This week has been a great exposure to all things tonewood. The amount of thought that goes into designing and building an instrument is amazing. There are myriad different ways to do everything, and the builder, has to determine the way they want to approach the construction of an acoustic guitar. A lot of it is intuition about the way certain changes to the guitar will affect the sound or feel of the instrument, but a lot of the same decisions can be based on scientific research and experimentation. For me, this week has really been an exercise in problem solving and reasoning.
The activities I have done in the past week have been exciting and diverse. Some tasks are less enjoyable, like labeling and coding wood for inventory, but even they are a huge part of the business and are interesting to me. Other things I have done include working on the construction of shelves for storing wood, designing and making a work board for shaping tops, designing the bracing pattern to use for the two guitar tops, and experimenting with pine as a tonewood.
There were plenty of surprises, but everything is going as planned and we are moving toward all the goals and activities. This coming week we are planning to complete the two tops and have them to present to the committee. My experience has been packed with learning. Tom is great about sharing bits of information about everything we do to help me understand the reasoning behind it. He comes from an engineering background, and has a masters degree in philosophy so he is very good at problem solving and thinking things out. That is a valuable skill and it is something that i will take away from this project.
Looking back on this past week, it is hard to believe that the project is almost half-way done. I feel like there is so much we could do with more time. We will get everything done that we planned, but really a project like this would be best planned over a period of a month or so.
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