Promo Video

Here Phil Heywood plays "Hedgehog Hedge" at the 2007 Guitar Show at Southeast Technical College. Each year we have professional musicians come and perform with the hand-made guitars built by our students. It's a great day to cap off an exciting year and friends and family come to see and hear the results of all the hard work. Often these instruments are less than 24 hours old! This performance was made into a promotional video for online use with permission of Phil Heywood. Thanks Phil!

Cutting Edge

Everything starts somewhere, and in the guitar program, that somewhere is four-week tools and materials classes. Materials is, as you might expect, a course on many types of lutherie wood, from acacia to willow, as well as some discussion of adhesives and abrasives. However, the bulk of time during that first month is devoted to tools, which is itself divided into two concurrent portions.

Power tools provides an education in the basic safety and usage of several common wood-shop machines: planers, jointers, routers, sanders, saws and drill presses. The program's tool shop is equipped for nearly any step in the process of creating a guitar, from the jointer and the planer for preparing rough lumber, to band saws for cutting curves, to routers and drill presses for creating hardware and control cavities. Of particular note are the table saws; the larger, workhorse saw contains an innovative safety brake that drops the blade under the table if it contacts skin, and a second table saw that's better able to handle thin blades is used exclusively for cutting fret slots.

After we passed the safety tests, students were given a number of tasks to improve our acumen with the machines. We made bench hooks, guitar-neck rests and nut-and-saddle holders for use in later guitar repairs, and we created mock-up scarf joints and truss-rod channels.

The counterpart is hand tools, which centers on preparing all of the valuable tools the students have purchased for the precise work of lutherie. There is discussion of safety and maintenance, and of safe use of the power grinders used to prepare chisels; but most of the class is elbow grease and a few flying sparks.

We set about flattening water stones so they could, in turn, be used to flatten plane blades and chisels, and then we moved on to cutting out and beveling scrapers. We also made sure the planes themselves and even our rulers were appropriate flat and straight, since any problem with them would be multiplied in anything we made with them. Our spare time all the while was put into removing machining marks from our burnishers, and then polishing them and shaping handles from wood. Some of the final steps constituted honing chisels and burnishing scrapers, bringing them to a fine cutting edge.

Those first four, frenzied weeks weren't terribly difficult--classes are designed to bring everybody up to the same speed--but the level of dedication and discipline required meant that some of the steps became frustrating and always challenging. Regardless, the foundation they provided has already proven invaluable to me; I can't imagine trying some of the repair work we've been doing without the well-prepared tools or the attention to detail I took away from tools class.

- Jon

New Facilities & Upgrades

In May of 2007 a construction process began on the Red Wing campus to update the school as well as our music repair program areas. The lab areas were reconfigured and space was added to our power tool room known as our "common shop". This renovation brought our facilities up to date complimenting our updated finishing area and new spray booth constructed a couple years ago. Here is one of the guitar labs located within the department and adjacent to both our finishing area and power tool room.

Over the last 4 years we've slowly replaced older equipment and this year added a new Timesaver thickness sander, Denray downdraft sanding table, a half dozen Dynabrade sanders and upgraded our planer with a Shelix spiral cutterhead which is the same configuration our 12" Grizzly jointer has. A brand new dust collection system was also apart of the improvements so the whole power tool area stays much cleaner than our old facility.

There are still upgrades to equipment planned and we'll continue to phase in refinements throughout the coming years but the program and facility have gone through a major evolution in just these past 4 years. Below is the other guitar lab adjacent to the power tool room.

Students each have their own workbench and our classes are arranged in 4, 6 or 7 week blocks depending on the course and semester. Even though it's a full-time 8 hour a day commitment, this allows students to have only 1 or 2 classes per week for those blocks of time. We've been able to get to more content with this arrangement, another improvement to whole program.