Birthday Video

This is the video that was shown during the worship services yesterday. Angela collected the pictures and Ricky Kelly did the slide show. This part was fun; lots of really good memories. (Insert old person/memory joke here.) Thanks Angela and Ricky.

Enjoy the one of me without any facial hair. There was a six-month period in Georgia when, on a whim, I shaved off the mustache I had had since I was a high school senior. Angela didn't even recognized me when she first saw me. Other than that six months I've tried to cover this mug covered with something!



Angela couldn't find any pictures of me with my black Labs, Magnum, who was Lab #1 while we were in Georgia, and Bear, who moved to Frederick with us when he was a year old. But she got Bubba, our first dog, and Kobi, the current one.

Turning 50

Which I did yesterday.

On a Sunday.

No way to ignore it.

No way to low-key it.

Two services. It's embarrassing enough to have a dozen people sing Happy Birthday to you. Try it with 180 people. Then do it again a couple of hours later with over 200.

And this is how I found my office:


Seriously, is this any way to treat an old fart?

More on turning 50 to come...

Binding Wrap

Wood bindings can leave more gaps in the gluing than plastic bindings, so there's two things I need to deal with this: twill tape, and super glue (with accelerant).

I use the same blue painters tape to glue the bindings, but the wood's resistance can be stronger than the tape's adhesive, so to try to make the binding as tight as possible the guitar gets wrapped in some twill material.

I went to JoAnn's Fabrics last year and bought about 100 yards, though they didn't have 100 yards in any one color, so I got three different colors and tied them together. I think I was the only guy in the cloth material department. Maybe the only guy in the whole store. I kept resisting the urge to say, "I'm building a guitar. In a workshop. With, you know, power tools and stuff. Definitely not making a dress or anything. Working with wood and sharp tools."

Probably no one would believe me anyway.

So here's what the guitar looks like all wrapped up:


Some guys are able to do this in such a way that the wrapping looks beautifully symmetrical, almost like art.

I am not. I blame it on the cutaway.

That's my new theme. I'm blaming everything on the cutaway.

So that gets a good overnight dry, and I do the top binding. In spite of my efforts, there is still some gaps, mainly around the waist and the cutaway.

Here's where super glue and accelerant comes in. I loosen the binding in the area where the gap occurs so that it's flexible again and can be pushed flush to the body.

A couple of drops of super glue, spray the accelerant, and push like crazy! (Wearing rubber gloves, of course.) After ten seconds, the glue has cured and there's no gap.

Sweet.

So what's left is to scrap and sand the bindings. This is sweaty work, but in the end I'm pleased with the result.

Here's the top (it's been sprayed with a light coating of shellace to protect the light spruce from the dust of the rosewood, which can stain it):


Here's the cutaway, and you can see how I've mitered the b/w/b purfling. Takes a lot of trial and error to sneak up on the right fit, but I think it turned out pretty well:



And here's a view of the back and one side. Clark and I made a good decision to go with the rosewood bindings rather than the black ebony. The ebony would have been nice, but the rosewood bindings match better.


The bindings are the most harrowing part of the process, in my opinion, but a good binding job really looks nice.

Glad to be done with it though.

Back At It

After two weeks working on the house, I finally have some time to work on the guitar. The den is painted, and the furniture put back in order, but we are going to put some wood trim up, possibly next week, so we're not quite done.

On the last guitar-related post, I routed the ledges for the binding and purflings. Before anything can get installed, the bindings and purflings have to get bent or else they will break. For the thin white/black/white purflings bending is just a matter of soaking them in very hot water for just a minute, then taping them on the guitar with blue painter's tape. When they dry the hold the shape.

For the wider decorative purfling, the hot water works pretty well, but since I have to get out the pipe and blow torch for the bindings, I use this to bend them. Once again I tape them to the guitar body and when they are cool they retain the shape.

The rosewood bindings that I bent when I bent the sides came out all right, but the non-cutaway bindings need some touch up. As for the cutaway bindings, there was more cracking than I originally thought, so I ordered some more and bent them on the pipe. It's a painstaking process, but it works. There is just a little splitting on the horn of the cutaway, but it's shallow and will be sanded away.

It actually took me a couple of nights working with the bending pipe to get everything ready to be glued. First to get glued is the b/w/b purfling that will go underneath the rosewood bindings. Then it's the decorative purfling that is inlayed on the top and the back. In this picture the purflings has already been glued on the top, and I'm getting ready to glue it on the back. Since the glue sets fairly quickly, I have the blue tape ready so I can just grab each piece.



Everything is glued and ready for an overnight dry. It doesn't need this much time, but it was late and I was ready to go in for the night.


Here's a close-up of the purfling. You can also see the b/w/b purfling on the side and the channel waiting for the bindings.


You can see now why I needed to do three routs per side: one for the decorative purfling, one for the binding, and then a final one to deepen the binding rout to accomodate the b/w/b purfling. I wouldn't have needed this third rout if I planned to continue the b/w/b all around the butt, but I intend to stop at the butt-wedge and miter the purfling, which gives a nice effect that I'll show you when we get there.

Gluing the binding is more complicated, so I'll get to that in a later post.

It's good to be back. Hope you missed me. If so, tell Pam that the house looks great and doesn't need any more painting. :)

Don't Have to be Famous to Make a Difference

Check this out.

Pretty cool.

About time to start thinking about Water For Christmas again.

Why Haven't There Been Any Guitar-Building Posts This Week?

