I left everybody with an unsightly mess on the guitar. But there was a method to my madness.

Here are some of the last bits and pieces, the bridge and the tailpiece.…

I am just catching up on posting although the pace is crazy. Not much time for reflection and determining if my next action will work or not. Speaking of.

I had the painters give me some raw tint to put int paint, was suppose to be good for water based and oil paint. It didn't seem to like the wipe on poly and instead of mixing stayed as mini globules as I mixed it. I went with it anyway , first doing a yellow coat and then when dry doing an halo orange coat. I could see it wasn't going…

Routed out the binding ledge. Decided to use some flamed maple I have, never bent it before.







Messy bench, I'll get to it later. I have my masking tape ready to hold down the binding, using fish glue, another first. I have a bending iron in the vice to touch up the maple binding. It sprung back as shown…

I'll keep the mushroom posts in mind although I doubt I will get much movement on such a small instrument with how I built it.

So I had the idea to hammer form the resonator cover out of the aluminum. Seemed like a good idea, would have been easier with thinner aluminum. Had a piece of fir plywood that I carved the dome shape out of, used a hand plane and worked up a sweat. That was premium old growth fir ply. It was easy enough figuring out if I needed to take off more from one side…

A few more pictures. Don't know how to brace the top, it's not like a normal acoustic with the sound hole. With the well the hole portion of the top is fairly stiff. So the points above and below are the flexible parts. Basically you want to limit the movement of the top trying to fold in on itself requiring a neck reset. Tied the neck block to the well which stiffened the top up. Not a heck of a lot of stress from four strings with a short scale length but I am building this so you can swap…

Not sure how this forum works, but this will be my build sequence of building my entry.

Great! Two weeks into the contest and I decide to give it a try. Played around with some door skins thinking to build out of it, finally decided to use some parts where I took a wrong turn on and doubt I would build from them but can't seem to toss them out. Some baked maple sides and a neck glued up from sugar pine I salvaged from a pallet.…

I was a vendor at my first guitar show this past weekend. The show had a minor handmade music theme and was headlined by Justin Johnson, who had a booth, did a clinic and presented the final concert of the day. The show directors contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in donating one of my guitars as a giveaway item to be signed - and potentially played - by Justin. Since I live only 70 miles from the venue, I jumped at it. Arranged for the donation, reserved a booth and started flinging…

'Voodoo Stick', the Chonkinfeckle CBG album and pdf book! For those who don't know us, we're a UK based duo & one half, Les Hilton suffered two strokes 4 months ago.

Now he has managed to finish it, and its now available as a free download. All we ask is if you possibly make a small donation to the charity 'Stroke Association' here in the UK who do a sterling job with Stroke victims All the links can be found on the page link below

MANY THANKS!!…

Billy Wise test piloting the electric banjola, Joan Kirkham on the guitar, and Myself on the Washtub.

Thanks for the welcome guys.I'm new to social media and I'm not shure about what Im doing.I'm trying to learn so bear with me.

Someone out there living near Clinton, Tennessee, site of the Museum of Appalachia, with its great collection of traditional musical instruments? For a first impression, check the documentation about this treasure on http://www.cigarboxnation.com/video/museum-slideshow.

To study the details of the presented instruments, to refer to a single instrument, a busy slide show is far from ideal, it would be…