The Southbound Custom Guitar Blog

When I talk to people, customers or not, about the fact that Southbound Custom builds guitars, I often receive the same question:  “So you buy bodies and necks and put them together?”

No.

We take rough lumber, add our blood/sweat/tears/creativity/experience in several thousand square feet full of machinery and come out on the other end with guitars.  Building a custom one-off guitar takes several months.  Even our builds that are more production oriented take at least a few weeks from start to finish.

Electric guitar building is an interesting field in that taking a build from start to finish, one must be a designer, draftsman, forestry expert, woodworker, machinery repairman, finisher, electronics technician, guitar technician and guitar player.  If a builder is lucky enough to own his own business, then to that list you must add entrepreneur, accountant and customer service representative.  You could also just say we wear a lot of hats.

It has been said that art, as part of its definition, must not have any practical use or purpose.  By that definition guitars are not art.  At Southbound Custom, we view what we do as art even if others do not.  The fact that guitars have to be beautiful, compelling in addition to functional makes building them, at times, maddening.  It is, however, that streak of insanity that defines us and separates us from those who haven’t the stomach.

A past customer of ours told me in frustration that the problem with the guitar industry is that it expects perfection for a dollar-twenty-five.  There are those who don’t appreciate some of the more refined aspects of guitar building.  But we’ve found quite a few who do.  We’ve had some truly wonderful customers over the years.  Those are the people that help inspire us to keep finding better ways to create even better instruments.

So as long as those people keep our phone ringing, we’ll be here covered in sweat, solvent and sawdust…building guitars.

After a weekend of doing some recording with our Green Guitar Project prototype guitars, I got to sit down with another new one last night.  This latest guitar features some more unique materials in its construction and a new neck profile.  It’s a real killer.  I guess this will mean that there are some new members of the “tone wood” group.  The guitar industry has brought a lot of species into this category.  There are differing opinions on which ones are included and which aren’t.  Many of the woods that are widely considered to be the best for tone aren’t going to be available forever.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love wood.  I love seeing the beauty of exotic wood guitars.  And I love building with those woods.  We at Southbound Custom simply want to bring some new ideas to the table.

Rest assured Southbound Custom is bringing something new.  We’re not only bringing something new, but we’re bringing something that sounds fantastic, is fun to play and is affordable.  I’m sure some people will disagree.  But the fact is that Honduran Mahogany and Brazilian Rosewood aren’t going to be available as building materials much longer.  And beyond that…$3,000 for a Les Paul? I can’t afford that.  I had to buy mine used.

SBC is fully on FB.  facebook.com/southboundcustom. We’ve had a lot of people asking for more pictures.  Since our epic main site renovations are taking epic amounts of time, I thought facebook would be a nice way to appease our guitar-crazed fans and customers.  So check it out and let us know what you’d like to see that you don’t, and what you’d like to see more of.  No one gets to see any of the Green Guitar Project yet, though.  You’ll still have to wait a few more weeks for that.

oh, and…

facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom        facebook.com/southboundcustom

really, you should check it.

Another week has come and gone.  We got a lot of rain this week.  This, as it always does, played havoc with the finish schedule.  For a painter, I really don’t think there’s anything worse than 90% humidity…except even more humid air I suppose.  I’m still trying to get Rick Nielsen’s Gruhn guitar clear coated.  I ran into yet more blushing while it was raining cats and dogs on Thursday.  I’ve found MAK to be a good cure for such high humidity levels, but I’m fresh out at the moment.

We’re getting close to having some new shirt designs nailed down.  We should have new SBC, GGP and Roadiemade shirts available in a couple weeks.

Tru-Oil continues to prove that it’s the best finish you can put on a neck.  I can’t believe it took me so long to get hip to this stuff.  We used all sorts of oils and waxes over the years.  I’d say we’ve tried about ten different products.  Tru-Oil gives them all a good hard kick.  I think it’s better than any sort of sprayed coating as well.  Nitro feels tacky and slow on a neck…that’s my opinion…some people obviously like it.  Gibson seems to be under the impression that it’s pretty cool.  But then again, I think it’s more of a tradition thing for them.  ?  Urethane is good on a neck, but still lacking next to the T.O.

We’re finishing up some mods on a 1952 Gibson Les Paul for our good friend Kenneth Brian (if you dig old school country, you should definitely check him out).  We’ve been losing sleep over this project for a while.  We’ve converted it from P90′s to humbuckers and installed an ABR and tunematic.  The neck pitch was not steep enough for a proper bridge, so we had to get a little creative with the refret.  We’ll have pictures of the whole project up on Facebook soon.

