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Old 04-26-2019, 12:35 PM
chippygreen chippygreen is offline
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On to the end graft and back stripe.

Thanks everyone for all the ideas and feedback on the PRW back - they really helped me advance my thinking on what I want to achieve for this guitar. After going back and forth between stripe/no stripe, and then focusing in on the idea of a small decorative motif instead of a full stripe, here is something I sketched to try to visualize how to tie the end graft and back stipe together.

The idea being explored here is to have the maple strip that forms the center of the end graft "hooks" over the bottom of the lower bout of the guitar to form a "tongue" on the lower back.

3-4 Tail View.jpg

You'll see I tried a few different variations of Michael's end graft pattern that I liked because it mimicked the shape of the maple seed. See post #45.

My initial sketch was more organic but I quickly felt it was not faithful to the rest of the design of the guitar. I therefore simplified it further in a quick sketch to the top left.

As a sketch, the diagram was not to scale and bugged me a lot because I knew the end graft was drawn way out of proportion to the guitar as a whole. So I drew a version to scale with specific measurements relative to the 4.5 inch tailblock depth of the Bashkin OM and here is what I came up with.

Full Scale End Graft Concept Drawing.jpg

If you go back to the first post you'll notice that the side wood has some figuring, which is depicted in the sketch lines above.

Also, in this rendering, the end graft is made of parallel lines, not converging ones. This could change but the primary constraint is to leave a sufficiently wide strip of maple at the bottom to form a meaningfully sized "tongue" that laps over the back of the guitar.

This needs further tweaking - the semicircles are not identically sized, and a design decision needs to be made whether the semicircles touch at the top or not.

However, my feeling right now is that this design is worth continued exploration. The "opening" Koa/Walnut semi circles not only echo the "sliding door" rosette, but the shape of the Japanese Maple seed. Likewise, the maple wood center strip runs round the back of the guitar and allows me to insert a small trapezoid at the base, which makes a strong color statement set against rosewood, while still being visually and geometrically tied out against the end graft.

A final idea might be to incorporate a maple heel cap as well as a maple semi circle to the top of the rear ebony headstock plate, as follows:

Rear View %22Maple Tree%22 - Maple Accents.jpg

Maybe that works, or not - it's a detail that we can figure out later.
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Bashkin 00-12 Adi/Hog
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Bashkin GC-12 Sitka/Koa
Carter-Poulsen J-Model German Select Spruce/MacEb
Fender MIJ Strat ('90) and 50s RW Tele ('19)
Martin 00-28c Spruce/BRW('67)
Martin M-36 (R) Sitka/EIR
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Last edited by chippygreen; 05-02-2019 at 07:41 PM.
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