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  #16  
Old 08-22-2018, 08:12 AM
jaymarsch jaymarsch is offline
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I love this. And what spectacular wood choices! Can't wait to hear this one after it is strung up.

Best,
Jayne
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  #17  
Old 08-25-2018, 09:44 AM
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What an absolutely wonderful thread! Such a great idea to commemorate the anniversary of your co-op this way Mike ... love it!!!!!!!

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Originally Posted by jaymarsch View Post
I love this. And what spectacular wood choices! Can't wait to hear this one after it is strung up.

Thanks! We're having a good time and super excited to see how it turns out!
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  #18  
Old 08-25-2018, 09:46 AM
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Things continue moving right along with this one and we are officially half a box now! Once the rim was joined up it was time for Oliver Duval-Quinn (Quinn Guitars) to take over and get the sides ready to accept the back. Oliver is another of the younger new-ish members of the shop who is currently mixing in working on repairs while developing his own builds. Some of you may already know about it, but there's a reason there are so many young builders from Quebec -- there's an additional level of government funded schooling between high school and university (known as CEGEP) that offers students a chance to focus on a specific field, even luthiery! It's a full-time three year program and three of our members are recent graduates. It'd be a challenge to figure out the stats but I'm guessing Quebec and Montreal in particular must have just about the highest number of luthiers per capita anywhere!


First thing up is cleaning up any glue that squeezed through the inner mahogany lamination on the sides...





Looking good...





Next Oliver has the envious task of profiling the rim to a 15' arch. There are some tricks and shortcuts to make this job go a bit faster, but it still usually just means a bunch of elbow grease. The general technique is to draw a pencil line on the edge of the liners...





Sand a bit in the dish, plane the spots that have been sanded, draw the pencil line, sand a bit, plane, draw, sand...





Once the arch is fully sanded there are just a couple little jobs like beveling the blocks and it's all ready to go!





As I mentioned Jeremy is in charge of the back on this one. Of everyone in the shop, Jeremy has spent the most time experimenting with bracing patterns and really getting into the nitty-gritty of tuning tops and backs. He decided to try something a bit different on this one and braced the back with a variation on his hexagonal pattern...





Carving the braces...





So far Jeremy has only used his hexagonal bracing ideas on tops but I think that will probably change after this! If any of you have seen pictures of builders testing Chladni patterns, you might appreciate that this back is pretty much as good as you could ask for...





Everyone in the shop has been enjoying tapping the back and we're all getting quite excited for how lively this guitar is shaping up to be. And up next we're finally on to the top!


Mike
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  #19  
Old 08-25-2018, 06:20 PM
Dion James Dion James is offline
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I’ll get that fretboard and carbon rod sent to you folks on Monday!
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  #20  
Old 09-03-2018, 09:57 AM
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A little bit more on the shop history before jumping into the guitar updates...


Having spent three years at Sergei's sharing a shop/bunk-beds/tent, when Jeremy and I decided it was time to set up shop on our own it seemed a no brainer to find a space together. We had spent a bunch of time in Montreal seeing shows and had started to get a glimpse at the incredibly vibrant art/music/culture scene happening there. Another friend from Montreal, Dave Madakoro, had taken Sergei's course, was interested in setting up shop with us, and luckily found us a space in a building with lots of... "bohemian character". Despite the rough edges, it was a wonderful first space -- one neighbor across the hall was an amazing painter, another a musician, sculptors, photographers, and so on. We quickly surrounded ourselves with the creativity we were hoping for!


Here's a shot of the first shop just a day or two after moving in when Jeremy and I were still sleeping on the floor...





We didn't have much, but more or less all of the essentials -- lots of instruments, home roasted coffee, extra fancy wood, and home-brewed beer...





And an early shop meal of beans and rice (all while sitting on stacks of brazilian rosewood with a honduran mahogany table)...





And our first finished bench...





Once the space was built out, we quickly jumped into having shop concerts and having people visit the shop. In these first couple of years it was more common than not to have a friend or two stop by at 3 for coffee time, have someone in the shop learning to make an instrument, and people in general curious to see what we're up to. And of course we had some great music as well!





We also hosted some art events -- here are two works by our then neighbor Jennifer Hamilton that we still have up in the shop today!





