FOUR YEARS HIATUS

After a hiatus of four years from actively making classical guitars, I’m writing today to share an update on my work as a luthier. During this period of silence, my engagement with guitar making was paused due to various reasons which I won’t delve into here. However, I’ve recently completed a new guitar, and I’m currently working on another guitar, which I plan to complete in the near future, marking my return to the craft after these years.

Instead of continuing my previous pattern of work, my hiatus became a period of exploration and learning within the realm of electronics. I dedicated my time to building an electric guitar, crafting a tube amplifier, and creating other intriguing electronic devices related to the play of music, including speakers.

A complex repair in a new guitar

This guitar has a long construction history. It was a cypress-spruce narrow body guitar. I started it about three years ago. It was planned it as a flamenco guitar, but before it’s completion a problem due to the quality on the cypress, made me change my mind. So, it ended up a figured maple back and sides guitar

So here is when the interesting part comes up . I decided that the quality of the back and sides wasn’t good enough, so I decide to start a complex repair.
In the Spanish construction the heel in the neck has some narrow slots for the sides to go in. The great luthier Romanillos, came up with a new way to do that. He cut a wider and tapered slot so a shim could be fitted against the sides. The reason for that according to him was to make easier for future repairs.

I thought this is the moment to put that theory on practice. So, I replace the sides and the back of the guitar without taking apart the bindings of the top. The reason being the top had finish and some coloration due to the natural oxidation of the lightly finish wood. If hard enough to perfectly fit the bindings tight against the sides, I was about to know how hard is to fit the sides to the bindings.

Because that backward procedure, this guitars has some slight cosmetics imperfections in some areas in the bindings, I’d say barely perceptible for the untrained eyes.

This operation was only possible because hot hide glue. If other glues had been used, every surface, tentellons included would had to be scraped and cleaned to reglue them.