Aloha,
I must qualify my comments here by saying that I have made them before on build sites that are trying to replicate the old Martins.
It was stated above,
"Uh, chat with folks who play 350 year old Strads. Great older instruments do not fade, they improve"
As one who's been both a luthier, repairman & also been lucky to have seen up close many of the greatest instruments - including Strads - ever made, I must respond. As a player, I also owned many 30's OM & OOO-12 Martins (they were relatively cheap & unpopular in the 60's & 70's when everyone was making & playing Dreadnaught's).
I agree with the statement above, with one caveat: to stand the test of time & improve, wooden musical instruments must firstly be well designed & well made.
Viol family instruments are highly refined & are much older than modern guitar designs. That wasn't the complete case with factory-made Martins made in 1930. Individual luthiers have been further refining guitars ever since.
I have repaired hundreds of Martin guitar tops that had cracked using Martin's mistaken & unrefined, production method of affixing pickguards to the tops of their guitars. They glued the pickguards directly to the softer unfinished spruce tops & then sprayed finish over them. The pickguard materials shrunk over time & subsequently cracked the spruce tops. Martin stubbornly kept doing this until the 80's. By then, most individual luthiers & repairmen had refined it to affix the guards to tops,
post-finish.
In the last group of shared pix, in post #24 especially, it looks like the creators of the pictured guitar are getting ready to use the same debunked technique that cracked so many Martin tops for some 60 years, especially when celluloid, acetate & other plastic materials began to be used for pickguards instead of tortoise. The post is described: "Pickguard On!"
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...93c8fa414d.jpg
The practice worked for Martin's production line, but not for the evolution & refinement of the instrument. Even when I used wood veneers as pickguards, I never glued them directly to an unfinished top because of my repair experiences on Martins.
I would suggest that trying to be true in painstakingly reproducing famous, classic, musical instruments is a great thing. But to copy such an obvious Martin mistake is counter-productive to the process & the instrument's longevity, don't you think? It could be disastrous & prevent it from even becoming the next generation of great classic 90 year-old Martin-inspired guitars, as with so many Martins & copies before it.
Beautiful work & woods overall. I'll bet it will sound very nice too. But the flaw must be noted. Or am I missing something?
A Hui Hou!
alohachris