Baritone Completed

We Finished our first acoustic guitars this week, and I must say I'm glad to be done with it. I think I will always be slowed by the pace of the rest of the class, but as I move on in the program, and the folks in the shorter program leave, we should be able to work a little faster. That way everyone has some experience, and we only really have to wait for a few people on the different steps with cycling through the tools rather than 13 people.
The grades varied a fair amount between all the students, but supposedly this whole term did much better than the last term in general. They grade pretty tough here, and in some ways I would say it's unrealistic, but my final grade on this guitar was 83% which they'll try to tell you is a great job. Meh. I think they're grading does not reflect the various levels of significance for each area. Not all sins are equal with guitars.
I just kinda took some random pictures of the guitar here and threw them on the blog. The school is not the best place to be taking really great pictures, and I'm not that great at taking pictures, so you'll just have to see it when I get home. You can click on any of the pictures though to see the full size image and they look much sharper that way too.
I think I'm getting sick again here; We've had some short nights, and the other day we were a bit behind so we came in two hours early and had a really long day. They were trying to pack in some repair lectures before the journeymen folks took off. The lectures were pretty interesting, and cleared some things up on guitar repair no-nos. Makes me feel really wrong about what I did to that poor old Harmony I bought.... It's hard to talk about still, but I sorta killed a vintage instrument as far as historical value goes. Actual cost: $50. Opportunity cost which is LONG gone:$500 or better.
This is that custom built baritone case I was mentioning. It really is a pretty nice case, especially compared to what the rest of the students got. I feel a little bad every time I open it... But then I pet that crushed velvet just a bit and all those feelings pass.
I'm finding I'm not real good at using Blogger, or maybe the program just sucks, but sometimes it's hard to get the right words with the right picture. So just bear with me and look around for the next pile of thoughts.

The weather is getting pretty soupy poopy here and so here I sit in my little coffee shop with my baritone rather than letting it sit in the cold car. (Today was the last day of the first term and I just haven't taken Barbara the Baritone back home yet. )Nitro finishes crack very easily if they are subjected to humidity and temperature changes; However, they are also believed to be the best for tone. A guy just saw my guitar here and tried it out, and seemed to really like it. He's playing a jazz show tonight in town so I think I may have to go in the name of entertainment.

Here's my friend Aaron with his completed guitar. He's a pretty cool guy, and he'll potentially be coming back to the school in another term to finish the master program.

So the new bunch of people will come in at the start of this week and will be welcomed with a very very clean shop. We spent a lot of time thoroughly cleaning each room of the shop by blowing dust down from all the high spots, and then of course lots of sweeping, etc.

So here's me filling white space, or black rather, in my blog. I better quit for now. I don't want to bore anyone. I guess just trust me that my guitar is cooler in person. Talk to y'all later.