Geoff's OO

As always, I’m playing catch-up! It’s so easy to under estimate the time that it will take you to complete a particular task. At the moment I’m filling the grain on Geoff’s OO in preparation for French polishing and it’s taking much longer than anticipated. You can see the grain on the guitar’s back before and after filling in the pictures below.

The Honduras rosewood has really deep pores to fill and this is proving to be a very time consuming process. That said, the better the grain is filled, the easier the polishing goes; an extra hour grain filling could save at least that when polishing. Although you could probably fill all the grain in one go, I tend to work over three or four days; the solvents have time to dry-off, you don’t get bored (grain filling is a tedious job!) and you come back to the guitar after a break with a fresh pair of eyes. Also, it reduces the chance of RSI- your shoulders really ache after a full day of grain filling, the continuous circular motion and the downward pressure that you have to put on the pad, gets to you after a few hours. Next step, fill the sides!! You can see Geoff’s guitar in the white,below.

Here’s another top-tip! I’m not sure where I picked-up this idea for levelling frets (these are Geoff's frets) but it works. Once all the frets are in, mask the fingerboard and soundboard.

Use some kind of crayon to cover the top surface of each fret with colour.

Once you start levelling the frets, you can easily see the low ones by the colour left on top of them.

Paul's Mandolin

Also on the bench is Paul’s walnut mandolin which you can see is coming along quite nicely.

Website Updated

I’ve just been updating my website, as I was in danger of having too many different instruments on the same page. There are now three sections,

guitars

mandolins

custom instruments

I now offer four different models of guitars; model 1, Phil Hare Signature, parlour guitar and classical. On the mandolin page you’ll find the twin-point, model 2 instruments and another mandolin, “The Standard” which I’m currently designing. And then there’s the custom pagefor all of those unique instruments that I get commissions for.

Titebond CA...yuk!

Many luthiers regularly use CA glues and I’ve been happily using ZAP CA for a number of years, Axminster tools have now gone over to Titebond CA. Although the glue is good, it’s a lousy bottle- you can’t control the application as carefully and much ends up on the floor or worse still on you hands. I’ll be looking for a new source of ZAP soon!