Picky pics

No sooner do I bitch and moan about my yet-to-exist custom-built guitar, than the luthier sends me some pics. I’m newly stoked.

First is a shot of the maple back. Make that the exquisitely flamed maple back. This is actually two maple boards cut from the same tree and matched for their striated patterns (they call it book-matched, for you literary types out there). The two pieces, which my wife and I picked out from a stack of maybe twelve pairs Maegen had on hand, are then glued together.

You can see that she has used a template to cut the wood to the body shape I chose, one with a gorgeous cutaway where the neck joins the body, which allows easy access to the highest frets. It’s gonna look like a stunning Picasso nude, I swear.

Then we see the rosewood sides taking shape. First with a couple of seemingly orphaned slices, suggesting their future contours:

Then with the whole assembly, glued and clamped and dreaming of the day it’ll become a beautiful box, united with its maple back and spruce top.

Maegen will be hand-carving the top and back with special planes and producing a heap of the best-smelling wood chips you’ll ever come across. I wish I could collect them and stuff a mattress. What dreams these fragrant flakes would forge!

It looks like things are moving along nicely now, so I’ll post more pics as they arrive. You’re about to watch a guitar get born, you lucky lads and lassies!

[Photos by Maegen Wells.]