Four Part Harmony

I’ve been spending some late nights in the shop these past few days, getting started on the finishing process. It seems a bit strange to be doing the finishing when there are still unfinished pieces of the guitar, but it’s just the way it makes sense to be done I guess. It’s easier (some would say) to finish the top before the bridge is in place, so you don’t have to work around it. So I’ve carefully and accurately marked the bridge location, taped it off with masking tape, and gave the guitar it’s first sealing wash coats of shellac. I’m using an amber shellac, which is pretty dark. I was worried it might be too dark, but I actually am really liking it. It has a warmth to it.

As I mentioned before, I decided to try my hand at french polishing this guitar. It’s a traditional method of finishing all kinds of musical instruments, basically consisting of building up a thin layer of hand rubbed shellac over the entire surface of the instrument. While most production steel string guitars these days are sprayed with nitrocellulose lacquer, some high end steel string guitars and most high end classical guitars are still french polished today. I like it because the shellac is non-toxic and there are no fumes, save the small amount of alcohol that the shellac is dissolved in. This means I can pretty safely do it in the basement without fuming out our house or causing an explosion. Lacquer, by comparison, is pretty toxic stuff. The hand rubbed finish is really nice too, the trade off being you have to kind of work for it.

Here are the high tech polishing materials I am using. The primary tool of the french polisher is the “muneca”. I made mine from a few scraps of a wool sweater that Nicki had picked up at the thrift store. I also sacrificed one of my old t-shirts (the older and more worn the better apparently). The wool is used to hold the shellac and deposit it onto the surface of the guitar in very small quantities under pressure.

Prior to any application of finish, though, the most important step is in preparing the surface of the guitar by filling all of the pores in the wood. Rosewood is very porous, and if the pores aren’t filled, then I guess the shellac will just sort of sink in to them over time. The traditional way to fill pores for french polishing is with some fine pumice and alcohol. The alcohol dissolves the shellac from the wash coats and the pumice abrades fine fibers from the wood. The resulting mix of material is then gradually (very gradually) rubbed into the pores. That’s the idea anyway. I spent three consecutive evenings working at this, each night ending with a pretty sore arm and shoulder. Still, eventually I got the entire back and sides filled. Thankfully, the spruce on the top is a closed pore wood, and didn’t require filling.

Since completing the pore filling, I’ve managed to get the first “bodying” session with the shellac finished. Compared to the pore filling, this has been much easier, and much more enjoyable. There is definitely an acquired skill to it. You have to strike the right balance of shellac, alcohol, and olive oil (a drop or two as a lubricant) on the muneca to get the shellac to flow properly. Maybe I’m lucky (or maybe I’m not doing it right), but it has been going pretty smoothly.

Here’s another view of the back after the first session. In theory, I’ll do about four of these bodying sessions before switching to a lighter cut of shellac and smoothing out the finish. In between sessions, I need to let the shellac “gas off” for a day or so.

Here’s the top, which has taken on a nice amber color.

Here’s a view of the top and sides. You can start to see the reflections as the finish builds.

And here’s another view of the back, where you can really see the reflection. Hopefully I can keep the finish looking this good as I do subsequent sessions.

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Here are some more pictures of the floppy little felt faerie house that Nicki made for Anna.

She put this whole thing together quickly, and I’m pretty sure it’s all hand-sewn. The basic design came from a book, which was woefully lacking in directions. Nicki asked me to help interpret them at one point and they were incomprehensible. She ended up doing a lot of improvising and I think the result came out really great.

There’s a little felt flower on one side. Now if I could just learn to take a decent picture we’d be in business.

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I’m reposting a couple of Nicki’s recent projects so they get filed away into our Art project section for posterity.

This is the springtime faerie smock that Nicki made for Anna, and gave to her on Easter morning. I’m not sure where she got the design, but she hand embroidered the design on the pocket, and sewed the rest on her machine.

The embroidery in particular is just awesome. Love the fabric too.

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We had a lot of excitement this past weekend, what with a full moon, spring equinox, and Easter all happening in the span of a short few days. We’re pretty excited about spring around here. Nicki’s been swapping out all the winter library books with spring books. I erased the winter snowman picture I drew on the winter solstice to mark the onset of winter, and updated it with this spring picture. I think maybe we’ll have to make it an ongoing marker of the seasons for us…though it does mean we don’t have our chalkboard for utilitarian things like phone messages and grocery lists.

