Our last full day of work! At the end of today we will essentially have the guitar ready for finish aside from locating and masking the bridge, fitting the neck, and some final sanding. I now have the ability to ruin a guitar instead of just a piece of wood and the to-do list reflects that. We have a short list of high-skill things and for the most part I will spend the day working with Steve.
The majority of the time Ryan builds the bodies and Steve does the necks (exactly what they both prefer), but they switch roles from time to time to keep up their chops and are constantly talking and using each other as a second set of eyes and hands.
I've gotten glimpses of Steve's neck carving throughout the week as he has been in the middle of carving a neck to a customer's specifications that is significantly different than Kinnaird's norm. I can't wait to see it up close and get involved.
AM -
- Glue binding. I joked with Steve that his builder friends would give him a hard time about having to have 3 guys to glue binding and he assured me they would all be jealous. We rotated positions but all 3 stayed involved the whole time. The only reason there aren't 6 hands in the pic is I took one away to take this picture and got in trouble for it
. This operation was more involved and more care was taken than I anticipated, though in retrospect it makes sense. You really wouldn't want any gaps at this point. Once again, I was impressed with how much the years of experience showed; they always knew how many pieces of tape they would need, where they wanted to double up, and where to be extra careful.
- Carve Neck. I helped with quite a bit of material removal, but admittedly there is zero chance I could do this by myself. Steve was nonstop telling me where to shave, which tool he would use in which area, what to look for where, what not to do, etc. Watching this neck go from a block of wood into a perfectly hand-carved neck was one of the most impressive things I've ever watched. I could have spent 50x the amount of time and not gotten anywhere close to how good it was after an hour-ish of Steve's eyes and hands on it. These pics are not posed...I did actually do a little with the master carver behind the camera.
- Install frets. I didn't get any good pics of this as my hands were pretty busy during. I chose to use EVO Gold frets and this was my first time to do a complete fret job on a guitar. With Ryan's good instruction and timely words of caution it went by pretty quickly and without a hitch. They will be gorgeous and match the tuners and accents on the bridge pins and end pin.
- Level Binding/Purfling. Files and scrapers.
- Fit bridge to body. Black dust on raw white top.
- Side dots were installed somewhere in all of this and I didn't get any good pics of it.
Day is done! We made plans to meet for breakfast at an old diner on the square in the oldest town in Texas (Nacogdoches), and then come back and do some final fitting and masking to close out the week. So close!