1. pick made from Ipe for weakflesh, aka dude who bought my charger

2. pick from Macasser Ebony

3. various picks

4. piece of bocote. using it for the pickguard, fretboard, truss rod cover, and maybe a few other cosmetic things. it'll all match pretty nicely

5. ebony and bocote shavings

1. back of bocote pickguard

2. front of bocote pickguard, check out the sapwood at the top

3. laid onto my guitar's pattern

4. planed ebony for a good while, turned my hands black. picture was taken after scrubbing my hands for a few minutes

Day 3

So today started off with sanding. Lots of it. Brad had me working on a flat-top that's been sitting in the shop unfinished since the fall. I was mainly just smoothing down the sides, trying to even them out where there were divots and valleys, little hills in the wood. There were two spots where the wood had shrunk after months of humidity changes, so we're going to have to figure out how to work with that some other time. By lunch break I was COVERED in rosewood dust.

Had a good lunch break; ate pizza with Brad, and then I walked up the street to a drum shop that I had passed by last night. This place is called skinny beats drum shop & gallery, and they don't have a single drum kit in there, just african, indian, and other assorted drums from all around the world. After playing around with a set of tabla, I spied a sitar in the corner. Now I've been wanting to get my hands on a sitar for a good long while, so this was a big moment for me (I had even been listening to Ravi Shankar all morning while sanding). I dicked around with it for a minute, and decided that I will not be leaving Asheville without it. After all, it's only $480. Not too shabby.

So after lunch I helped Brad pick out tops and backs for two flat-tops he's going to build on commission. Both have spruce tops, one with a three-piece walnut back, and the other with a regular two-piece honduran mahogany. After tracing the shape of the guitar onto the blank pieces of wood, Brad showed me how to use a router to make the channel for the rosette, and then how to cut out the soundhole. Very cool process.

Tomorrow I'll be picking out the walnut for my back and sides and neck from one of Brad's friends from here in town. I'm really hoping to get pieces with nice figuring in them.

Day 1 & 2

So yesterday was my first full day as a "guitar builder." I'm using that term very loosely, as I'm merely an apprentice in Brad Nickerson's workshop in Asheville, NC. He builds mostly archtop jazz-boxes (which are absolutely beautiful by the way), and some flat tops. I found this gig online by searching around for guitar building courses and schools. Brad usually has students who will come to build a guitar, and Brad will build one side by side with them, but he's a bit bogged down with backorders and couldn't take a full-time student, so we worked out a different arrangement.

Anyway, yesterday I drew out the designs for my guitar, cut out a template on plywood, and began planing a few pieces of scrap wood as practice. Today I started off the day fixing something on my gypsy jazz guitar. I had a humbucker installed in it last year, and it was in there in a very flimsy way, so I wanted to reinforce it. I fashioned a new bracket for it out of a strip of brass, epoxied it to the pickup (which has to set over night), and hopefully it'll be much sturdier when it's screwed in instead of glued in like it was.

After that I began choosing woods for my build, which is exciting to say the least. Brad had some bookmatched spruce sets for tops, which are nice but nothing special. After digging around in the wood room a bit, he found a top he had started carving for an archtop, which he had accidentally started carving it to fit a left handed guitar, which would've been fine if he hadn't intended it to be a righty... mistakes happen. Anyway, this partially carved top has an amazing bearclaw figure in it, it's absolutely gorgeous. I'm ecstatic that I'm going to have such a nice piece of wood on the top. Later in the afternoon we're going to a friend's shop to take a look at his supplies of walnut for the back and sides, and neck. We'll get that cut, thickness sanded, and then I'm going to begin actually building my very first guitar!

I'll be building a 14 3/4 inch, fully hollow, thin bodied archtop in the shape of a Selmer Maccaferri (gypsy jazz) guitar, with spruce top, walnut back/sides/neck, ebony fretboard and bridge, two humbuckers with coil tapping and a single coil pickup with phase switching.