Anna’s foot is healing, and as far as I can tell isn’t bugging her much anymore. She’s still not walking on it yet, but I think that might just be due to the fact that it’s kind of awkward. She’ll stand and put weight on it, but just would rather crawl to get around.

She’s had quite a few friends sign and draw pictures on it.

We dyed easter eggs on Saturday of course. We had such success last year with the natural dyes that we did it again this year. Nicki did most of the work cooking up the dyes, while Anna and I went on a bike ride. (The weather’s getting nice, and we’ve been breaking out the bike and trailer on sunny days to get back in the groove of riding in it after a winter of not using it too often.) The dyes, from left to right in the photo, are: spinach (yellow/green), red cabbage (purple), onion skin (orange), and beets (red). As with last year, the onion skins make the best dye by far, and actually come out a deep red color. Additionally, we added a little bit of the orange onion skin dye to a couple of the purple and red jars, and those came out a deeper color than the ones without onion skin dye. I don’t know what it is about the onion skins, but they work some kind of magic when it comes to making dye.

Sunday morning, just like Nicki said it would, the “Spring Hare” had come and hidden the eggs and left an Easter basket and a couple presents for Anna. He had also nibbled at the carrot we left out for him and left a very nice thank you note. Anna did enjoy hunting for all the eggs, though she mostly wanted to get to opening the presents and checking out the goodies in the easter basket.

Anna’s Easter basket had little eggs filled with dried apricots, cherries, and raisins, and even some little molasses candies. These went largely ignored, but there was also a little paper bag with a little butterfly stamp on it, closed with a staple. This picture shows Anna just about the moment she discovered what was inside….popcorn. A whole big bag. And she didn’t move until the whole bag was gone. She was very happy.

In addition to the basket, there were two wrapped presents. One of which was this smock that Nicki sewed and hand embroidered for Anna. She’s been working on this for a while now (fitting it in amongst a million other projects), and it turned out amazing. I think I’ll have to post this again separately, so I can get it filed into the art project section properly. Anna spent a lot of time filling up the pocket with snacks and whatever else.

The other gift was this hand sewn little floppy felt house. This is another project that Nicki just finished, and the photo doesn’t do it much justice. It’s got a little roll-up door and curtain, a window, and a little felt flower on the other side. Anna has a little bunny that she got at the clinic when she got her cast, and it’s just the right size for this house. This one too will have to get posted to the “Art” section of the site.

After a nice leisurely morning, and a delicious breakfast, we rallied some energy and planted a bunch of summer seeds. We’ve got our seedling setup in the basement. We got 15 or so tomatoes started, eggplants, paprika peppers, tomatillos, and basil and then we ran out of soil. We’ll have to get the rest of them going in the next week or so. Anna was a big help, though had a tendency to empty a whole bag of seeds onto the ground to grab one.

And here’s a cute picture of Nicki, Anna, and Floydie, sitting in Anna’s new bed and watching the rain come down. Spring rain though.

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We’ve been sort of preoccupied this past week or so, and I feel like I haven’t gotten much done on the guitar. But then I look at the pictures I’ve taken, and the last time I posted anything, and I’m realizing I’ve come quite a ways really.

I started in on installing the fretwire, which wasn’t too bad a job, although I won’t really know how it came out until I get around to doing a final setup. I first cut all the wire to length, then had to cut the fret tangs off the ends, since I had bound the fretboard. Once I had them all cut I just started hammering them in.

You can see that, since I chose to bind the fretboard, I needed to trim the tang off the fret at each end where it overhangs the binding. It took a bit longer, but wasn’t really too bad. You can also see that some of the frets aren’t seated all the way in this picture. I ended up having to go back and individually apply small amounts of super glue to the end of each wire and clamp it down to make sure that they were all seated.

And here’s the mostly finished fretboard. I filed the ends flush with the edges of the binding, but will hold off on recrowning or shaping the frets at all until closer to the final setup. With the fretboard done to this stage though, I was starting to think that I was ready to take the big step and glue up the neck. Of course I hemmed and hawed for a night or two…wasn’t sure if I’d thought of everything, wasn’t sure my neck joint was perfect enough (it likely wasn’t). After a couple nights of minor tweaking I got up the nerve and installed the truss rod in the neck, put the neck into position, positioned and aligned the fretboard, and glued and clamped everything up.

