A "Mae West" Style Lacote Guitar, Part 3

I have had three wives and three legitimate guitars, flirting, however, with many others.

Andres Segovia, "A Conversation", Guitar Review 43, 1978




Work goes slowly on the Mae West Lacote. I decided to install the bridge before I complete the french polish, before that I needed to see what thickness to make the bridge. I put a straight edge on the fingerboard and discovered there was a huge back bow. I spent about 40 minutes sharpening the irons for a block plane and a No.3 smoothing plane and then got to work.




You can see how much wood I had to remove to make the fingerboard straight, well, I did put a little dip in it between frets #7-#12. After I install the bridge, I will sand it smooth and then install the frets. As I was planing the fingerboard I discovered that I had failed to orient the grain direction of the ebony so I could plane from sound hole to peg head. The way that it was probably was the best, I butted the box of the guitar up to the stop and planed away. Ebony is quite the wood to hand plane!


I am so far behind on all of my work. Today, I need to drive down to the lumber yard and pick up material to frame in a floor over the dirt floor of the garage. We have 2 cars and a one car garage won't take 2, I'm slowly converting it into a wood shed and shop/storage space. Then there are guitars and guitars and guitars to finish, make bridges for, necks to carve, back and sides to thin, rosettes to install.

By the way, are there any other classical guitar players out there in blogger land? I know of John Dimick and Christopher Davis, please check out their blogs.


A video of Izhar Elias playing what appears to be a copy of a guitar made by Johann Stauffer, who taught C.F. Martin how to make guitars.

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