Because The Wife has had me involved in this:


That's the current state of our den. We're painting. Every room in this house has been painted at least once in the 14 years we've lived here, but not the den. It had wallpaper on the lower half, and the contractor didn't prep the wall before applying it, so there was not to be any removing of wall paper, not without significant drywall repair. Or replacement.

So Angela has moved to Alexandria, VA, and Austin has moved into her old room.

And Pam is nesting or something. So last week we painted Austin's old room. And part of the hallway.

That last wasn't part of the original plan. Pam mentioned while I was working on Austin's old room that the hallway had some problem spots from the last painting that needed fixing, and would I fix them. Sure, what the heck.

But when I finished Austin's old room and came out to fix the hallway, I found out that Pam's definition of "fix the hallway" means "repaint-the-hallway-with-a-different-color-paint-because-I-really-didn't-like-the-last-shade."

Like she hadn't planned it all along. And like I can't smell a con.

She's an evil woman.

So that done, we turn our attention to the den. We had to spackle the wallpaper seams, then sand them smooth before applying the primer. All the furniture had to be moved to the center. We primed yesterday.

Tomorrow Lynette Briggs, wife of Clark, for whom I'm building the zebrawood guitar, is going to come over tomorrow after church and she and Pam are going to paint. Burgundy on the bottom, some shade of tan on top. They've probably got fancier names than that, like "Regal Porcelain" or some other completely random and contrived name, but I'm a guy. It's burgundy and tan.

As long as it's not pink. My only demand was that the den remain a masculine room. Ain't watching the Orioles and Redskins in a pink room with flowers and crap.

So that's what I've been doing. Painting, plastering, and sanding. Gotta earn the right to work on the guitar.

Practice Makes...

“Practice makes perfect.” We’ve all heard that saying. And it’s not true.

Practice something the wrong way, and all you will have learned is how to do it the wrong way. You may perfectly perform it the wrong way, but I don’t think that’s the point, either of the saying or of what it is you are trying to do.

Who wants to be really good at making mistakes?

Cal Ripken Jr. used to say that his father changed the saying to “Perfect practice makes perfect.” His point, of course, is that it is important to practice doing something the right way if you want to learn to do it the right way. When I was a kid forced to take piano lessons my teacher and my mother was always telling me to slow down when I practiced. I kept trying to play the song up to speed when I couldn’t play it perfectly at a slower tempo. But slow seemed wrong, also. It was boring, and it was, well, slow. But all I was doing was making mistakes and, worse, actually entrenching my mistakes into my muscle memory, guaranteeing that I would continue to make the same mistakes. Perfect practice makes perfect.

But, honestly, perfection occurs in so little areas in our lives. It’s a worthy goal, but sometimes it can get in the way. When I was building my first guitar I kept having problems with the pearl position markers on the fretboard, so I kept re-doing them, seeking perfection. They were good, but I wanted perfect. Well, in guitar-building, little is perfect. All things need to be done well, and a few things need to be done with excellence, but the perfect guitar has yet to be built, and certainly not by a novice working on his first guitar. Finally my instructor had to come over and say, “Why don’t you fix that on your next guitar.” In other words, you did your best on this part. Accept that, and let’s finish the guitar.

But here’s a saying that is true: practice makes possible. I may never build a perfect guitar, but I’ll never build any guitars without practice. I may never play lead guitar like Erick Clapton or, for that matter, like Billy Winpigler, no matter how much I practice, but one thing is for sure, I won’t play any lead guitar without practicing. If I were to go out and try to run a marathon this weekend, I would collapse into a groaning, sweating, pathetic mess after a few miles because I haven’t trained for a marathon.

But if I were to decide that I wanted to run a marathon, and actually trained for it, I could do it, barring injury. I could run 26.2 miles without stopping if I trained for it. It’s not enough to decide to do it, however. It’s not enough to want to do it really bad. I would have to actually train for it. Then, and only then, would it be possible.

All of us have decided at one time or another to learn a skill, whether that be to learn the violin or to play soccer; to learn trout fishing or tai chi. In each case, that decision led us to a community that carried the tradition of how to learn the skill. To be successful, we entered into the practice of that community and tradition by submitting ourselves to the authority to those who had become proficient in the skill.

At the beginning, what they have us do is boring and tedious and only remotely related to what we ultimately want to do. To play Bach, you don’t start with Bach. You start with the C Major scale and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” If you are a couch potato who is in your first day of marathon training, you don’t start by running 26.2 miles, you start by walking for 30 minutes without stopping. If you can. Real slow. Because no one plays Bach who can’t play “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, and no one runs a marathon who can’t walk for 30 minutes. The spiritual life is no different. You may want to grow closer to God, and more like Christ. You may even have decided to do it. But it’s not going to happen because you want it or because you have decided to do it. There are certain practices you have to incorporate into your life. Spiritual Disciplines, they are called. And at first, they will seem tedious, repetitive, boring, and far removed from your ultimate goal.

But these are things that the Christian tradition says are necessary practices for growth. Prayer. Sabbath. Study, both in solitude and in group. Service. Silence. Meditation. Fasting. Worship. And the list is longer. Some are necessary, and you will need to do them all your life, like the master pianist doing her scales or the professional basketball player doing the same passing and dribbling drills that he’s been doing since elementary school. Some are seasonal, to help with a particular issue or a particular skill.

But all are necessary. Because what is possible is only possible through practice