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					*VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2*

					*AN AXE TO GRIND:* *THE GUITAR THAT PLAYED ME*

		courtesy NASA

Last year the Fret House, my local guitar store, sponsored a guitar building class on Saturday afternoons, led by a local luthier who makes gorgeous hand-built instruments. I was sorely tempted, but it was a lot of money for the opportunity to build a guitar very much like the one I had just spent a lot of money to buy. The class was such a success that they decided to do it again six months later. I tried, but couldn’t resist a second time.

Our first meeting was in September to sign up for the class that began in January, four months later. We had to choose a kit, a 000 12-fret or a dreadnaught, and pay $500 up front (another $1000 will be due some day, but they hadn’t mentioned it as of the end of March). My first question was whether we could modify the kit to make a guitar with a cutaway. Ans: you can if you want, but you have to buy new sides, figure out how to taper the cutaway side (the top and back are both arched a little, so if you suddenly dip toward the middle, that side has to be taller where it’s closer to the center), get (or make) a bending iron, learn how to bend the wood to the shape you want, do it, and have it done before the class starts because we glue the sides on day 1. In other words, no.

Sure enough, we glued the sides to the head and tail blocks first thing. And installed the rosette in the top. (For non-guitarists, the top is the front.)

After we had prepared the body, we had to sand it to mate with the aforementioned curve of the top, a sphere with a 25-foot radius. That's not much of a curve, but it’s enough to produce screw-up number one. There are 2 ways to do this, an easy way and our way. We used the sandpaper-on-a-stick-at-a-5º-angle technique. It produces the appropriate angle on the gluing surface, but I somehow managed to sand one side more than the other, so if I had tried to glue on the top, I’d have had an S-curve. Which led me to the second technique, going over to the instructor’s shop to use his giant sanding disk with the radius built in. This works very well to even things out, but it evened them out about a half-inch lower than the plan. This is way more serious than you might think, but you will have to wait a couple of months to find out why. Mark, the leader of the class and a pretty good hatmaker as well, says it’s no big deal. I don’t know it yet but Mark says everything is no big deal. That is because he regards your first guitar as a throwaway for you to make all your mistakes on.

Before gluing the top on, we have to install the braces and then make little cutouts in the top edge of the sides for them to set in. I cut them three or four different ways and put them in a different wrong place each time. Never did figure out what went wrong, but I ended up with slots maybe twice as big as the braces they were meant to hold. And lots of epoxy filler.

After all that, the actual process of gluing the top on went more smoothly than I had any right to expect. You have to apply 26 clamps before the glue dries. I managed, with a classmate’s assistance, to accomplish this with minimal trauma. The top is secure all the way around, but I noticed—remember how I sanded the sides too far?—a substantial downhill slope from about the soundhole to the head (the top, for non-musicians, but not what we call the top).

The neck has a truss rod, a steel rod adjustable from inside the soundhole, to compensate for the inevitable bowing of the neck under 200 pounds of string tension. My guitar’s neck has a truss rod installed upside down. In theory this means only that you have to turn the adjustment screw the opposite way—no big deal. (Guess who said that.) In practice, it means the adjustment screw is not accessible from inside the soundhole, and therefore nonfunctional. No big deal.

The neck is a bolt-on type, a mortise & tenon joint with bolts on the tenon that fit through holes predrilled in the mortise on the head block. Fits, that is, if you didn’t reshape your guitar with sandpaper. Now the bolts no longer line up with the holes. “No big deal, says Mark. We’ll just pull the bolts, plug the holes we leave, and reposition the bolts.” And saw off what is now excess on the neck.

Mark didn’t know that the hanger bolts were not merely screwed into the neck but were also glued. Which causes them to break off when you try to unscrew them. I figured I didn’t have to drill them out, though—I just left them in place, sawed them off and ground them down flat. Now to put new hanger bolts where they need to—hmm, it seems the holes I have to drill are going to overlap where the steel is still there. “No big deal!” I can move the new bolts farther away; all I have to do is plug the holes in the mortise and redrill those to match. Yeah, yeah, I know: if I’d done that in the first place, I could’ve left the bolts alone.