Until next time…

I got another call recently from a customer trying to make up his mind about a finish.  “Nitro sounds better, right?” is the question he posed.  I gave the response that I always give: This is far too subjective and there are far too many variables for me to give you any sort of useful answer.  I can give you a plethora of information on various wood coatings.  But when it comes to tone…well, there I’m afraid is a word without a clear definition.  So let’s leave behind the metaphysical and the emotional and see what we have left.

I told this potential customer that, in my opinion, the only place nitro is superior to other coatings is on the soundboard of an acoustic guitar.  This is even stretching things a bit, because I really feel that any thin film on a soundboard will produce excellent acoustic results.  I’ve got several repeat finish customers who agree with me there.  I’m talking about boutique builders who have me put polyester and polyurethane on their multi-thousand dollar masterpieces.

Now, I know some of you have thrown the computer across the room upon reading the word polyester, so I’ll give you a minute to collect the bits and put them back together.

Right.  So let me elaborate.  We use Polyester on about 80% of the instruments we finish.  The reason this coating gets a bad rap is because it has a great potential for evil.  This evil can be seen on a lot of the cheaper stuff that comes in from overseas.  The import guitar crowd uses polyester because it’s fast and durable.  This is the same reason we use it here at Southbound Custom.  The difference is that we are meticulous in our sanding of the polyester sealer coat before putting on an ultra-thin polyurethane topcoat.   The overseas guys often use polyester as a topcoat as well as a sealer coat without nearly enough sanding, which too often results in a goop-covered, resin encased, shapeless, shining beast with strings rather than all of the great things we love about guitars.

I can tell you’re getting bored now.  I am too.  But there are a few facts here.  Thick finishes can be bad.  Thin ones are often better…especially on soundboards.  Poly finishes can be thin.  SBC poly finishes ARE thin.

Now as for changing/improving…mutating…whatever the tone of an electric guitar.  I always recommend starting with the pickups.  Swapping nitro for poly will cost you several hundred dollars and take weeks.  And it won’t give you 1/100th of the change in tone that changing pickups can give.  AND even if changing the finish does actually change the tone, it might not be better to your ears.

All that being said, there are plenty of cool things about nitrocellulose lacquer.  It checks, it yellows, it has a soft feel, it can be easily repaired and so on.   Those things may or may not be your bag.  That’s why we offer lots of choices.

Today was a cold day at 1301 Pillow Street.  There’s a lot of paint work to be done in preparation for NAMM and also just to generally clean house for the quickly approaching new year.  Among the more exciting jobs are pieces for Show Pro (custom steel guitars), Vox and a couple of really cool Gruhn models.  The most exciting things, however, are a pair of Green Guitar Project guitars.  One is getting finished in gold and the other in an aged white pearl.  These two are spoken for, but they’ll be followed by several more in January.

We’ll be posting tons of info on the GGP line in the coming weeks.

Headless Guitar: Part One

Those who know me know I have a bit of history with Steinberger.  It’s not a history I love to recollect, and due to certain involved parties, it’s not a tale for public record.  Let’s just say that headless guitars and basses, through no fault of their own, left a bad taste in this luthier’s mouth.  So when I was recently commissioned to build a single custom six-string featuring the Floyd Rose Speedloader system, I lost my head! (don’t pretend you didn’t like the joke.  I won’t tell anyone you laughed)

I’ve enjoyed the stability and smooth feel of double ball-end tremolo systems whenever I’ve picked them up.  And the appeal of a Wyld Stallyns endorsement is hard to ignore.  I’ve just never felt comfortable with the aesthetic of a guitar without a headstock.  So the Speedloader project piqued my interest.  I was ready to get down and dirty with the Speedloader and all the ins and outs of headless guitars.

The customer supplied most of the parts including a Cort body for template making purposes, but I had to track down a Speedloader nut.   I found, first, that the parts are not easy to locate.  If you’re ever looking, save yourself some time and order direct from Floyd Rose.  The prices are retail, but if you’re like me, your time is valuable.  I wasted a couple hours looking for a discount supplier.

