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.
