Monday, June 28, 2010

I am still pretty fascinated with the resonator theme and pushing to make something that is new, sounds good and looks really old. Improvements on this build include the double slotted headstock, Grover tuners, a custom truss rod, and a hand hammered cover plate. I etched most of the metal to give it that "came off of a plantation 80 years ago" look... So far, the response has been incredibly positive.



This nut was milled from a dog bone that I bought at the pet store... You can't believe how bad bone smells when you are cutting it on a bandsaw. It's really a pretty tricky operation cutting bone, if you try it be careful! (I built myself a jig to hold the blank0. I would not want to make a living cutting this stuff all day. It really kills the saw blade. After I cut out a rough blank I then did as much of the rough shaping as I could with my belt-sander. The real fitting though was slow going, There is a lot of hand sanding to get the nut to the final dimensions.



I stayed with the Tobacco sunburst finish. I almost forgot to mention that I actually used a two bottle wine box for this CBG. Yes it is still a CBG because this was a box for Chianti so according to Angel it technically still qualifies. You can see that I used Bacotte for the heal cap. That wood is amazingly beautiful.



Here you can see the cover plate that I hammered from some 26 gauge metal I found at Lowes. Again, this is a lot of work to make one of these. I am thinking that it took me almost a full day start to finish. The larger F-holes on this build really help produce the warm full sound this instrument features.