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.

Saddle Sore

There's an old cowboy saying that goes, "It's not what you ride; it's where you sit." Okay, I just made that up, but it sounds good, doesn't it? The point is, saddles are made for sitting on, so they need to be comfortable. Guitar saddles are no exception, only the strings do the sitting.

Ask a layman on the street to name the parts of a guitar, and you're likely to hear "head," "neck," "body" and "strings." A guitarist may be a little more savvy; he's likely to throw out "pickguard," "pick-up," "bridge," and "fingerboard." But you could probably re-string a harp in the time it takes him to get to "saddle." Saddles are so necessary that they're simply overlooked when everybody's gawking at flamed woods and three-tone finishes and lipstick-tubed squeal-increasing wired-in-series yadda yadda yadda.

Behold the humble saddle. It acts as both a fulcrum for bridge torquing and as a trasmitter of mechanical energy. In both capacities, it moves the bridge, which moves the top, which makes a guitar sound like a guitar. This particularsaddle was made by yours truly.

We're finishing saddle-making in Mr. Vincent's section this week, which means it's crunch time. I had this one prepared this morning and ready to grade, and it did well (after I replaced the broken string, naturally). We were going to move on to neck-resets class after lunch, and, with one saddle still due, I had three hours of hasty work to do.

The first step is determining need. I hope it's clear why ol' number 44 needed a new saddle.

I selected a blank. By which I mean that I asked Mr. Vincent for one, because I'd ruined all my spares. The next step was shaping; this is where most of my major mistakes have happened in the past. I don't need to go into details; just know that there's no "undo" button on a belt sander. You'll see in the picture that I've sanded and polished it to thickness, and I've started fitting it to the slot. The real trick is getting a good, tight fit, so the saddle will stay in place under string pressure and won't lose energy that it should be transmitting to the bridge.

Next comes a careful process: lowering the saddle height to bring the strings to a playable distance from the fingerboard, without taking them so low that they buzz. It takes good measuring and cautious sanding. Ideally saddles should be a bit taller than what you see here but for this particular guitar, this is where the saddle height ended up to have the correct string height or "action".

After the saddle is mostly shaped, its top, where it contacts the strings, needs to be contoured to set each string's intonation. That is, the end of the string needs to be placed at the exact point where it sounds correctly, offsetting its stiffness, the bending that happens when it's fretted, and the general tonal fudging of fretted instruments. You can see that I'm inserting an old string end under each string to create a high spot and then marking where it sounds best.

All that completed (and a little polish sanding, to boot), I presented the saddle to this nice gentleman for grading. It turned out very nicely, only missing one point because the high E string was too close to the fingerboard. My total fabrication time was about two hours, forty-five minutes, out-pacing my previous effort by over two hours. (Still twice the time a professional would take, I'm told, but they've had more practice than I have.)

You can ask people what the best pieces of furniture they own are, and they may bring up antique dressers or Grandma's dining-room table. But ask them what they use the most, and they'll almost always pick one chair or another. Much like saddles, chairs are so essential and unassuming that we rarely appreciate them for all they do. But, in the end, it's about where you sit.

- Jon

Repair Work is Key...

Most guitar makers I've talked with feel experience with repairing and restoring instruments leads to a better understanding of design. What has worked over the years and what hasn't. While I no longer am able to repair instruments daily, I still have repair shop & get calls to repair something no one else wants to. I'm also always making sure as an instructor I'm up to date on current repair techniques and keeping my skills sharp.

Here is a guitar that, in a way, survived a house fire. The owner has had this guitar for a very long time and is attached to it. I wanted to help him out and get it back to playing condition and if possible, looking pretty good in the process.

























The process involved disassembling the head stock and piecing it back together (and to dimension) with a spline made out of the same species of wood as the neck. The fingerboard was loose from the neck about half the length of the neck and that had to be cleaned up, heated and re-glued to the neck stock. Since a piece of wood was missing from the bass side of the neck a new piece was made, glued and shaped to match the original design. Finally a piece of figured maple was used to cover the face of the headstock a bit thicker than the original to further strengthen the repair. The final stages of repair were matching the color, spraying the clear coats, buffing, and completing the work with a fret job, a new nut and a set-up.

Not too bad in the end if you ask me.

Advanced Finishing 2008

What a great run of instruments for the graduating class of 2008. Again we had the opportunity to run the advanced finishing class where students were able to dream up the color and look in their mind and then make it happen.

Pictured to the right is a beautiful hand applied sunburst on swamp ash with a dark grain filler to highlight the pores.


Next color is used to enhance a piece of wood with some great curly figure.




Here is a mahogany instrument with light colored pore filler under a sprayed blue/purple toner. The options are pretty much endless when you understand the methods and materials that go into high quality finishing.










Ah and here are some fine looking mandolins! One is a hand applied color using red as the foundation with subtle shading techniques along the edges and the other is a more traditional sprayed sunburst that looks great.





















Here are some other fantastic instruments as well. (I haven't included all the instruments that were done simply because either the pictures didn't turn out or I have yet to crop and adjust their file sizes.)

Back to school!!!

Whoah, what happened to summer? We're back to work and currently in the Basic Materials class and our Intro to Tools class. Our shops have all new floors bringing our renovation to a conclusion (knock on spruce) and things are running smoothly (knock on rosewood).

These two classes are prerequisites for the whole year and lay the foundation for what is to come. It's great to be back and we're very excited for the 2008-2009 school year!