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.
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