I had to obtain an actual Speedloader nut, opposed to a regular Floyd locking nut, because the system must be fitted with specially manufactured strings that have “double-ball ends.”  I put that in quotes because the ends are more like Fender Bullet ends than standard balls.  The nuts come in a variety of finishes, widths and radii, just like their locking brethren.

I began the build by roughing the body out of a two-piece alder blank.  I used one of our paint-grade blanks because it was going to be painted Surf Green.  I stopped the body construction there.  I needed to build the neck in order to lay out the rest of the guitar with the most accuracy.  I build templates for everything from the neck pocket to fret slots, but there is no substitute for having the neck in hand to ensure a tight fit in the neck pocket.  Once I had the neck pocket cut, then I was able to scribe my center line on the body.  Everything else can then fall into place.

The neck was constructed of maple and Madagascar rosewood.  I picked through a lot of maple stock in order to find a piece that had an exceptional look and had seasoned in our shop for an adequate amount of time.  The piece I chose had about a 3A flame, tight straight grain and had been cut to a two neck-sized blank over two years ago.  I’ll write more about the art and science of neck blanks in a later blog.

                Madagascar rosewood is the closest thing to Brazilian rosewood that’s readily available.  It has similar structural characteristics and the same spidery black lines running throughout.  Needless to say, it’s gorgeous wood.  Because this guitar was to be aesthetically simple, I wanted every aspect of it to be exceptional.  I find this sort of look to be much more appealing than an ornate guitar covered in inlay and binding.

Southbound Custom doesn’t do all that much custom inlay work.  We do, however, build a lot of custom guitars that often require something other than dots.  I try to steer clear of any design that’s particularly ornate, but there are plenty of simple designs that can spice up a fretboard.  The first question to answer when tackling one of these inlay projects is, “How many are we building?”

If we’re only building one guitar (or just one neck as the case may be), then I will try to avoid using CNC’s due to the high setup costs.  The hand-cut inlay project is really only feasible for me if it’s fairly simple.  Inlay is not my strongest area of luthiery, so when I can’t do a great job, I turn to computers and machines for help.  It is possible to find many pre-cut inlay pieces in many styles and materials from suppliers.  Stewart McDonald and CustomLuthier.com are two such suppliers.

Using pre-cut inlays is a great way to keep cost down on a project, while still achieving a custom look.  Sometimes you just can’t find what you want, though.  Below are a couple examples of customized projects that had to be designed and cut from the ground up.  One of these was done by hand and one by CNC.  Can you tell them apart?

The paw prints were cut by Todd Reith at CustomLuthier.com and the matching fingerboard was cut in-house with our CNC.  Vendors like Mr. Reith who specialize in a given task can be a real help in keeping prices competitive and allowing us to spend our time on the things we do best.  In this case, there was a good bit of setup time on the front end to get the designs in the computer, coordinate with vendors and design our CNC programs and fixtures.   But once everything was done, the inlays dropped right in and looked great!

I did the moon inlay neck by hand.  There were a lot of hours in this project.  When I say a lot, I mean around 12 for the inlays alone.  If I charged the usual Southbound Custom shop rate of $60/hour, it would have been a $720 inlay job!  That doesn’t even include the cost of materials.  This illustrates a point I deal with every day.  If we charge what the work is worth, we often price ourselves right out of the market.  I don’t want to launch into a lecture about the value of skilled craftsmanship and how low-quality Chinese imports have grossly distorted our perception…well I don’t want to launch into while we’re talking about inlay.  It’s a topic for later blogs.

Getting back to an earlier comment about quantity having an effect of pricing, we can use our examples to see this in action.  In the case of the paw prints, it was a variation inlaid into a fretboard that we already had programmed.  The customer ordered five guitars with two different inlay variations.  In addition, I expected that we’d be making more guitars with the paw print inlay, so it made sense to use the computer and CNC.  We probably had seven hours in the setup.  The other issue was that there was just no way that I could see myself cutting out all those tiny toe pieces.  Talk about hours! No thanks.

The moon neck was a one-off, and it was simple enough to cut by hand, so I thought that the best way to get it done.  Being that it was in maple, the cuts had to be precise.  I was only able to cut the board by hand because I could use forstner bits to cut the pockets.  In a dark colored fingerboard, filler easily hides small imperfections in the inlay pockets.  Maple will flaunt every minor flaw.  I had more money and time invested in the paws, but I can now reproduce those fingerboards quickly and with consistency.  The moons cost me less, but should a customer ever request that again, I’ll have to start from scratch.

