Two failed tops, fans, and a road trip

 

This is a story of failures, road trips, and hybrid X / fan bracing.

The first fail was the rather pretty englemann spruce / flamed myrtlewood guitar.  I built that one as light as I could, which eventually turned out to be too light. Over time the top started to distort to the point of no return.  Before it self destructed I removed the top & started work on a new one (still in progress, coming soon).  I hung the original top  on the shop wall as a reference / reminder of what not to do.    For the new top, I decided to do a hybrid X brace with fan braces on the lower bout and was quite happy with the results.

Second fail was the top on the Table Legs guitar. This one started to sound a bit odd, then just went dead. All of the magic was gone.   So I also tried to pull the top... and it just disintegrated, a collection of splinters held together by the braces. That fir had two great careers, ~100 years hanging out on the side of someone's house and a decade playing music, but it was clearly time for it to be put out to pasture.

I figured I might as well build a new top for the second one as well.  While I was in shop, I was staring at the englemann spruce top hanging on the wall and found myself wondering.... if I removed the lower bout tone bars and replaced them with fan braces, I bet it would also sound great and resolve the structural integrity issues.  A couple hours later it was done, next morning strung up and back in business.

Flash forward months later and I was planning to trip to Maine to hang out with good friends I haven't seen in quite a while.  On that last trip, I took a guitar with me, I'm pretty sure it was this one, and it ended up going home with Simon Poirier.

So for this trip, I thought it would be fun to bring another guitar and this one was perfect. It has a bolt-on neck, which makes it easy to collapse down to carry-on size, and had already been beat to hell and back -- no worries about scuffing it up, etc.

This one was last seen in the back of Jim McQullian's SUV.   Perhaps Simon figured out a way to convince Catherine that he should take this one home, too.