The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I know a lot of folks watching my valiant attempt at building a guitar feel like they’re rubbernecking a highway wreck. Just at really slow speeds. They witnessed me trying to bend walnut into a shape nature never intended walnut to pretzel itself into and on multiple tries, nature proved its point. They watched in horror while I whacked on a Sitka spruce block with a froe, a flat length of steel used for splitting cedar shakes I’d let rust for 30 years, then tried to plane the bookmatched sections down to 3/16th of an inch and glue the two side by side together for the soundboard.

Some had to avert their eyes when I made kerfings to attach to the bent sides to create a glue surface for the top and bottoms and add strength to the skinny carcass. When I cut spruce and cedar bracing wood for the top and then the back, they cringed. The big boys scallop these, but I drilled holes to take away mass. The last thing you want is a top that doesn’t vibrate freely because you stiffened it too much.

Remember this mantra: let the top sing! Let it vibrate! Most guitars have a soundhole cut right into that vibrating top. Not me, pal. I’m building mine to let sound out the side so I, me, myself, can hear it, not some mythical audience I’ll never play for. The fretboard on most guitars gets extended over the top down to the soundhole and glued, more dampening of the vibrations. Me, I’m going to elevate it above the top a quarter inch or so, nothing touching that singing spruce.

Ditto the pickguard, usually a plastic affair cemented to the top too. I’m either eliminating it altogether or making a floating wood one attached to the side. Most strings on a traditional gitbox sit on a bridge then drop down through the drilled top where the stress on the thin soundboard is compensated by a hardwood reinforcing strip, yup, glued down. I’m going to attach a fancy tailpiece at the end of the guitar bottom where only the bridge touches the top, the only place the soundboard is tampered with. Good good good vibrations sez the Beach Boys. We’ll see. No, actually, we’ll hear…. Stay tuned!

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Now that we all understand that the news is faux and science is a hoax, the door to Understanding is wide open once again. Just this week you maybe read about the guy who’s built his own rocket and plans to launch himself into the sky blue yonder so he can look down and prove with undoctored photographs that the earth is flat. His rocket was financed by the Flat Earth Society and I admit, I didn’t realize there were still Flat Earthers among us, and even now I assume they are a comedy troupe out of L.A.

Ordinarily I would applaud the guy. He says he doesn’t believe in Science but he’s blasting off on his own expedition and a high risk experiment. Copernicus and Galileo sat on their butts, but this adventurer is putting his on top of highly explosive fuel tanks. Course, he’s only going up about 1000 feet and probably won’t get too great a photo documentation, but c’mon, give the man credit. If not for brains, for courage.

I know, you’re wondering why he doesn’t spend the money for a rocket on a plane ticket. Get up about 35,000 feet, 35 times higher than his homemade cannon shell, so maybe he doesn’t believe airplanes can fly or he doesn’t like going through Homeland Security, whatever, he’s going up.

Who knows, maybe he’ll discover the planet IS flat. Maybe this global warming has pancaked the earth to the point the oceans are cascading off the edges in giant waterfalls out into the galactic void virtually unnoticed by the space station pretending to orbit a flat planet. Personally — and this only me — I’d forego that ballistically dangerous ride into outer space and go the other way. Dig down, buddy, until you reach the other side, the earth’s bottom. Probably not even a thousand feet and way less dangerous. Course, you want to be careful that last shovel full so you don’t fall through. Especially if you don’t believe in science and gravity. God speed, Mr. Flatlander!

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A buddy I met this summer gave me a book called ‘Clapton’s Guitar’ about a luthier in a small town in the Appalachians who was building Eric Clapton a custom guitar. The book was great, a chronicle of constructing a six string from scratch, an instrument worthy of a guitar legend that also waxed philosophic about country living, old time music, tonewood selections, luthiery skills and the life of a consummate and modest craftsman. I was knocked out. I was so knocked out I decided I would build a guitar too, inspired straight into insanity.

It’s as if I’d seen a Picasso and the week after decided I’d just go ahead and paint a masterpiece of modern art. Why not? Isn’t that what we want art to do, launch us off the ground we thought we were gravitationally bound to?

So okay, let’s understand right off the Get-Go that no, I knew I wasn’t going to get a commission from Clapton or Jimmy Page to make them a custom Skeeter axe, I just wanted to see if I could make one at all, something playable, something pretty, something that might even sound good, something that wouldn’t fall apart. At least not right away. Not that I need another guitar — after all I have 3 electrics, 4 acoustics and one steel guitar. Plus a couple of ukes, a mandolin and half a dozen banjos mostly homemade. But NOT a guitar I’d made myself.

The mizzus shook her head, once again, but as always knew I was going to go right ahead and make a fool of myself or drive myself crazy trying. I’m a couple weeks into this and managing both of the above nicely. Guitar luthiery, for any of you uninitiated, entails specialized tools and skills I do not have nor will I acquire in the course of a one-off instrument. And even though the book that kickstarted me on this quixotic journey pretty much described in detail each step of the process, I had no clear idea how HARD this would be. No doubt I could bore you with horrorshow details of my sad attempts at everything from bending sides to cutting kerfings, but I want to keep moving forward, not looking back, otherwise I would need grief counseling now and never get to the end. Whatever the End is.

So I’m reading about bracing strategies and radical soundhole placements on the side, not the top as usual. I know, it would make sense to keep it simple, stick with the Tried and True, follow instructions, yada-yada, but … I’m only building ONE, why not make it unique, why not shoot for Art, maybe go for the Picasso too as long as I’m lost in the fantasy? When I’m done — if I ever am — I may not know how to play the blues on that fancy new axe laying in pieces down at my shop, but I should be well versed in what the blues are. I’m living them every day now.

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