I finally finished my "Garden of Eden" guitar tonight. This guitar was built to be given away to my church to be a fund raiser for missions.

Here are the details:

Sycamore back and sides

WRC top

Englemann spruce bracing

Mahogany neck

Leopardwood bindings

Full abalone purflings, rosette, and MOP and abalone fingerboard

rosewood fingerboard, headplate, and bridge

Gotoh tuners and Martin SP strings

Now for this.... I am a little dissapointed in this guitar. While I was building it, I tried a few things that I have not done before. First, this is the first guitar that I have built that didnt have a spruce top... this one I did in western Red Cedar. That may be the whole reason I am a little dissapointed??

Dont get me wrong, it is beautiful (over the top with bling if you ask me) and it is loud and responsive. It has decent sustain, but not what I am used to with my spruce guitars. I was expecting a really bright sound with this one, and somehow it has a warm overall tone. I dont know if that is normal for WRC tops?? I guess you could say that it just doesnt have the tone that I am used to... not that it is a bad tone, just not what I am used to.

anyway, here it is.. Thanks for looking!

I had changed my mind a number of times while building it on what materials I would use. I am pleased with the look and the pleasing contrast of materials... just cant get over the tone of the guitar..I dont know if I like the tone or not.. just cant put my finger on what the differences are right now...

Thanks for the compliments and encouragement!

Dave, the sycamore was really easy to bend and work. It sands well and was easy to pore fill since it doesnt have much pores. easy to sand and finish also. It does tend to oxodize rather quickly and turn darker. I had to sand it several times lightly to restore the lighter colors. Once the finish is on, the darkening seemed to stop.

I own several portable sawmills. This sycamore tree was standing in the back yard of my local town hall and the tree trunk was given to me by the tree surgeon that was hired to remove the tree. I sawed it up, dried it, and now have built a guitar with it. My work bench is also made out of the lumber from this tree.

the top and back purflings are 5/16" in width. I bought this abalone material through my asian supplier. Even with the teflon to help out, it took me the better part of a day to inlay the top of the guitar. The back was a little faster because I didnt have the rosette to deal with.

My camera wont take close up pictures, but there is a thin BWB purfling lining all of the abalone and also is on the sides of the leopardwood binding as well. There is also a BWB line under the fingerboard and headstock. This lines up nicely and really sets off the neck. It was a pain to do though. The BWB under the headstock and fingerboard is actually all wood. The light colored center is maple and the black is dyed maple. I bought the materials from woodcraft and made my own trim. I bought the leopardwood as 2 long boards on ebay and resawed them into binding materials. It's a good thing I had some spare because I broke the first two attempts of binding. I finally soaked the wood in the tub for a couple of hours with warm water and then gently bent them in my bender.  Leopard wood is pretty, but it has a structure that reminds me of particle board. Not the easiest thing to bend without breaking. Once it is installed, it is strong and hard and it takes a finish really well.

I have been playing this guitar for a couple of hours, and Hesh was right... it is changing in tone and sounding better all the time. Had me worried for a while there!

Thanks for all of the compliments and encouragement!

I have a reason for everything I do, and this guitar is no exception. One of the things I had been critisized for is that I didnt have any pictures of my work to send to potential customers. I have now built 3 guitars that span every point of the spectrum and I plan on having some professional pictures taken of these guitars, this one included.

I have to admit that the fingerboard inlay I purchased. It was already cut out for me, but I did inlay it into the fingerboard. This proved to be a real challenge and has given me new respect for artisans like Craig Lavin. I doubt that I will do anything as ornate in the future, at least by hand.

Hesh mentioned that this wood is special to me. There is a long story that goes along with this wood and explains how I got to where I am now and why I am building guitars. I was able to share this story privately with Hesh, so he understands what this guitar means to me. I will try to be brief in my explanation, but I will try to explain this to all of you now:

This wood came from a tree that stood in the back yard of my local town hall for 40 to 50 years. For those of you that have moved away from the place you were raised, I'm sure you understand why things from home are so special. I was able to get the log when this tree was cut down and I sawed it up into lumber. There wasnt much useable lumber from the tree and I have made a few things out of it, including my work bench. There was one board left, and I resawed it into back and sides and have now built a guitar out of it.

My dad passed away a little over a year ago. I had moved back home to take care of him in his last days, giving up my life in the NC Mountains. I had bought a couple of different kinds of portable sawmills to give me something to do while I was taking care of him. The day my dad passed away is the day I sawed this log into lumber. I had brought a piece of it in for him to see because he was so curious about what I was doing and why I wanted to waste my time sawing up a sycamore tree. Anyway, this is why I wanted to do something useful with the wood. It means a lot to me and now it will outlast my lifetime and go on for generations making music, which is my passion in life.

There is one more set of back and sides that exist out of this wood. I gave this to my friend Hesh. I have faith and confidence that he will also turn this wood into an instrument that will make sweet music for decades to come when he gets time to work with it. I think my dad would be proud.

Thanks again,

Ken

[QUOTE=James Orr]

Ken, why did you go with cedar on this? [/QUOTE]

To tell you the truth, I wanted to try something different just to see what it would do. Other than that, no particular reason. If you remember some of the earlier posts I made about this build, I left the whole top rather thick (~.130 ) and then sanded it progressively thinner towards the outer edges of the lower bout. The upper bout is still sitting at or about .130.  The outermost parts of the lower bout are sanded to around .050.  It is incredibly strong and loud too.

The more I play this guitar, the more the tone is growing on me and the better I like it. I still cant quite form the words to describe the actual tone that I get, but one well seasoned guitar player I let play it today said that he was most impressed with the clarity. This is one of those kind of people that believes that Martin and Taylor are the only real guitar makers and it is hard to impress him with anything, so I always take my guitars to him to get an honest opinion. He was totally flabberghasted by how good this thing sounded today and just didnt want to put it down. To me, that is the best statement that he could make... just not wanting to put it down

I wouldnt hesitate to use WRC again and I have plenty more of it too!

did you inlay the neck?

that is quite a job.

Yes I did. It was quite a job too. I learned a lot from the process as well. One of the things I learned is to radius your fingerboard BEFORE you begin inlaying. I made the mistake of inlaying a rosewood blank, and some of the inlay was actually sanded off. Close inspection of the inlay work reveals this, but there is so much going on with the guitar that it is generally not noticed and so far nobody I have shown it to has noticed it. One other mistake I made was starting the inlay too far down the board. If you notice, ALL of the rosette is showing. I had left the normal gap at the top of the rosette and after fitting the neck I had to go back and inlay some more on the rosette in order to use it. Then again, nobody ever notices those things, but I do. Nothing wrong with how I handled it, but it is not exactly what I had intended.

On a side note, I was interviewed by a reporter today and this guitar will be featured in our local newspaper and a regional magazine. Seems that somebody tipped him off that I had built an exceptional guitar and he wanted to make news of it. I live in a part of the country that nobody ever gets famous from. Maybe he is hoping one day I will be known internationally for my guitars??

For what ever reason, my web site is beginning to get a LOT of hits from countries I couldnt point out on a map if I had to. Some of them I cant even pronounce.  Somebody, somewhere is looking out for me