We also had our first shop helper join the ranks and he quickly took over and put himself in charge of quality control....








And now on to the anniversary guitar! Loic was in charge of the initial top prep and joining. In order to get the grain as straight as possible along the joint, one quick trick is to push a pencil into a soft grain line and drag it from end to end. The pencil will want to stay in the trough of the softer grain and gives you a highly visible line showing exactly where the grain is. Cut this line on a bandsaw....





Then it's just a matter of a little planing and shooting the final joint...








Joel Michaud, being the mega-champ that he is, wanted to take part in this guitar as well and we are all more than happy to have him on board. Here he's sketching out some rosette/fingerboard ideas...





His palette of scraps to work with...





Getting closer...





Voila!





The end of the fingerboard and the rosette are going to key into each other we're super happy with how it's looking so far!


Up next is bracing and tuning the top!
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  #21  
Old 09-27-2018, 09:25 AM
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We've had a busy couple of weeks at the Mile End Guitar Coop with lots of activity in and out of the shop as summer officially came to a close. There was a fantastic local guitar show this past weekend, Festival Sonore, that a bunch of the shop members participated in which of course meant many late late nights as people prepared! Also in unrelated but incredibly exciting news for us is that our grant application to upgrade our machinery was accepted! The Quebec government, through their SODEC program, has awarded us a matching grant to replace all of our major machines plus purchase a few more. Our current machines were all bought used and have been cranking away for the past 10 years so all have their own unique quirks (somedays I use a bit harsher language than "quirks"...). We are all beyond excited for some major changes in the coming weeks!


With all the activity we still managed to move the anniversary guitar along and are just about finished with the woodwork on the body. One of the big questions was how we were going to brace this one -- a couple of years ago, Jeremy came up with what I think is a completely innovative and brilliant bracing pattern for his classicals based off of hexagons (inspired by Buckminster Fuller). I had taken the basic idea and modified it to work with steel strings and working together we developed the idea even more for this one. The basic idea is using the power of 60 degrees to evenly distribute support and do so in such a way to emphasize the main modes that guitar tops like to vibrate in.

Here is the bracing plan with brace stock ready to be prepped....





Oliver was in charge of brace prep and here he's planing the arch into the braces. The basic idea behind this jig is that you start with a rectangular brace (no arch, sides parallel) and you press and clamp the brace into the desired arch. Once clamped like this, you plane the exposed and now concave side flat, release the clamps, and voila! The brace pops back into it's original state and the newly planed side is now a convex arch ready to be glued...





Nothing too unusual with the glue up (hide glue of course)...





Ready to be glued to the rim! And for those wondering about the bright orange bridge plate, we decided to use pernambuco -- one of the rarest and most tonally sought after woods out there, because, well, why not!?





Next to Jeremy and I, Nic Delisle (Island Instrument Manufacture) has been in the shop the longest and he'll be in charge of all things fingerboard and fretting related. Nic makes some killer electrics that range from wild and fanciful re-imaginings of vintage guitars to modern shredders. Being an electric maker he tends to finish up instruments a whole lot faster so he's got a lot more fingerboards under his belt!





Hard at work...





The woodwork for the body should be completely finished up by the end of this week and it's on to the neck!
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  #22  
Old 10-11-2018, 09:53 AM
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As per usual, busy times afoot at the Mile End Guitar Coop! Before diving into the anniversary guitar, just another brief bit of the shop's story (with a surprise plot twist!). A week or two after moving to Montreal, Jeremy and I went to an artisan fair a few blocks away and met our first fellow Montreal luthier -- Lenny Piroth-Robert of Daddy Mojo Instruments. Fast forward 6 months to a Nuit Blanche event (city wide all night open studios) we were hosting and Lenny came by with his shop assistant Nic Delisle (soon to be Island Instrument Manufacture). Coincidentally, that was also the night that the AGF's own Dion James first came by the shop as well! Dion spoke with Jeremy and planned a time to visit the shop during the week to talk about potential bench space. When Dion showed up a few days later with a bag of whole oats as a thanks for meeting with him, Jeremy and I (who mostly subsisted on whole grains and beans at the time) knew right away he'd be a perfect fit.


