Paul was a truly dear friend; I had dinner with him and Robin up at their place in Bonny Doon a couple of times a month for a number of years. I knew he was seriously sick for quite a while, and...
Paul was a truly dear friend; I had dinner with him and Robin up at their place in Bonny Doon a couple of times a month for a number of years. I knew he was seriously sick for quite a while, and...
More a guitar thing, but Addam Stark (who was the lead finisher at SCGC for several years) shares spray booth space with me, and he does work for a lot of other guitar makers, so regularly get to see...
Haven't been around here for a while, but here I is...
Another advantage in using HHG are that if you're doing a repair and everything fits, the glue line will virtually disappear. I've reglued a...
Hey, I resemble some of those remarks!
Banana, Michael Kane, and I all met at the Boston University freshman rally in the fall of 1962. We were the three guys who refused to wear those...
As per Dave's suggestion, I use void-free "Baltic Birch" ply for end blocks and head blocks in guitars, ukes, and in the pancake mando kits I make for my courses. Because of it's strength and...
Rolfe, good on that. It's how I build my acoustic guitars and I dado the CF up into the fingerboard as well as down into the neck. No, you wouldn't want to try to remove the fingerboard, but I'll...
I'm an early adopter of using carbon fiber, and I've remained a believer now for 33 years, though I use the stuff differently than I did at first. For longer necks, I do like the ability to adjust,...
If you read up on the history of violin makers trying to reproduce Strads, then you'll see that blind (or deaf) adherence to sets of measurements rarely gets the desired results because each piece of...
Re. the "reversed" pickguard... They probably cut those out on a scroll saw cutting two or four layers of material at a time with alternating layers of the white/ivoroid and the tortoise. Then...
Holy Toledo, you guys! Even 1/8" (.125" or about 3mm) is pretty thick, but at .250" you'll have to steam bend it like boat parts, probably using a backing strap. I bend guitar sides at about...
If we're talking copper wound strings, then I just don't know where you'd get them. A lot of classical guitar strings are silver plated copper wound, but I don't know of any US made copper-wound...
You could get one of the specialty string companies to make some "Loar Lore" strings. That could be very interesting for a mandolin that wasn't expected to be a Bluegrass machine gun. I bet you...
As a production instrument maker building in the just pre-CNC style right now...pin router patterns and such, I can say that as tooling wears, you get very slight changes from one instrument to the...