Big Clean-up

This week has seen Ian’s neck carved and the guitar get its big clean-up prior to French polishing.

You can see my favourite tools for neck carving below.

I like to carve my necks last of all. At this point the fingerboard is on and fretted and you can get a really good feel for what the finished instrument will be like to play.

And here we are ready for grain filling………….

Nava Archive

I’ve added a few more instruments to my archive blog, so please take a look if you’re interested. And if you have one of my old guitars (pre-digital cameras era!) I’d be delighted to see a photo of you and the instrument so that I can include it.

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.