The next year and a half was a great time in that first shop with Dion, Jeremy, and I sharing the space. Jeremy and I were living in a loft down the hall, more often than not we had neighbors and friends popping by for afternoon coffee, had some great shop concerts, helped a couple musicians build their first instruments, we even had a playwright hang out for a few days and write a play! Then... the Great Displacement of 2010. Like I mentioned, Jeremy and I were living down the hall and most of the spaces in the building were combination live/work spaces for creative types. Well, the powers that be were not too fond of people living in a commercial/industrial building (nor of the buildings general "Bohemian charm") and after a knock on the door we had 5 minutes to gather our belongings and get out before the building was chained shut. Over the next month or two we were able to slowly dismantle the shop and extricate all of our tools/belongings and moved down the street to a much bigger, and legitimate, space. It was a stressful few months to be sure but moving into a new space forced us to expand to accommodate more builders (from 3 to 6) and improve the layout/efficiency of our setup.


It was a this point that Nic Delisle, now the third longest member, officially joined the shop. Here's an old shot of Nic, Dion, and Jeremy hanging out in the hallway clearly contemplating starting a boy band...





Not too many shots showing the full view of this shop, but here's an appropriately blurry one from a 2 AM post-shop concert old-time jam...





And here's a great video showing a bit more of the shop and the core group of builders working in the shop during this period...





And now to the guitar! With the woodwork on the body done, it was time for french polishing and a bunch of neck work the past couple of weeks. This guitar will have an elevated neck which I feel has three main benefits. First, an entirely bolt on neck makes any future neck adjustments incredibly fast and easy. Second, it allows a bit more reach up to the higher frets (similar to a scoop). Third, and most important in my book, is increasing the angle the strings hit the top resulting in more of a perpendicular pull on the bridge. My personal theory is that this mimics some of how an older guitar with a bellied bridge acts. On an old guitar, the bridge twists towards the neck; in this case, the neck is tilting towards the bridge. As Norman Blake puts, "Never trust a guitar without a belly."!

Preparing the neck with an elevation can be a bit tricky your first time, so this was a great opportunity to teach one of the younger guys how to approach it. Here's Matt setting the neck angle on the belt sander...





And gluing on some cross-grain hardwood on the tenon. The hardwood supports the cross dowels that accept the bolts...





Mortise and tenon cut before adding the elevation...





Using pins to hold the elevation in place while gluing...





All glued up and looking slick!





Thanks for looking and more soon as we finish this one up!
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  #23  
Old 10-11-2018, 02:17 PM
Dion James Dion James is offline
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Originally Posted by IndianHillMike View Post
As per usual, busy times afoot at the Mile End Guitar Coop! Before diving into the anniversary guitar, just another brief bit of the shop's story (with a surprise plot twist!). A week or two after moving to Montreal, Jeremy and I went to an artisan fair a few blocks away and met our first fellow Montreal luthier -- Lenny Piroth-Robert of Daddy Mojo Instruments. Fast forward 6 months to a Nuit Blanche event (city wide all night open studios) we were hosting and Lenny came by with his shop assistant Nic Delisle (soon to be Island Instrument Manufacture). Coincidentally, that was also the night that the AGF's own Dion James first came by the shop as well! Dion spoke with Jeremy and planned a time to visit the shop during the week to talk about potential bench space. When Dion showed up a few days later with a bag of whole oats as a thanks for meeting with him, Jeremy and I (who mostly subsisted on whole grains and beans at the time) knew right away he'd be a perfect fit.


The next year and a half was a great time in that first shop with Dion, Jeremy, and I sharing the space. Jeremy and I were living in a loft down the hall, more often than not we had neighbors and friends popping by for afternoon coffee, had some great shop concerts, helped a couple musicians build their first instruments, we even had a playwright hang out for a few days and write a play! Then... the Great Displacement of 2010. Like I mentioned, Jeremy and I were living down the hall and most of the spaces in the building were combination live/work spaces for creative types. Well, the powers that be were not too fond of people living in a commercial/industrial building (nor of the buildings general "Bohemian charm") and after a knock on the door we had 5 minutes to gather our belongings and get out before the building was chained shut. Over the next month or two we were able to slowly dismantle the shop and extricate all of our tools/belongings and moved down the street to a much bigger, and legitimate, space. It was a stressful few months to be sure but moving into a new space forced us to expand to accommodate more builders (from 3 to 6) and improve the layout/efficiency of our setup.


