Northwoods Seminar 2000
At Bryan Galloup's shop in Big Rapids, Michigan
Once again, Dan Erlewine gathered a group together for a short week of instruction, and shmoozing at his the shop of his old pal, Bryan Galloup. Bryan is the dude on the right, below, holding a prototype MacPherson guitar he made in his shop:
That's Dan behind him. Dan is probably the only guy who could mobilize this group of luthiers to get together (without pay) to do four days of instruction in the craft.
Here's Dan, busily engaged in a refretting demonstration:
And here's his famous contraption - the fret jig:
Using this apparatus, he can predict the outcome of a fret job with real precision.
Dan's fixture rotates so he can actually work on the guitar in playing position:
Yasuhiko Iwanade gave us some insights drawn from his years of working for the Fender guitar company and his association with Leo Fender:
Bill Antel presented his methods for hand building replacement necks for electric guitars:
Speaking of necks, here's Phil Jones, passing along some subtleties on Gibson neck construction
Flip Scipio brought along a fine old National steel body resonator guitar:
Yikes! Now I've got it all apart - what'll I do?
Never fear, Flip is here. . .
Sylvan gets a quick photo and some good tool ideas, thanks to Jeff (background) who brought along this cool bench fixture for show and tell:
We all picked up ideas from each other:
Dan checks out some of Tom Murphy's colorants.
Tom gave a great demonstration of the three-color sunburst technique:
And a bit on artificially aging finish touchups:
Most of the instructors and all 40 students gathered to hear a discussion of guitar intonation presented by Buzz Feiten:
Master resophonic builder, Tim Scheerhorn, filled us in on the nuances of adjustment and setup:
Steve Olson has come up with some new ideas on amplifying resonator instruments:
Speaking of amplification, Lindy Fralen showed us how he winds pickups for electric guitars:
It was a busy four days, with instructors duplicating each demonstration, so we wouldn't miss a thing:
I demonstrated my own version of the "traditional" method of refretting acoustic guitars:
This was my fourth Northwoods Seminar. As before, the four days passed mighty quickly!