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I’m lead to believe that there are silver linings in all problems and challenges in life. This week I had the opportunity of salvaging Noel’s guitar top. It could have been much worse. I could have been replacing the entire top. Taking the time, glowing slow, thinking before I act was the only way I could achieve this. With the new rosette installed, I have to say . . . it’s better. It matches flawlessly with the blood wood details and compliments the cedar top. With this

As I was finishing sanding the body to move on to the next steps of fitting the neck to the body, I discovered I had sanded through a part of the rosette. This has set me back, who knows how long. It could be a lengthy surgical replacement or rip the top off and start the top from scratch. You can only imagine the ‘f’ bombs I threw out of my mouth. My patience was most definitely tested. With stresses at work and now stresses in the shop, my supposed place of peace, life's

I’m finally complete the neck jig, tested it and happy with the results. I’m sure I’ll find additional improvements along the way as I use the jig on these next few guitars. It took a lot longer than I expected, but why am I surprised. Anything I do always takes longer. I go down rabbit holes, go after near-perfection, I go after quality. I think that’s the attraction for me. I get to explore my limits, patience, and challenge myself to seek a final result that gets my dop

This week has been dedicated to as in the previous post, ‘getting better’. I’ve spent almost every night after coming home from work on the neck angle jig. With quite a bit of research (basically watching Youtube videos) of what other people have done, I’ve taken elements of what I think are best practices and combined them with my own. I think I’ve taken control of my vulnerability as a luthier. This week we filmed another set of interviews for the doc. We have captured s

Someone once told me that guitar making is a craft of making jigs, jigs, and when you think you have them all, you make another. At first, I wasn’t comfortable with this idea. I just wanted to make one guitar. Now that I’ve made a hand full of stringed instruments, and now exploring a world where I make many in a year, I finally understand the jig making business. It’s about repeatability. High quality over and over again. I thought about buying a CNC machine – for those o

It’s been too long. I’ve thrown in some half ass blogs since I’ve been away. From Colombia to Beijing and back, its been crazy. In fact, as I write this, I’m counting eight times where I’ve left Canada in just this year alone. The opportunities, the ideas, the sights I’ve seen have been nothing but awesome. Although, I did hit a low point in the last month when my day job took over my life. A ridiculous amount of deliverables needed to be generated in an impossible timefr

Life comes with challenges, and with each challenge, comes opportunity. Even though I’m stressed at work trying to get everything done all at once, I need to step back and do one thing at a time. And for that one thing, do it well. This also means that there are some things that may take priority at certain moments and time and then it will flip. Just as in the GuitarBorn project grant application, that was the last month’s priority, and now it’s flipped to my day job. So t

I’ll begin to say that I haven’t been keeping up with the blog as much as I have in the recent past. A lot is going on, but I don't want to make excuses. I don’t know who is following my blog and I have no idea who cares to know my thoughts, but for those who are following, I chose not to contribute over the past few weeks because I’ve been mentally away. I’ve been stressed with all my ‘9-5’ duties, trying to create value in every way that I can. When I say creating va

Let’s see what happened this week. I worked on the guitar: bound it; broke the gold mother of pearl purfling and glued into place; sanding and scraping the guitar ready for finish. The body is ready and now we embark on the neck. The first thing is to make a new neck jig set at 8 degrees and block the neck. As I think and dream about this next step, I ask myself how can I make it special, unique, one of a kind for Noel. It think proper fitment to the body and playability is