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RE: "Luthiers share your creations" thread
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: "Luthiers share your creati... (in reply to pink)
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My playing is not happening at the moment. Funny I had an MRI done on my back today, and a CT scan and X-Rays two days ago. I have a reaccuring back pain that the physical therapists have not been able to fix. As a result I can't sustain holding a guitar for longer than 15 minutes without burning pain between my scapula. I stopped playing seriously about three years ago. The doctors say I have perfectly fine spine, but it's a mystery. Tomorrow I go back for the doctor to read the MRI results and he thinks it is an impinged nerve. I think he's daft, I think it's muscle tear with scar tissue upon scar tissue.
That is why I'm such a grumpy misanthropic piece of dookey- I had to give up guitar but I still have to build them to make money!
"Life, it's a killer." ~ Dr. Benway
_ I sold my guitar to keep from playing and also to keep from playing flamenco here. There are some nice ladies here who dance and I got throw in with them to play at a wedding. They did fandangos de Huelva and something that seemed to be something like tangos, but I can't be sure. There was also a number that I think was supposed to be tanguillos, but I can't say for certain...there was some flamencoid dancing and no singing. They kept ivting me to play and the best way to get out of it was to just sell the guitar adn get it off the property and then say "oh I don't have a guitar so I can't perform. I figured if you're going to ruin your back you have to at least play for someone worth wrecking your back for, right? I can't stand to see flamenco done that badly that I just cut myself off from it. I have too much respect for flamenco to play badly, even though I'm in a position to work and get gigs by virtue of the fact that so few guitarists are in this part of the country it still does not justify compromising. There's a term for people who go to Japan and get work in advertising and TV commercials that they would not do in their own countries. You see actors on TV in commercials who would not do commercials in their own film market. One of them is David Hasselhoff, he does not count however because he'll obviously do anything anywhere. But Kelsy Grammer has done some stupid ones. The name for it is Japandering...so no Flamenco Japandering for me, flamenco is too good to screw it up just you are in a situation where the audience can't tell one thing from another. It just seems wrong.
I'm holding out for a complete back muscle and skeletal transplant from a young healthy athletic donor. You know life is so unfair that youth is wasted on the young. They don't deserve youth, they have not lived long enough to have earned it.
Palo Escrito, hard to find, but when the dealers get it it's good. Mine is from Mexico and it's about 20 years old. I bought it from a guitar maker who closed up shop. When this stash is used up I'll have to get more, I would start by emailing Todd Tagart at Allied Luthery and see if he has any. He gets stuff like that.
There's also a guy in Santa Clara CA- Global Wood Source, he scours around a finds things, you could ask him. http://www.globalwoodsource.com/
Anyway, just checking in. Keep up the good work, and keep Ruphus off the drugs. Stay away from orange guitars and most importantly, don't play any cajons. Cajon playing has been scientifically proven to reduce your "manhood".
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Date Jan. 21 2014 15:37:40
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: "Luthiers share your creati... (in reply to pink)
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(*&(*&^^&%%^&$%&^((_)(&%%$#!!!!! Doctors don't know anything!
I had the MRI, a CT scan and X-T=rays and I should and will count my blessing, my spine is in good working order, looks really good and I have clear lungs. Yeah!
So the doctor says, "Oh this is very common with Asian people not so much with foreigners. ( As if he would know) - He continues "Asians work on farms and do lots of hard labor so this happens. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about it. But I can give you a local anesthetic shot that will make the pain go away for a few days and you can be happy for having no pain for at least a little while." So just to appease all parties I get the shot, it's like novacaine that the dentist gives you, did not do a damn thing.
So am back at square one, but now I at least know I don't have nerve damage. It's very frustrating to know there is a physical therapist SF who could fix this with regular therapy, but they don't do that kind of work here. I've been kind of depressed about it actually, I look healthy so it is difficult to convince the doctor I am in a lot of pain.
In this chart it is this muscle group that is the issue or where it hurts:
1. Serratus Posterior Superior
2. Serratus Anterior
3. Rhomboid Major
It happens where those muscles get near the bottom tip of the right Scapula- I don't know which of those muscles it is, but it is not a muscle near the surface, it is under the top layer. The pain radiates up about four inches from the bottom tip of the Scapula and then radiates down about four inches, like belt of pain about 3" wide it does not effect the spine at all.
