What’s next?

With the construction of Adrian’s double commission nearly completed, it’s time to start preparing for the next instrument. This one will be a rather striking guitar for Ian, based on my Model 2 shape. If you’re not aware of my Model 2 you can see it here on my website.

The Indian rosewood back has been glued together; I like to use sash clamps for this task.

Once the back has been joined and taken down to 2.5mm thickness (did you spot the deliberate mistake?) a groove is routed, to take a decorative stripe.

This stripe is going to made up from ultra-thin black/red/black lines and abalone; the whole stripe (6 lines and the abalone) is just over 2.5mm wide. When you are doing fancy stuff, it really is a case of less is more!

The groove is routed with a dremel tool and then all the component parts are glued in with epoxy resin…………

……………..24 hours later and after a clean-up, here’s the result.

And although the stripe is very fine you can see below how it stands out against the rosewood back. Like I said, more is less.

Nava Fretted Instrument Archive

On the side bar, you’ll find a new link to another blog that I have just started. I’ve decided to put together an archive of as many of my fretted instruments as I can.

Why? A number of reasons

 I seem to be making more and more mandolins and wanted somewhere to record my guitars, without over loading my website.

Some of my old instruments seem to be surfacing and I’m getting requests for information.

I’d also like to encourage anyone who has one of my early instruments to send a photo; in the early days I didn’t have a camera and much work was unrecorded.

And I thought it might be fun!