Alembic Guitars Club
Connecting => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: edwardofhuncote on January 26, 2019, 07:07:56 AM
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Thought I'd share this with you all...
Rewinding the clock about 30 years, there was a time in my late-teens/early-twenties when my Dad and I were in the hey-day of building banjos and doing repair/setup work. I started thinking about applying what I had learned to building a few dreadnought guitars to complement our banjos that had become somewhat sought after, at least locally. We started with a couple kit guitars from C.F. Martin & Co. that one of our customers had given up on. The first one was a style D-35, the other a style D-18. From then on, we bought the wood parts from Martin, and sourced other hardware from Stewart-MacDonald or First Quality Music Supply. Altogether, there are only five guitars. I've since lost track of two of them.
File under weird coincidences - not just one, but two of our guitars came home for a visit recently, their stays overlapping long enough for me to reminisce and snap a couple pictures. Unfortunately, one of them will be here for a while as it needs a major repair, (I may do a Shop Thread on that another time) but its predecessor, one of those original two kit-guitar prototypes has received a neck reset, (courtesy of my mentor, Ward Elliott) and been completely refretted, got a new bridge, and is now ready to go back to her original owner. He's had "Stella-Jean" since day-one, fell in love at first strum. This is her 2nd bridge, and 3rd set of frets in 28 years! I couldn't tell you how many incidental repairs I've done to that axe... I think we even had to replace the tuners one time, from extreme wear! Jon has played that guitar probably every day of his life, and it shows the weathered look to prove it. I'm a little proud that he's never wanted another guitar all this time. These frets by the way, should last him a while... they are made of a very hard alloy beyond nickel-silver, called EVO Gold. Look it up - good stuff.
This natural-topped one was actually built to order for a paying customer, a gentleman named Melvin "Tommy" Jordan* we had also done a banjo for. Though technically we built two guitars at the same time, this one is stamped #92-001, the other bears #92-002. Per his request, Tommy's guitar was built with the appointments replicating a cherished Martin HD-35, with rosewood sides and three-piece back, with herringbone trim, an englemann spruce top, also with a herringbone strip of purfling, and of course with scalloped braces. I can't remember why, but I also dished out the back braces. Who knows what I thought that might do?!
It was completed about a year after "Stella-Jean" rolled out, and even now I smile looking at my own learning curve, particularly looking around inside the guitars. Soundwise - WOW! They are both proverbial cannons. It's been fun having them both here, and nice reconnecting with old friends too. Stella-Jean's custodian- Jon Benfield, is looking forward to wearing out another set of frets. In an interesting twist, several of Tommy Jordan's friends are going to share his old guitar, and keep taking it to festivals and fiddlers conventions he loved going to. I can't think of anything more fitting... his favorite thing was handing that guitar around person-to-person, listening to someone else play it.
*Tommy Jordan passed away on 5/3/2015.
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I did a little digging through old shoeboxes of photos and found these from around the time these guys got their guitars from us. The pictures I'm certain are from a fiddlers convention in Galax, Virginia I go to every year. I'll guess either 1992 or 1993. The guitars were new-ish. Even found one shot with both of them in the same frame, maybe in their first jam together!
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Gregory those are a couple of beauties... love the backs on them.*
Did the kits have completed front, back and sides and then you assembled them?
*I have a thing for that, the fronts are always decorative and on display everyday, but the backs show the simple structure and strength of an instrument... the unsung hero.
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I'm with Paul; love a good backside.
Tommy's is particularly lovely. I know for acoustics the tradition is "beautiful rosewood; nice tight, straight grain".
Fie on that, I say! Tone is, of course, paramount - but (and I know will shock and offend everyone on this website ;D ) I also put a premium on spectacular figuring.
Peter
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Thanks for sharing the story and pics!
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Paul, the backs and tops of the two 'prototype' kit-guitars were already joined when we got them, and I think they came that way, but the guitar we built for Tommy Jordan was more-or-less 'from scratch'... the sides were pre-bent, and the dovetail block was routed for us, I do remember that, but we had to do pretty much everything else from a set of plans.
Interesting note; in 1965 Martin came out with the D-35 model and its three-piece back as their supply of Brazilian rosewood back sets wide enough to make D-28 guitars began to dwindle. Turned out to be a very smart move.
There are some other differences in construction that I did not use in our builds. For one, the Martin D-35 used 1/4" top bracing, giving them a reputation for being bassy, boomy guitars. These two are both standard 5/16" braces, but scalloped. Here's a look inside at Tommy's. ('scuse the mess... this poor old guitar has been through a lot!) I should have snapped a picture of Stella-Jean's skeleton too. Oh, and here are the paper labels too.
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Jon came to pick up "Stella-Jean" the other day, and we finally had a chance to visit a while. We don't run in the same circles as much anymore, so a good catch-up session was somewhat overdue. I had shared a couple of my pictures, and he brought along a few too. This one has a couple good stories in it. The band was one we played in together back in the late-80's and early-90's, I think until about 1993 or so. We used to do a few Grateful Dead covers, bluegrass-style, played every dive bar, biker hangout, and every fiddlers convention within a day's drive of here. I'm not sure where this picture is from, but on the back it says "I Know You Rider" & "Dark Hollow".
The guitar I'm holding here (yeah, that's me!) was the guitar Jon had been playing right before the Honeytone prototype he's had ever since. It was a Martin Sigma D-28 that I'd made a few modifications to. We worked some kind of a trade deal out, and I sold it to cash-flow the down payment on my first Martin guitar. I've not seen it in almost 30 years now. I had to sell that Martin too when the Divorce Attorney came a-callin'. It was last spotted in the Piedmont-Triad area of North Carolina. I'd buy it back in pieces today if I could find it.
So many stories... and they are all connected.