gilbert Tuners with snakewood knobs / buttons.
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