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estebanana -> RE: Headstock and neck marking out ~ fun - lazy - ideas đź’ˇ! (Apr. 21 2023 15:47:18)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Firefrets
No, I meant 'you', as in which method are you using to get her flush? I remember you weren't keen on using a router against the steel.
Who is her? She?
Yeah if you mean the tool I use to carve the headstock, I use a chisel and a knife, but rough it in with a bandsaw.
The marking in both sides allow you to put the headstock face down and cut near the line, then use a knife to cut the headstock to the line very sharply. I designed the pattern because I don’t like router work. Many people today cut the headstock with a router and while that’s a time saver and all, a lot of headstocks look DOA because they are cookie cutter. I evolved my headstock to be cut by hand, and I like that it’s necessary to cut it that way. When someone looks at it, who knows how to build, they immediately see that it’s not something you can accomplish with a router. Why is that important? It’s important because we as makers work to impress each other.
I see guitars with tons of wispy finicky line work and a router cut headstock finial and I just yawn and say poor guy doesn’t get it. It’s guts, not finicky martyrdom of marquetry that it’s about. Any fool can learn the tricks of flashy line work, and that visual noise sells a lot of guitars. But in the end the timelessness of an instrument comes from guts, not decoration. Line work is decorative and about 80% of it is shallow.
Look long and hard and Stradivari’s guitars, they are arrows of clarity released through time. A friend gave me Stewart Pollens’ book on Stradivari’s patterns which are in the museum in Cremona. I’ve studied them with great interest and looked at his sense of line and form. He puts the right amount line work on them to make them work as objects. The problem today with a great deal of guitar making ( other than flamenco guitars) is that the makers see the flat panels of the guitar as surfaces to decorate, rather than try to build the instrument so that it’s in visual agreement with itself. You can impress contemporary customers with virtuoso decoration, but if the design doesn’t have the grace and guts understood profoundly, then the decorative filigree doesn’t have meaning.
The reason I can make guitars out of orphaned backs and sides from different species of woods and it all hangs together is because I studied reductive design like Stradivari and worked to take things away as a building aesthetic, rather than add them. It’s not for everyone, but my best guitars will still look timeless when I’m long gone. And not everyone is interested that, that’s ok too.
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