Of course I didn’t get a picture, but in the morning it was looking something like this. I’ve done some subsequent work on the neck with scraper and sandpaper, and I’ve actually now gotten everything sanded to 400 grit and ready for finishing. Which is great! Except for the fact that I don’t know much about that part yet. I need to do the finishing prior to gluing on the bridge though, so I’ve been reading, and will probably be able to get started on it in the next few days. I’m planning on trying my hand at french polishing with shellac, and possibly using tru-oil (gunstock oil) for the neck. Prior to starting on any of that, though, I need to fill the pores in the rosewood and mahogany, which is what I’m reading about right now. For anyone that needs to know, here’s a great tutorial on french polishing guitars.

Here’s the back, all sanded up and ready for finishing. Even the neck, I think I’ve finally gotten it to the point where it feels pretty comfortable in my hand and I don’t want to mess with it any more.

A couple more photos, since I have them. This is a moose bone that my dad brought out from Minnesota which a friend had given him to give to me (thanks Pat!). I’ll use it to carve out the nut and saddle for the guitar. Nuts and saddles on most higher end guitars are made from cow bone (cheap ones use plastic I guess, in the old days I think they used ivory). Moose bone is reportedly denser and should make really nice material for making nuts and saddles. If I’m able to work with this bone without screwing up too many times, there should be plenty of material here for several guitars too.

And here’s the piece of ebony I’ll be carving the bridge from. Between this and the nut and saddle, these are the last pieces I still need to make for the guitar. Everything else is finishing and setup. I haven’t decided yet what kind of bridge to make. I’ll probably stick with a design pretty close to the standard Martin bridge though, in the interest of keeping it consistent with the rest of the guitar.

As much as I feel like I sort of see the end in sight, I still feel like there are a lot of little (and big) things to be done, and a lot to be learned.

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A few pictures of our band playing at Mississippi Pizza this past Sunday.

We played an afternoon show, which was nice because a bunch of folks with kids came out, but not nice because I ended up missing most of our friend Niko’s first birthday party. Nicki and Anna were there though, and then came up to catch the end of our show.

Bonus trivia: Lefthand Monkeywrench was the first band to play at this venue (before my tenure in the band) when it was just a fledgling pizza joint on a mostly still rough and tumble Mississippi Ave. Now it’s a full fledged music venue/bar/pizza joint on the fastest growing strip of pavement in town.

There’s a caption that goes with this picture, but I’ll be nice and not etch it in stone here on the internet.

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Well, it’s been an interesting few days to say the least. Monday morning I got a call at work from Nicki saying that she’d slipped while coming down the stairs with Anna in her arms, and that Anna had hurt her leg. (To answer everyone’s immediate first question, Nicki’s fine, Acorn’s fine…it was a pretty minor stumble). I ended up coming home from work to try to help out. It seemed like Anna’s foot hurt, but there was no swelling or discoloration or anything. We were concerned, but figured that nothing seemed broken so it wouldn’t do much good to drag her in to the emergency room. Then yesterday I was home with Anna all day. Her leg seemed worse not better, but still no visible swelling. You could tell it was painful for her though. By the end of the day we began to realize that we needed to get her in for an X-ray, if only for our own peace of mind.

This afternoon we managed to get an appointment at the clinic to have her examined. Before they even took the X-ray they said that there was a fracture. They thought it might have been a “toddler’s fracture” which I guess is a kind of spiraling hairline fracture that’s evidently pretty common in kids her age. They said we could almost just bypass the X-ray room and go straight to the cast room. But of course we needed to get the X-ray. Anna was a model patient, very cooperative. They took three pictures and sent us over to the cast room.

When we got a look at the X-rays it was clear this was no hairline toddler’s fracture. The tibia was completely broken and the fibula has kind of a splinter broken off of it (there’s my non-professional, technical diagnosis). Thankfully the breaks were in a relatively good place, and were aligned well enough to not need anything more than a cast, and just a short one at that. We had been worried that she might need a full leg cast, but they just put it on the lower leg.