I had to cut down the dowel I used for the plugs—it was the wrong size. But you knew that. But I managed to plug the holes, built a little jig to make sure the new ones would be straight, and drilled the holes in the jig and then in the head block. Using (but you knew this, too) the wrong size bit. Too big, of course, because too small would be easy to fix. Plug the holes. Plug the holes in the jig. Drill new holes in the jig. Now I‘m ready to drill the new new holes in the head block. But I’m not ready.

In the meantime, I finished cutting out the pocket for the first abalone inlay in the neck and glued it in. It looked great until this morning, when it fell out and broke in pieces. Before my wife went out to the garden she said, “If every time I planted a flower it died, I’d stop planting flowers.”

I yelled. I threw things. I persevered. I found the two biggest pieces of the inlay on the floor (the whole thing is only 1/4” long) and glued them back together and made a little piece of wood to substitute for the third piece. I’m waiting for the glue to dry.

Through some fluke that no one will ever be able to explain, that worked. The repaired inlay is in, leveled, and looks pretty good. Eight more to go. Somehow, I only seem to have seven pieces, but—N.B.D.—I’ll just make another one.

I have started thinking about finishes. You finish the body before attaching the neck, so I could get that going any time. I dread the idea of spraying, which involves a sprayer or lots of expensive cans, a dust-and-breeze free room, a respirator, and a lot of other hassles. So I decided to use a variation on French Polish (very difficult and fragile) called padding lacquer (easier and more durable) that I have used before. The Woodworkers’ Supply website says it is currently illegal to ship the stuff to California because of ever-changing laws regarding Volatile Organic Compounds. I sent an e-mail to the company’s expert for advice, and he called the next day and told me the only supplier he knew that would ship to California despite threat of a $10,000 fine was Constantine’s. He knew this because he had called and asked. I went immediately to their site and ordered and rejoiced for an hour, when Constantine’s called and said they had been shipping it in blissful ignorance until today, when somebody called and asked, prompting them to investigate and discover the new law. So I seem to have shot myself in the foot again. There are lots of other online stores that carry it—I guess I’ll just go through them one at a time until I find one that doesn’t know.

This guitar has been playing me for 10 weeks, but the finish was just about the finish. I got my padding lacquer from the next online store I tried, and set out to do the deed. I first laid on a layer of shellac, which wasn’t great but looked workable. Next step was to rub the whole thing with fine pumice to fill the pores. Disaster. I now have a blotchy mess, with great globs and ridges of shellac mixed with rosewood dust everywhere but in the pores where it belongs. I have no idea what went wrong; all I know is that whatever I do now makes it worse. I plan to ask my classmate whose first attempt at French polish came out beautifully, but I have little hope that he will have a clue. Mark, of course, doesn’t do French polish. Mark is smarter than he looks. He says it’s no big deal—he should have that tattooed on his forehead. For him it’s no big deal: he’s not the one who has to scrape everything off and start over.

If I had the nerve to install the bolts, I could get the neck to go on just fine. Except that the fingerboard is straight and the body (I told you to remember this) is not. I am waiting for Saturday for Mark to say it’s no big deal. I managed to wait until Tuesday before I drilled my new holes, using my cleverly designed drill guides to assure that they would be perfectly perpendicular. They weren’t. So I filed them out just a skosh. I think that will work, but I’m afraid to try.

Not so much. I had to epoxy the damn things into the holes, which worked fine because I could set them in perfectly straight, which worked fine until I came back the next morning and found one of the bolts had shifted in the night and was now firmly and irrevocably fixed at a slight angle. Never mind: I can force it in.

I started over on the finish, and it seems to be working. I’m not sure what I did—or what I did differently—but the pumicing, while not filling the pores completely, did not make a lumpy, ugly mess the second time around. I have now rubbed in several coats of lacquer and I can count my teeth in the shine. This may work out after all. But now I know why people who make guitars for a living don’t do French polish: they don’t have the time. I do, though, because the class skipped a week while Mark was out of town.

Nobody really knows how many coats you should apply; apparently you just keep doing it until it starts making it worse. I think I ended up with 15 or so applications before I convinced myself that it wasn’t getting any better. A final polish with a glaze meant for show cars took off the fingerprints and fine swirl marks and left the whole thing gleaming. Now I’m afraid to touch it…. I have to reset the angle for the neck—yes, I can force it in, but it doesn’t seat right. But you knew that. Then I can glue it on. Without touching the finish.

