#5 The Steve Mc Build | This one is specifically for my good buddy Steve McIntyre so he can see the build process for his guitar. All the guitar geeks will dig it too I hope. I feel like I crossed a real threshold with Steve's guitar - multiscale/fan-fret, bound fingerboard, modified A-frame bracing, pinless bridge - all things I have been working toward and now all coming together in this guitar. Like Miles Finch, I am psyched out of my mind about this guitar.

Not a lot of explanation here; just going to lay out some pics of the process. Steve picked out a mahogany top with figured walnut back and sides. I was not sure how this wood combination would work, but in the end it made for a very sweet, resonant, responsive guitar.

I start with bending the sides and setting them in my mold. My new found guitar building buddy Chris Harris was over and helped me bend the sides.

Next - work on the back and top plates to inlay the rosette and get them to the right thickness, etc. Steve went with a herringbone for the rosette and purfling on this guitar. I have not worked with it before, but I think it turned out pretty nice.

Next big step - bracing. Gluing in the back reinforcement strip.

Bracing the top. For this one, I used a technique I picked up from George Lowden. In the upper bout there is an A-frame set of braces that ties the neck block all the way through to the top of the X-Brace. Lowden says this is one of the keys to good sustain and clarity. I think he is right after hearing this guitar.

While all this is going on, I am also gluing in the kerfing to the sides.

Gluing in the side support braces.

Routing the Sound Port (a standard feature on all Tyson Hand-Did Models).

Fitting the top and back to the sides. For this guitar, I went back to the way I first learned to fit braces and that is to have the X-Brace and the Upper Transverse brace projecting all the way through the kerfing and the sides. All the other braces stop short of the kerfing. I think this strikes a good balance between power/energy transfer and responsiveness.

Now that the box is together, time for first sanding and flattening and getting ready for binding.

This one was a real time saver to get after

For the binding, I built a new fixture that holds my laminate router and allows me to easily adjust the depth and width of the cut to get the binding channels very neat and clean. This allowed me to get a great fit with very little clean up.

Yeah, that herringbone is pretty cool. And wait till you see the beauty shots of the flamed maple binding.

Finally all the neck work. I forgot to take pictures of neck fitting and shaping etc. On this guitar, the new addition is the bound fretboard which takes the whole thing up a notch.

Also, I forgot to take pics of the fret cutting process. With a Fan-Fret design, all the slots have to be measured, marked and cut by hand - no fancy jigs for this. I have a ruler that is divided down to 100ths of an inch for very accurate work. Once the slots are cut, I sand the fret board to a 14inch radius.

I also polish the fingerboard to a near mirror shine with 4000 grit abrasive paper. Really helps with the final smooth feel of the fretboard.

Since this fretboard is bound - strips of flame maple are glued to both sides to hide the fret-tangs - all the frets tangs have to be filed off at the ends so they fit in the slot but the crown flows over the edge of the binding. This one step really takes the whole appearance of the neck and fretboard up a couple of notches.

There are fancy tools you can buy to do this, but I decided that filing and refining them by hand would be the simplest and cost effective way to do it. A LOT of work, but the end result more than justifies the time.

Starting to bevel and shape the fret ends.

While I am carving and shaping the neck (sorry - forgot to take pictures of this, but there is nothing new to see really) I start to finish the guitar. As with all my others this one gets an open pore treatment with TruOil.

After just one application of the oil, the figure in the wood really starts to pop.

For this guitar, we wanted a little more rustic look, so I left all the pores open and carefully sanded every couple of layers of the TruOil to get a good smooth finish.

The last steps - gluing on the bridge and final finishing.

Steve chose the D'Addario auto-trim locking tuners that I have on a couple of my other guitars. With these, you put the string in the tuner, pull it up, lock it in, twist to tune and on the first quarter turn, the tuner cuts the excess string flush. Pretty slick.

That is all for now. I have some "beauty shots" of this guitar that I will post up a little later.