It was a this point that Nic Delisle, now the third longest member, officially joined the shop. Here's an old shot of Nic, Dion, and Jeremy hanging out in the hallway clearly contemplating starting a boy band...





Not too many shots showing the full view of this shop, but here's an appropriately blurry one from a 2 AM post-shop concert old-time jam...





And here's a great video showing a bit more of the shop and the core group of builders working in the shop during this period...





And now to the guitar! With the woodwork on the body done, it was time for french polishing and a bunch of neck work the past couple of weeks. This guitar will have an elevated neck which I feel has three main benefits. First, an entirely bolt on neck makes any future neck adjustments incredibly fast and easy. Second, it allows a bit more reach up to the higher frets (similar to a scoop). Third, and most important in my book, is increasing the angle the strings hit the top resulting in more of a perpendicular pull on the bridge. My personal theory is that this mimics some of how an older guitar with a bellied bridge acts. On an old guitar, the bridge twists towards the neck; in this case, the neck is tilting towards the bridge. As Norman Blake puts, "Never trust a guitar without a belly."!

Preparing the neck with an elevation can be a bit tricky your first time, so this was a great opportunity to teach one of the younger guys how to approach it. Here's Matt setting the neck angle on the belt sander...





And gluing on some cross-grain hardwood on the tenon. The hardwood supports the cross dowels that accept the bolts...





Mortise and tenon cut before adding the elevation...





Using pins to hold the elevation in place while gluing...





All glued up and looking slick!





Thanks for looking and more soon as we finish this one up!


Some of my most fond memories are from my time in that shop!
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  #24  
Old 10-11-2018, 08:37 PM
tkoehler1 tkoehler1 is offline
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I love you guys. Sharing a shop is so... Canadian. But what's with the lack of socks?

TK
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  #25  
Old 10-12-2018, 09:13 AM
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Some of my most fond memories are from my time in that shop!
That was a really fun time, especially when we had that drum kit! Dion and I used to let off some steam and take 5 minute rock breaks during the day (much to the chagrin of the nice ladies working the sewing machines on the other side of the wall). No better way to clear your head than by making some noise!


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I love you guys. Sharing a shop is so... Canadian. But what's with the lack of socks?

Surprisingly I think 5 or 6 of us work barefoot, a few in socks, and one or two in shoes. I think most of us feel that if we're going to be working on our feet all day every day, we might as well be comfortable! If anyone is moving large stuff (sheets of plywood, etc.), they'll wear shoes but for the most part we're dealing with things that are pretty small and light. When Jeremy and I were at Sergei's, he would always wear moccasins in the shop, take them off to walk barefoot (outside) back up to the house, and then put them back on once in the house -- even in the middle of a Quebec winter!

Mike
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  #26  
Old 10-14-2018, 12:13 PM
LouieAtienza LouieAtienza is offline
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Awesome stories and guitar! Wish I could work barefoot, but I'm too clumsy!
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Old 10-15-2018, 05:42 AM
Zacharius Zacharius is offline
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Wow, you guys really ARE my family! Haha! Maybe it's Sergei-influence, but I think we all have some barefoot, late night, jamming in the shop "genes" in us. Maybe some day I'll come spend some time at the Mile End shop and rent a bench.
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Old 10-16-2018, 09:23 AM
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Awesome stories and guitar! Wish I could work barefoot, but I'm too clumsy!
Thanks Louie!


Quote:
Originally Posted by Zacharius View Post
Wow, you guys really ARE my family! Haha! Maybe it's Sergei-influence, but I think we all have some barefoot, late night, jamming in the shop "genes" in us. Maybe some day I'll come spend some time at the Mile End shop and rent a bench.
We do love it when other builders spend time here! Brings in new perspectives, keeps things fresh, and gives us a chance to spend a lot of time with some great people -- I think we're all in denial that Joel's going to be leaving us in a couple of months!
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  #29  
Old 10-17-2018, 08:54 AM
Marcus Wong Marcus Wong is offline
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This guitar is going to be EPIC! I think it's an incredible project that deserves more recognition. Can't wait to see the outcome, and with so many hands and ears on deck, there's no way the tone is off by even a fraction of a frequency! Great job guys
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