Sinker logs, are pulled from
the bottom of lakes and rivers. Sometimes, scuba divers are needed to achieve
the extraction. Most of these logs are hundreds of years old (In
one of the pictures above, you can see that the tree was cut with an hatchet).
Due to a series of factors (The logs were too big and heavy to be pulled
out of the rivers or the logs were caught by currents and were sucked to
the bottom) these logs were trapped by the muddy buttons of these
water beds and this created like a time capsule where the wood was preserved
in fantastic humidity conditions that made the wood season in a slow natural
way during many centuries. Some of the logs are selected for musical instruments
construction. The sound that these woods produce is unique and the grain
has a beautiful coloration that changes according to the type of mud present
in the water bed.
Adjustable saddle bone
When ordering a guitar, every
player will ask me to set the action as low as possible without any
buzzes... Since every player applies different amount of strenght
when plucking the strings it is impossible to set the action precisely
to each player's will. The Spanish builder Fleta, had come up with this
genial idea which consists of pushing the bone more or less into the groove
on the bridge. The player would set the action to his liking and then either
cut off the excess or keep it intact in case he decided to lower or raise
the action depending on humidity conditions etc.
Radiused or flat fingerboard?
The radiused fingerboard has been
around the acoustic and the electric guitar since day one. The same is
true for most instruments of the Stringed family of instruments (violas,
violins cellos, bass). Radiusing (image above) makes barre and left hand
stopping A LOT easier. The only drawback is that you will NEVER want to
play a flat fingerboard after that. If you are having your custom
guitar built, I am all pro radiusing the fingerboard. The standard
fingerboard is flat. |
The fan brace is based on the Hauser
1943 Frame. It incorporates 4 different species of wood: Sinker redwood,
Spruce, Cedar and Mahogany. The sinker Redwood is the transversal strut
that shortens the trebles side to augment the power of the high registers
whilst Cedar and spruce were used on the bass side to augment the power
of and resonance of the bass line. I think I can affirm that she has the
most powerful 6th string I have ever heard and one of the best ringing
trebles you can hope for. Simply amazing. The top was reduced to less than
1 mm towards the edges and just a little over 1 mm towards the bridge area
where I installed a new underbridge system that connects the bridge with
each strut in the fan brace whilst directing each frequency to the right
portion of the top.
 650
mm or 640 mm?
Keep the following
rule at hand: If the distance between the tip of your thumb and the tip
of your little finger is equal or less than 9 in. when fully stretched,
use 640 mm. In stringed instrument performance, a single millimeter can
mean the difference between playing effortlessly or the exact opposite.
|