Anna chose red for her cast, and she laid very still, holding my hand while Nicki held her leg and the doc wrapped on the cast. She cried for just a brief moment when he was done, and asked him to take it off, but she understands that it’s helping her leg feel better. We have an appointment in 3 1/2 weeks to have the cast removed. In a few days she should be up and walking around on it.

She’s been a different person since we’ve been back from the hospital. Lots of laughs and smiles, which have been harder to come by these last few days. We went out for pizza to celebrate tonight, and then we all signed the cast when we got home. It’s nice to know she’s on the mend.

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The weather was great this weekend. We didn’t really have any major plans when we woke up Saturday morning, so we went outside to take a look at the garden. We thought we’d make some plans, maybe sketch a few things out for the summer, nothing too serious. Pretty quickly though, we had the shovels and the seed out and ended up planting a pretty nice looking spring garden. Here’s Nicki digging the first few shovelfuls of dirt for the plot.

We dug together for a while, then Nicki and Anna started getting the seeds together and I kept on digging. The soil was really nice and soft from recent light rains. We had planted a cover crop of clover last fall, so we just turned that right into the soil. We didn’t even have to weed much. It was pretty fast, enjoyable work on a clear cool morning.

Anna had fun with the planting, and got the hang of it pretty quickly. We’d make a row and dig a shallow trench, and let her take the tiny seeds and sprinkle them into place. At first she was just sort of scattering them, but pretty quickly she caught on and was carefully placing them in the row, all the while saying “This is so much fun!”

And here’s Anna standing in front of the garden after a morning of planting. We planted collard greens, kale, swiss chard, bok choy, spinach, carrots, onions, kohlrabi, and snow and snap peas. We’re also planning on starting some seedlings in the basement for summer veggies. It’ll be fun to watch the garden grow with her this year.

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Work on the guitar has really slowed down this past week or so. I’m not sure quite what to attribute it to, but it’s likely due at least in part to the fact that I’m treading in to uncharted territory somewhat. I’m really getting to the part where I need to work on tasks that are going to significantly affect the playability of the guitar, and it’s daunting. A week or so ago, though, I did manage to tackle an inlay project on the headstock of the guitar, and even remembered to take a few pictures while I was working on it.

I had been kicking around ideas of potential designs practically since I started building, but I had never come up with anything that really struck me. But the other day, Anna and I were coloring and one of our little scribblings started to plant the seed of what eventually became this design. I sketched something up and got out my little scraps of mother-of-pearl and started cutting. The infinity/figure eight symbol was really the main piece that I wanted to see if I could do, and I kind of tried to build a simple design around it. I started cutting simple shapes and dots, and then arranging and rearranging them on the headstock until I came up with something that seemed like it would work. The layout I finally decided on wasn’t at all much like the one I initially drew.

This picture and the one above show the routing process already underway (I didn’t think to grab the camera until I got to this point). The routing was as painstaking as I thought it was going to be, and much more frustrating than just routing out those little squares and diamonds on the fretboard. I ended up with quite a few places where I ended up outside my scribed lines.

And here’s the finished routing job, you can see a few places here where I nudged the bit outside my lines. I was hoping that the old ebony dust and superglue was going to be able to work its magic again.

Here’s the pearl all glued up with the ebony dust. It always looks pretty bad at this point. I went to bed hoping for, but not necessarily expecting, the best.

And here’s the finished product. I have to say overall I’m pretty pleased with it as a first try. The dust and superglue did a great job of seating everything, though in some places the gap was just too big to be unnoticeable. In person, in good light, the pearl pieces really shine and I think they’ll look pretty good with the rest of the guitar as a whole.

Well, assuming I get myself down into the shop at all in the next couple weeks, here’s what I’ll be working on:

-further refining the neck (just one last time)

-installing fretwire, dressing frets and finishing fretboard

-once fretboard is finished, glue fretboard to neck and neck to body.

-make bridge, nut, and saddle

-finishing (much to learn here).

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This is mostly a test, as I’m trying to add a few new sections to the site.

My ultimate plan is for there to be separate little repositories for artwork/projects/etc, and for music-related stuff.

I don’t think I’ve got it quite figured out yet, so there may likely be some ongoing changes.

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