Well, it was nice while it lasted. I spent much of the afternoon’s class getting the neck to fit right. With 15 minutes to clean-up I was ready to glue. Put on the glue and slid the bolts into the body, reached inside and screwed on the nuts and then stuck in my socket wrench to tighten them. The first one never seemed to get very tight—“Mark, did you hear something crack?”—and the second was even looser. When I looked inside, the bolt was pulling out, epoxy and all. It wasn’t until I got home, with everything disassembled and the glue scraped off, that I discovered that I had indeed heard something crack. So I have glued my broken neck back together, and we’ll see what happens next.

The gluing fiasco was so upsetting that I hardly even winced when I dropped the wrench on the face of the guitar and put a big ugly dent in my beautiful finish. No big deal: I figured I had plenty of time to repair it while waiting for the neck repair to set so I can repair the bolts so I can repair the glue-up…. There was enough time, but time was not enough. The finish levels itself out if you rub long and hard enough, but the shellacquer is beautifully clear: it’s like putting a piece of glass over the dent.

With the neck repaired and the bolts reinstalled, Mark and I (well, OK, Mark—but with vigorous cheerleading from me) managed to get the neck trimmed to fit pretty well. Needless to say, my beautiful finish with the single tiny flaw was trashed in the process.

Gluing (and bolting) the neck the second time was slick as pig snot. The next day I fitted the bridge in place, which is a critical step: the bridge is where the strings end (or begin, if you’re looking north) and if it isn’t positioned perfectly, the strings will be a fraction off and the guitar becomes untunable. Next I fitted the bridge in place again, followed by fitting the bridge in place. Finally, on the fourth attempt, it was right, and I glued it on. To my surprise, when I removed the clamps in the morning, it was still right.

During the next class, I installed, leveled, crowned, tapered, and smoothed the frets. I also gouged out the surface with a file here and there, but I can see the finish line from here. I went home and did the last few details and strung it up. I’ve done it! I made a guitar! I started to tune it and almost got the first string up to pitch when, with a tremendous thundercrack that sounded like the announcement of the apocalypse but was in fact merely the exclamation point at the end of my career in lutherie, the bridge ripped off. You remember the bridge—the fourth-time’s-the-charm bridge?

You think I’m done, right? You think I can read the handwriting on the wall. You think I will finally recognize the fact that if God had wanted me to be a guitar maker, He’d have made me a guitar maker. Hah! I don’t know if the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has an entry for “obsessive-compulsive-and-stubborn-as-hell,” but if it does, look in the index under “Grossman’s Syndrome.” I am not daunted, not cowed, not even fazed. Okay, maybe a little fazed, but after a couple of hours curled up under the bed in a fetal position, I am ready to go on.

For some reason (I have my suspicions, but never mind that for now), the bridge pulled loose pretty cleanly. If I sand it down a bit, and clean up the face of the guitar where it was (not quite) attached, I can put it back. And what the hell, as long as I have to do all this scraping and sanding anyway, I might as well take off all the finish and remove all the dings and errors of outrageous fortune while I’m at it. Grossman’s Syndrome.

I just put on the last coat of lacquer. It’s not the last coat because the finish is back to its original thickness and luster, it’s the last coat because it’s the last coat. I probably should have trimmed my fingernails first: a chipped nail somehow got around the pad I was using and put a brand-new scratch in the finish. Twenty minutes of rubbing tuned it into a somewhat older and less obtrusive scratch. I don’t care. It’s still the last coat. Tomorrow I will reattach the bridge. Then I can string it up, tune it, adjust the action, and put it in a closet where I will never have to look at it again.

But it was not to be. Not that easy. I glued the hell out of the bridge, waited 24 hours and then strung it up. This time I got to the third (i.e., the fourth) string before the bridge popped off again. I’m guessing I didn’t scrape all of the finish off, so I glued onto shellac instead of wood. I don’t care. I’m beaten. And I still owe $500. I wonder if they'll take the guitar in lieu of the final payment.

I'll say this for Mark: he doesn't know when to quit. He concurred with my diagnosis, but refused to give up. I mean he refused to let me give up. I scraped what was left of the finish off the guitar, scraped the old glue off the bridge, and stuck it on once more.

Looks like the sixth time's the charm. Once I get the glue reamed out of the holes so I can restring it, this project will be finished. As will I. Mark said the first guitar is meant to be a learning experience, and so it was. Exactly what I learned will be left unsaid.