Hi all, been busy doing lots of repairs and setups recently; working on enough floyd rose tremelos to last a lifetime as well as a couple of refrets (I don't just do refrets, although sometimes it seems like it). One was a classical guitar built in Nicuragua, its a nice instrument using local tonewoods; it'd be nice to have mahogany and Cocobolo growing in your back garden. The frets were a weak point of the guitar, stoned badly and made of a poor quality metal. The customer also wanted a slight camber on the fingerboard to help with those awkward classical positions. The next refret was to a tenor banjo, this refret was unusual in that the fingerboard was made of celluloid imitation mother of pearl (sometimes called mother of toilet seat) so a slightly different technique was called for. Instead of hammering in the frets as I would normally do with a wooden fingerboard I pressed them in using a caul and glued them in place using thin superglue, this stopped the fingerboard from cracking when installing the frets.


Another job, a bit out of the ordinary for me was to make a 'strat' style body with Humbucker- single coil- Humbucker routing and more exaggerated contouring. Lots of routing, sanding and rasping the outcome was very nice.

I'm off on Holiday for the next few weeks. If you are in the area at the end of the month the craft centre, where my workshop is, is showing a couple of my guitars as well as a work in progress (back, sides and front in pieces) as part of an exhibition, so if you are interested in seeing the inside of a guitar, some of my instruments and a nice cup of tea and cake then drop in.

Details on the website ( I think)

http://craftrenaissance.co.uk/