Today I was staring down my miter joints as I inlayed the purfling in one of my classical guitars. It's a very exhausting thing - applying the binding and purfling to a guitar. Of course, it would be a lot easier if I didn't care about the outcome. It was about 3pm, and like lots of people in my time zone, I was beginning to lose concentration.
It's good to be productive. Some of it is hard work and some of it is ingenuity. By the end of this week I will have a couple of guitar frames hanging in my humidity room ready to get fitted for both their top and back. It's so much faster than I had previously been building guitars, yet my process has changed very little.
I think that most guitar makers hate shipping their guitars. I mean its great to be sending guitars out the door and reaping the fruits of your labor, but I have heard too many horror stories about many hours of work being ruined in transit.
When I bought a couple of chunks of western red cedar from Jerry Roberts in Nashville, TN about a year and a half ago I didn't know for sure what I was getting in to. I was used to judging tops one at a time, feeling each plate individually - all coming from different trees of course.
I grew up on a farm making things. When family and friends came out to visit us the prevailing question was always, "what do you do out here in the middle of nowhere?" For me, the question was always - What couldn't you do?
I have been intending to do this for a long time, but for the last 4 guitars, I used a razor blade and a chisel to inlay the tail stripe on the butt of the guitar. Using a wedge as the tail's decoration on a guitar has two advantages for the luthier. 1) It's easier to get a perfect fit.
People have been making things out of wood for a very long time. I'm not going to be the person to spend a long time formulating an argument for when it started. I am sure that there are anthropologists out there that have argued it and have promulgated some sketchy theories.
Wednesday afternoon I had the great opportunity to make a trip up to Louisville, KY and visit the guitar department at the University of Louisville.
