In the middle of it all

The journey is more than half-completed. I have been here in Atlanta working feverishly, non-stop, and without hesitation on my 4 electric guitar designs for the past 3 weeks straight. Things are shaping up (finally) and are looking terrific!



It takes quite a bit of patience, dedication, and time to build a quality guitar by hand. I love it. The past few weeks here have been the best times of my life. I wake up only to drive to the workshop and start carving away at my guitars. Today I hope to route the pickup and bridge cavities for all of my CMCg models ("I" through "IV"). Although one of my hardware suppliers has yet to come through with some much needed parts, I am sure I can get a full day's work in without everything there for me.

Overdue Updates

Hey everyone. First off, I would like to apologize for the totally lack of posts for almost an entire week now. Once I began carving my necks last weekend it seemed like all hell had broke loose. Drama in the luthiers' lodge and an increasingly close finishing date as well as the lack of much needed materials has turned this class into a war-zone almost overnight! Altogether though, things are coming along quite nicely. I will be posting more pictures tomorrow, but in the meantime...



That's the Mike Virok Guitars model CMCg-I semi-hollow prototype guitar. It's the closest one to being finished that I have on the bench right now. The other 3 electric models are sitting off to the side (I have to wait for the truss-rods to arrive via UPS this week, and without them I am dead in the water!) waiting to be completed. So, in the meantime I spent a good portion of my Saturday carving the hell out of this guitar and enjoying the muscle aches that accompany the hard work. Since it's taking quite a long time to get all of these guitar rolling, and I refuse to leave here with any of the unfinished as playable guitars, I am not going to build my acoustic guitar while down here in Georgia. Instead, I will take the materials home with me and build the acoustic in the comfort of my own state of New Jersey. Maybe once I get home I'll really be able to apply this knowledge to it's fullest extent and make a decent living on my craft.

Sunday is our day off here at the school. The past 2 weeks we've been putting in extra hours on Sundays to get things done that needed to be done. This week, Matt & I are hell-bent on escaping for a few hours to Athens to enjoy the local entertainment (at least whatever we can take in for the small amount of time we'll be out and about). When we're done we'll probably end up with the others at the workshop getting some more chores finished on our guitars.

Until tomorrow (eh, later today!), adios!

One big ol' "Oops!" (?)

Well, I kind-of made a mistake yesterday morning. I was in the shop a little early getting a head start on some neck making. While searching through what I had assumed to be a scrap pile of wood shoved off into the corner of the shop, I found a rather large piece of a darker colored wood that had a headstock for a P-bass drawn on it with the bottom half cut off. Since it looked like a scrapped piece of wood, and it had nice resonance to it, I figured I would rescue this little gem from the trash and make a guitar neck out of it.

Well, that just started it right there. I cut the front profile rough out and draw the detailed outlines. Nice tight grain, really heavy, but still it has a nice ring to it. So, I proceeded to use the thickness sander on it. Little by little, I start sanding it down. I kept thinking to myself, "This looks like Koa... I hope it's not something that Gary or someone else was going to use...". Being that it was too late to go back and not use it, I kept sanding it down. Gary saw it and pondered over it momentarily, then went back to his business. Shortly after, the sander made a loud band a the paper broke off inside. That was bad, leaving burn marks on the mystery wood's surface. We struggle with the replacement paper and finally Tim and I manage to string 'er up. For the rest of the morning, I set that neck aside, wondering what I may have inadvertently ruined by doing so.

After the class was over yesterday, Matt, John and I all decided to work on our projects after hours at the shop, hoping to get things done while we had a chance. I spent a great portion of the evening sanding down this mystery neck. It was too hard to be Koa... I still couldn't nail it. I finished getting its profile sanded and the headstock rounded out and I was excited to see it get so far. The headstock will be scooped, and the back needs to be carved, but all together it'll make a nice neck.

Later that night (around 1am or so when the three of us finally came back home from the shop), I encountered fellow student Dave sitting at the planning table. He had just got back from partying with our instructors Tim and Gary at a bluegrass club in Atlanta with other student Josh as well. Dave proceeded to add to a humorous comment by Matt calling me "the wood nazi", and in doing so he mentioned that Gary had said something about it too. The mystery wood was/is Bubinga. That makes sense now. Unfortunately, what I didn't realize is that some of that stuff is not scrap, but it's stuff that both Gary and Tim own and are planning to build with. Again, it looked discarded, but I may have been wrong. If I was, then I will gladly pay for that Bubinga board that I made into a fine neck. I'll just pay Gary about $40 and be done with it. I'm not trying to freeload on anything, just thought it was garbage and I wanted to rescue it from damnation. I may have damned my self in the process.

The CMCg's are multiplying!!!

What a great day I had today! I really knocked out a lot of work. Check out those necks!!! The head-stocks are right there, just like I wanted them to start shaping into. These CMCg's are going to be a neat bunch o' axes. So far I only have one mahogany neck-through blank begun and a canary wood bolt-on. I am most likely going to head back out to the lumber market this week and pick up more supplies, unless I can manage to piece together something around the shop for a sandwich neck of some sort. I'd still need something "plain" for the back of my other canary wood top. That'll come with time though. Oh precious time!