I know I promised all guitar talk in this blog, but I’d like to extend it to guitar shop talk.  The life of the small business owner is never dull.  There are new problems every day and lots of people ready to take advantage of you.  Just this morning, I received an email from an individual claiming to work for a company in Asia registers domain names and online trademarks.  This “John” (good solid Chinese name) informs me that a company called Henfeng Investments is attempting to register the Southbound Custom name as their own trademark.  Well at first, I was floored.  I replied that I would naturally seek immediate legal action against any entity claiming ownership of my intellectual property and livelihood.  I forwarded the email to my girlfriend (who just so happens to be an attorney) along with a second email from “John” addressing my reply.

He told me that I, being the owner of the Southbound Custom trademark had five days to dispute Henfeng Investments’ attempt at registration before they would own my property!  I then received a reply from my attorney with a link to a blog exposing this type of scam.  There were several accounts of people who had been contacted just as I had with the same SCAM.  (http://blog.sinohosting.net/beware-of-chinese-domain-names-fraud/)

Most, if not all of the information in these scam emails was fraudulent…right down to the fact that they were not even coming from China!  Here’s my scammer’s email:

Dear Manager:

We are a Domain Name registration service company, which is the domain name register center in Shanghai,China. We have something important need to confirm with your company. A formal application here dated on April.29th,2009 from HENFENG Investment company requested “southboundcustom” as their internet Trademark and CN/Asia domain names(.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/org.cn/.asia) on internet .After our initial examination,we find this name conflicts with your company. We send this email to the owner who have used this name and hope to get the affirmation of your company because that may relate to your internet intellectual property. Now we have not finished the registration for this company, in order to deal with this issue better, please let the someone who is responsible for this matter to contact us as soon as possible.Thank you!

Best regards,

John
Oversea marketing manager
Tel:+86(0)21 6296 2950
Fax:+86(0)21 6296 1557
web:www.ygregistry.cn

Granted, my scammer may not have been the same individual as the ones in the above blog, but you can’t deny the blatant similarity.  This is one of the most convincing scam emails I’ve ever gotten.  I get plenty, and most are very easy to spot.

I have ZERO patience for dishonest people.  I work hard every day to make a living.  Too many people on this planet want things handed to them.  I’m not about to get on a soapbox, I just want to expose this person for what he or she is: dishonest.  Now let’s get back to guitars!

We recently got a call from a customer who was beside herself after having smashed one of her husband’s favorite guitars.  After listening to her description, we decided it was a good candidate for repair and had her send it in for further inspection.

As you can see from the pictures, the guitar had likely been swung by its neck into pavement or some other hard, abrasive surface.  The impact had been so great, that the maple around the neck screws was actually torn out, separating body from neck.

Though it was smashed pretty badly, it was a 40^th anniversary model that will certainly increase in collector value, so I tallied the work that needed to be done and got the ok on a quote from the customer.

We began our repair by dripping super glue into the smallest cracks.  I felt this was a good place to start as the thin stuff is the only adhesive runny enough to get into the really tight spots, and this body had several hairline cracks.  Next we mixed up some West Systems epoxy and let it run into the cracks.  This took a while because the epoxy worked its way into the tight spaces slowly and had to be reapplied repeatedly.  We filled the remaining large gaps with epoxy putty known to some as “Magic Putty.”  After a few days, of gluing/filling and sanding, we had a reasonably level surface that was no longer in danger of crumbling into guitar-bits…which was a plus.

We then began our usual Poly finish process.  The polyester basecoat was not only true to the original finish, but a great aid in leveling out imperfections that had not been corrected by our previous efforts.  In a case like this, the spots in need of filler seem endless.  It’s important to be extremely critical and patient as you search for imperfections.  Because we were planning on using polyester as the topcoat, any low spot would mean a thicker topcoat and subsequently a darker color.  This is due to the heavy amber color of polyester.

The neck was a pretty straightforward repair.  We simply drilled larger holes at the screw locations, filled them with hardwood dowels and re-drilled the pilot holes.  This type of repair is fairly common, but we usually see it on mahogany necks.

You can see in the pictures that the body looks brand new.  Everything was structurally sound.  There was only one minor cosmetic issue that you will notice on the heel where a small piece of the wood had been torn out.  The original piece was re-glued, but the repair is visible.

All in all, I was very happy with the repair.  It was good to know that the body and neck were saved from their almost-fate in Trash Can Land.