July Shop Update
Its been a busy few months here in the Queen City Guitars shop. Lots of work went into preparing for the Vancouver International Guitar Festival which happened a little over a week ago. The show itself was a great time, so many great guitars made by so many talented builders and getting to hangout for two days with countless individuals who love guitars was a major change of pace from my usual days of working alone in my shop on things that will someday be guitars. Plus Vancouver is full of delicious food and beer that is way cheaper than the Bay Area, and I really mean sooo delicious.
I brought three guitars to the festival, a couple that have been kicking around in the shop for a minute and the third, the middle guitar pictured above, being a brand new guitar and a brand new model on offer, mid-way between the rb-0 and 000, that I am pretty in love with tonally. You can see more of the laurel wood rb-00 on the website and also hear another highlight of the festival for myself, Terry Robb playing the rb-00, as well as the Honduran Mahogany rb-0 I finished a few months ago. Terry is a supremely talented musician, playing a lot of country blues and folk, who I was honored to have demo two of my guitars at the festival. Besides these I made a few other changes to the site, some new photos and an updated introduction, wander around a bit and let me know what you think.
For those of you who have been following me
up to now you may notice a couple absences in the above picture. There should be another rb-00 up there (technically the first) as well as an oval sound hole guitar, both of which I was very excited to have on exhibition. Unfortunately complications arise in many endeavors and building guitars is no exception. The mahogany rb-0 with the oval sound hole has proven to be quite the challenge to get the finish just right and it will be being scraped back to wood in the next week or so. I am planning on attempting a bit of an experimental french polish on the body, a bit of a departure from my usual method of hand rubbing dye to color woods, a method that I am excited to try out. I am trying to achieve a piano black body with fades to the natural wood. You can get a bit of an idea of it from the picture at right of the guitar as it is finished now.
The other rb-00, which I was very excited to show off nearly made it on the floor, it was in Canada with me! It sounded superb while it was strung up to tension, but in transit one bridge wing lifted off of the top. It was sad to de-tension the guitar the night before the festival and accept that no one would see it, but I will be taking the bridge off to determine exactly why it lifted (I suspect it was cutting things to close for the hide glue to fully cure under the bridge in order to have it ready for Vancouver, a real catch 22) and re-glueing it in the near future. you can see some photos of that guitar to the right as well…
In the meantime I will be in the shop for a couple weeks before taking a little vacation time, working on these projects and hopefully getting a good start on another guitar. Hope this finds you all having a good summer, till next time! Thanks for reading!
Aaron