And here is the newly glued and traced body for the latest CMCg (this one is the bolt-on). I still need to figure out a neck for this one. Now that I am thinking about it, there should be enough extra "stuff" laying around the shop, and if not I'm sure that my instructor Gary would gladly sell me a piece of something nice to make another neck (suitable for a bolt-on style like this one). Maybe a single piece of Sapele or something along those darker lines would work nicely. If not, I have a birds-eye maple neck that failed on it's last go out, so I could always sandwich some blood-wood (or even better, some Wegnge if it's laying around!) just to mimic the sandwich on the body that is now going to be exposed. I'm still in need of a body back for the extra canary wood top I cut out earlier this week too... wow, lots of projects to get moving on!!!

Anyhow, back the intelligible parts of this blog... tomorrow!!!

Some pictures...

This is going to make the back of my second CMCg model. It is a sandwiched body with the following configuration (as of now, since it's not glued together and I might make another as well!), left to right: mahogany, wenge, ash, wenge, mahogany. It's going to be heavy!


Matt snapped this shot while I was learning how to re-fret my PRS neck. You can see one of my instructors, Brian, smiling as I learn to hammer the fretboard.


This is Dave, a fellow student and a kick-ass guy. He's a quick learner and will be an awesome luthier in the near future. His custom guitar is sick; it's like a satanic star-fish!


Here's my PRS neck all clamped up to apply pressure to the freshly added frets that I just put on her. Brian thinks it'll play really nice, and so do I...



... I think I did a pretty good job with this one!

Progress!!!

Yes!!! I made a lot of progress today!!! Just follow the images and read the captions to learn more...



So, after spending a lot of time re-designing the headstock for my custom guitar necks, I finally tweaked, tweezed and settled on the design seen on the right. I am going to hold on to the one on the left just in the event that someone might request a smaller, more curved headstock on a custom order. I really enjoy my new design and I'm pretty happy with the results.



That's my workbench at Atlanta Guitar Works. This is where I do all of my fret-working, gluing, and redesigning on the spot while at the school. It gets really messy really quickly. I like it though; it's my little home away from home!



Laying right next to my workbench is a large quantity of exotic hardwoods all glued up and ready to be carved, assembled, and made into guitars. Somewhere in there is a rather expensive piece of that Black & White Ebony that I fell in love with at the wood shop last Tuesday. It's an amazing example of fine wood.

It's really cool to see all of the CMCg's that are in that pile. Those guitars are going to look really cool. Although, I did recently change one of the hardware schematics today to reflect less of a PRS design and more adventure into my own ideas of what I would expect from a fine instrument that I would love to play. I'd rather play something original rather than a copy of something I already own.



So, just to give you a small idea of what I will be doing in the coming days/nights at the workshop, this is a guitar neck in it's most primal stages. It's nothing more that a 36" long piece of 3 glued-together strips of mahogany about 4" in diameter. On the face of the blank is an outline of the neck and the headstock that was pictured earlier in the blog. On the side of the neck blank is the profile of the neck and the appropriate markings on the scale length throughout. It's not easy to carve these things out, but after some practice and a lot of man hours, it'll make a beautiful guitar neck... or a shop sign, so Gary says!



And this lovely piece of wood is what will become the 1st ever Mike Virok Guitars model CMCg (semi-hollow) guitar. I can't believe that this wood was used on a crate from Mexico 20 years ago and has sat in the wood store for such a long time virtually undiscovered until I came along! It was a very long piece that had a few nail holes in it, so I ended up salvaging another length from the first board and made another body by sandwiching a piece of scrapped Wenge from a fellow student's wood pile.

Patience Is A Virtue

One of the things I have began to experience during my education in the field of luthierie is that nothing comes as a quick and simple solution for anything that would yield quality results. Yes, it was nerve-racking to rip apart my Paul Reed Smith only to find numerous imperfections and problems that I would be learning to solve as I uncovered them. After a short over-coming instant yesterday afternoon during the repairs portion of the day, I found a little more joy and relaxation in the practices we five students have been learning down here in Atlanta. It was a great eye opening moment.

As far as the custom builds go, I had to take a step back on Sunday and re-evaluate everything that I had over-ambitiously set on my plate. I want to build as much as possible before leaving for New Jersey since when I return back home I will not have the access to this machinery for a very long time (well, it may come sooner if some plans that are in the work fall into the right places). So, even though I had wanted to originally create about 4 instruments before the end of this session, I am focusing on rounding up my semi-hollow & my acoustic and only in my spare time working on an extra solid-body electric guitar similar in design to the semi-hollow.

I have plenty of designs and ambition to match it all. The issue is time and patience. I would like to be more patient with all of this and I think that with some careful consideration for my mental health while in this program that I can obtain a zen-like state while still getting the job done. I just need to set my own pace with all of this. And I am.


This is a picture of the Canary-Wood top that I will be using on the semi-hollow CMCg design I originally intended on finishing. If you look closely in the back-ground, the Spanish Cedar is also clamped up and glued. They're coming along quite fine, and today I'll be working on figuring out how to hollow this thing out for the semi-hollow design.

The solid-body electric will have (I think) a Mahogany and Spanish Cedar body with a Canary Wood and Wenge top (shown in the next picture in it's raw glue-up state), and a solid Canary Wood neck with that good ol' Black & White Ebony fretboard that I'm using on the semi-hollow as well.

I might inlay some maple on the solid body to mimic the F-holes (actually, they are more like S holes) on the semi, but that may or may not be worth while for the design. Stay tuned!