Sharp

 

I upgraded to a Lie-Nielson #5 jack plane.

Well worth it.

0.001" / 25 micron shaving.

Clams

 

Recently I was perusing the Alaska Specialty Woods website, which is rarely a good thing for my credit card.  This time I did a little damage to the credit card buying damaged wood, damaged in a very cool way.

The Teredo / shipworm clam excels at boring through wood.  If a log, Stikka Spruce in this case, is floated down the river and sits/sinks in brackish water, it might get attacked by Teredo clams.  Later that log might get pulled out of the water, quartersawn, put on a web site, and finally do a little damage someone's credit card.

I've always wanted a Teredo top since I first saw Yasmin William's guitar

Yasmin's is symmetric / book matched.  

I'm mulling over how I am going to do mine...

book match:

Asymmetric:

 

Voiding the Warranty

There are some decent beginners guitars, held back in part by trying to be as indestructible as possible -- tops that are too thick, over braced, and encased in way too much finish. I always wondered how they would sound if the finish was stripped, scrape down the top,  and thin the braces.

Let's find out.

My test mule will be an Orangewood Oliver, which I picked up for $170.  Solid mahogany top & neck, rosewood fingerboard/bridge, bone nut/saddle, the tuners tune, and well pretty much everything else doesn't matter.

With a couple thousand dollars worth of labor, we *might* be able to make this sound as good as a $500 guitar!

Initial thoughts on Oliver before getting to work:  the fundamentals are good. My only real complaint as a "beginner" guitar is that the frets are very rough / not polished - otherwise the setup/playability is solid.  It is not very loud, which is probably a positive for a beginners guitar, and I like the fundamental tone.  The overtones are lacking-to-non-existent, which isn't much of an issue for a beginner.

And it is really pretty nice looking, very dark. 

Slide guitar / now to hack or not to hack? (hack for the win)

 

A while back I mentioned that the Mytlewood guitar's top was damaged and I was working on replacing it.  The new top is made out of Alaskan Yellow Cedar, with an offset sound hole, and the hybrid X-brace/fan bracing I have been using recently. 

It sounds quite lovely.

And then the trust rod broke. Sigh.  At the moment it is great for slide guitar and cowboy cords.

I figure I should bother to take a photograph of it in its current state before I pull off the neck and decide what to do with it.

Update:  I pulled the neck and yanked out the truss rod.   Same exact truss rod as the one in this video, I used basically the same technique to get it out.  And pretty much the same problem, the 4mm nut had broken.   Unfortunately the light at the end of tunnel was not as much of a happy ending.

Holding the neck just right in the setting sun, you can see the shadow of fibers that have split under the stress.

 

This is a thin neck....  the right thing to do would be to remove the fingerboard, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard.

I think I will mull over doing the wrong (easy) thing first.  What is the worst thing that can happen?  If it goes bad, I would have to remove the finger board, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard....

Update 6/13/24:   Replacement truss rod was delivered.  I noticed that the diameter of the nut was just slightly larger than the block and I had not accounted for that - the neck was pushing on the nut. Over the years as adjustments were made pressure was put on different sides of the nut until it eventually weakened and broke. So the root cause was a manufacturing defect (mine), not a fault of the original truss rod.  I fixed that before tapping in the new truss rod.

I then mixed up a batch of thin hot hide glue, injected it into the cracks, wrapped it in parchment paper, then wrapped the whole neck tightly with rubber bands.   The cracks are now gone....  score one for the lazy method of repair.

Hacking

 

Here is a fun one I put down in the basement and forgotten about....   One lovely spring/summer day I had just read an article about someone who was developing plans for musical instruments requiring minimalist tools, materials, and expertise. The idea being to help bring music to developing economies and the like where expensive instruments are unlikely to be feasible.

Dan Young and David Pierce stopped by the house and we chatted about how interesting this concept was. So we decided to take a crack at it.   We made an electric guitar using a pine board for the body, held together with screws; tuners made from eye bolts and wing nuts; pickup made from the magnet in an old broken hardrive and the coil from an old-fashion "wall wort" power supply & held together with duct tape; and wrapped the whole thing in nylon string (fishing line, weed wacker string? I don't really remember) to make frets.

 Plugged it into an amp and it worked (for rather generous interpretation of the word "worked").  The tuners are perhaps not the finest I have ever used.  The frets are a suggestion of where a note may be, and they easily move.   But it does indeed make a rather glorious noise.  Dave and I were not particularly successful at "making music" with it, but Dan managed a rather excellent gritty blues riff (I.e something that was recognizable as music)

Looks like I swiped one of the eye bolts, possibly for whatever project I had actually bought them for.  The duct tape needs to be refreshed as well, it is now hitting the strings. 

House

And the second of the Parlor twins: a guitar built (mostly) from Eden Nelson's house.  Eden was remodeling and asked if I could convert some of the left-over boards into a guitar he could hang in the room in his house that they came from.

The top, back, and sides are "Eden's House" ~100 year old douglas fir.  

The braces came from a particularly nice board that our mutual friend John King gave me when he remodeled part of his garage.

Some of the lining came from a tree that was cut down in my yard.

The rest -- neck, fingerboard, bridge, etc -- came from the Rebuilding Center,  recycled wood from some anonymous local house.

(Mostly) Red

Up next we have the first of a pair of twins.  Since the prototype parlor when out the door so fast, I built another prototype/path-finder one step ahead of its twin.   Now you may be thinking that this particular one doesn't appear to be 100% done -- they are never done + I am in this for the fun and not as a business, so I tend to make such posts whenever it makes me happy no matter the state of the build.

The star of this one is the unusual woods. The back and sides are Red Mulberry, which is known to be one of the domestic woods with similar characteristics as rosewoods, but the trees tend to be small so not often used for guitars.  Head over to here and scroll down to Mulberry

The finger board and bridge are Osage Orange, which is related to Mulberry and looks very similar, but it is harder.  The Osage was sanded much more recently than the Mulberry, it will fairly quickly oxidize to match the color of the back/sides.

Neck is Red Oak, from a board that caught my eye passing through a big box store.  

The top is a B-grade (I'm a big fan of B grade) Engelmann spruce.  Originally I had planned on a B-grade Red Cedar top, but I decided to set that aside for another build that will likely have Osage Orange back and sides.

I am particularly fond of how the knot shadow lines up between the back and sides, wrapping all the way around: