? for builders

[Mycrotone]

I was thinking about what my dream guitar would be and got of on a tangent. Here's the ?.

Think Martin 000-18. Short scale, 14 fret, mahogony/sitka. No stains or fillers and with the thinnest satin finish just help seal the wood. Un-stained figured ebony board, bridge and headstock veneer with the board and veneer cut from the same piece so the figuring appears continuous. Is any of this undoable or not recommended?

[Island Mfg.]

Totally, 100% doable.

[SJ VanSandt]

I'm wondering if the builders out there would recommend no fillers. Mahogany has big pores - I wouldn't want to get splinters while playing my guitar!

[bowerbird]

SJ- Pore filling just helps create a more level surface for that glass-like finish appearance most of us have been trained to expect to see, but it's otherwise totally unnecessary. The only risk of getting a splinter might come from a damaged or extremely poorly constructed instrument.

[dekutree64]

I've grown quite fond of a simple wipe of shellac, especially on necks. Smooth, but not grippy like gloss, and not scritchy feeling like satin finishes. Best neck finish there is, IMO. But you need a good neck blank, cut so there's near-zero runout on the back of the neck, i.e. pores as long as possible rather than pinholes that feel annoying.

It looks decent as a whole guitar finish as well, particularly on a scraped surface rather than sanded. Not glossy, but pretty shiny, not flat like satin. Nice old-timey natural look, keeps the wood clean, and done in 5 minutes

[harvl]

I general terms it is a fairly simple guitar request but in the broad scope it could be a problem for a well known builder to create a guitar that might look like it was cheaply done. The perceptions of the public are very important and each guitar is a walking talking billboard for new sales and reputation. A guitar like that would most likely sound better than one with a thicker hi gloss finish but there would be no way to make it look like what most people have come to consider as acceptable. My very first exposure to luthiery was from an 80 year old violin builder back in Vermont (talking early 70's here) and he used linseed oil on his fiddles... and the sounded amazing (my dad was a fiddle player) but they looked unfinished and since he used nothing else they were blonde in color... both BIG turn offs in the violin world.

From a personal level I've always thought it would be interesting to see what if any difference it would make. I have a special finish I use on my Voyage Air necks that is a hybrid of an oil finish. I've toyed with the idea of trying a whole guitar with it and with a duplicate guitar with a standard finish.

Harv

[SJ VanSandt]

Pete - I was sort of joking about the splinters: I would trust any good luthier to sand things pretty well. I guess the point I was wanting to raise is, if one wanted to use minimal finish like the OP does, would there be better wood choices than mahogany, at least from an aesthetic perspective? I suspect that Harvey would say it wouldn't matter, from a marketing perspective, but I wonder if a denser wood (or a more attractive one, unfinished) might be a better choice. Just tossing the idea out there.

I would be very curious to know if there would be a noticeable sonic advantage to near-naked version of a guitar over a beautifully finished version of the same guitar. Seems like that experiment could be conducted easily enough on one instrument, if you have some golden-eared friends to come test it at two different stages.