If any of you have had this please let me know how it was treated. It was brought on by repetitive motion like doing fret work and typing. One day three winters ago in a yoga class I was in a pose called triangle pose, and the teacher was pushing us too hard and I felt a pulling and then a sort of tearing feeling. I've never been the same since.
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Date Jan. 23 2014 0:07:28
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: "Luthiers share your creati... (in reply to pink)
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Anyway I'l get back to business. Here's another picture of this Palo Esctrito guitar being built.
I put the back on as an unbraced panel as Torres or Romanillos would do. This is the guitar ready for the back. It is an interesting process and I have been studying Torres methods and discussing them with others who have seen many Torres guitars. Torres order of assembly was different than that which we commonly use today- he probably glued not only the back as an unbraced panel, but very likely also the top. There is evidence of this- he braced the top with the fans, but not the horizontal braces above a below the sound hole. The horizontal braces were glued to the ribs first, then the top, or so the evidence shows.
When you try to wrap your mind around that order of assembly you run into some interesting problems. It also breaks down what we think of as Spanish style construction into a broader idea. It looks to me that a lot of Torres' methods will never be fully understood because we don't have his tools and fixtures to backwards engineer how he did it, but I surmise and others have confirmed this, it was different than how someone like say Manuel Ramirez thought about order of assembly at the turn of the century 114 years ago.
The reason I'm taking this on is because I want to make a Torres replica to offer as a more genuinely constructed model, but the deeper I got into it the more I realized that it's not as straight forward as simply copying a plan. There's much which defines Torres' guitars that has to do with _how_ he did it as much as with dimension, materials and style/design. It's unfortunate that unlike the great violin maker Stradivari we don't have Torres patterns, notes or tools. From the collection of original Stradivari tools and patterns violin makers have been able to reconstruct the order of assembly of classical Cremonese violins, it has made a difference in both academic violin scholarship and modern violin making.
In the past, after the great Cremona era in violin making, other regions and schools such as the German tradition and French school of building changed the order of assembly that was used in Cremona. It gradually changed the violin in subtle ways, then in the mid 1970's a seminal book was published called Secrets of Stradivari by Simone Sacconi and this changed the game and brought forth a more intense examination of Cremonese working methods. The guitar world hopefully, someday,will find more evidence that will help to re-examine Torres working methods, but at this time some key pivot points of how he assembled the box are up for conjecture. I'm working on a plausible method for putting the top to the ribs and then I'm going to continue to submit my ideas to those who are Torres authorities and see what I come up with.
It came to light when I finally decided it was time to grapple with Torres' work that it was not a simple idea, but I hope it not only renders a good guitar but increases my depth of understanding. My guess is that Torres was more complex than meets the eye and later makers simplified his work to make it easier to build them in series with a shop of workers each making separate sub assemblies. And we today basically were handed down that order of assembly which came after Torres, mainly invented in Madrid; not that it's it's bad or even wrong, but it would be nice to know for certain how it was changed from Torres' original concept. We may never know. And we can't go back in time or back on how far guitar making has come.
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Date Jan. 23 2014 0:41:41
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: "Luthiers share your creati... (in reply to pink)
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John,
Thanks I get what you mean now. I thought it was the picture frame you were describing but I had to check.
Two thoughts not really associated; There is method in South America mostly in rural areas, or used to be, where it two guys to assemble the guitar. One would hold the top and back apart, the other would work the rib into the neck slot and onto the tail block as the lining was already glued to the top ! crazy stuff.
Warren White the California builder had an interior structure that he used for a while. He built the guitar top down in the solera normally, but left the horizontal brace off, the one below the soundhole. Before he put on the back he glued a 3" long brace under the soundhole and then from each side of it he buttressed a brace from the top to the back lining. The result is the inside of the guitar looks like the flying buttress of a Gothic cathedral.
I've seen two of these over the years, the first one in 1989, it was already about ten years old. Then again a few years ago. Both guitars had a very distinctive kind of sustain quality and shook like an earthquake when you played them. But at the same time were good flamenco guitars.
I have kind of wanted to build one fr fun to see how it ticks, but it is a very esoteric idea and I don't have time to make guitars I can't eventually sell. It needs a very stiff top to work so the double tops they make today might work with that bracing.
Crazy stuff.
Jun Oki is on my list of people to get to know, but I have not had time to travel North yet. There is a dealer in Osaka I am going to visit and bracing a guitar, that will be a turning point I think.
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Date Jan. 25 2014 0:22:31
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