Being built right now

Introduction:

Every once in a while I check out the local hardwood store for high quality tools, although most of them don't stock Instrument grade woods, it never hurts to look when I am there.  They look at me as if I am nuts when I pick up a piece, and tap on it with my trusty Swiss army knife.  I always liked the color purple, and when I came across a 5/16" thick piece of Purple heart wood, I gave it the old tap test, and boy was I surprised.  It was really hard and dense, somewhere between ebony and rock maple, and it had great acoustic tone.  Needless to say, it came home with me.

When finished in oil the Purple heart wood will have a rich deep purple color that can easily be associated with royalty, pair it with Ebony and gold to reinforce the theme, and I can come up with all kinds of imaginary stories, so here goes:

The story of Agnes:

It's 1916, in Barcelona Spain, in a small mansard apartment just down the street from Antoni Gaudi's Palau Güell, lives Agnes Herrera.  Although her father was a sales clerk and her mother a nurse, she would tell her love interests that she was the third, and only unknown illegitimate child of king Alfonso XII.

Her rich employers were hardly ever in town, so she would adorn herself with the lavish and expensive clothing and jewelry of their daughter Maria, and go hang out with the artists, the ones who were actually making money.  Agnes's job was to keep up the place when they were tending to their sugar refineries and hotels in Cuba.  Agnes knew Maria's belongings better than Maria herself, who was the quintessential spoiled brat, and never suspected a thing.

Agnes was a head turner, and could spend all night out on the town without paying for anything, and the hope of her putting out, was enough to keep the dream alive in the minds of unsuspecting bachelors.  No one really believed the story of her ascendancy, but everyone played along, since it hurt no one and kept her around. Even a young Joan Miró spent a few evenings in here captivating company, and fed off of her free and imaginative spirit.

Materials used:

The body is made of two pieces of American swamp ash at a decent 1 1/2" thick, the top and headstock are of one piece each purple heart wood.  The neck is made of laminates of purple heart, birds eye maple and ebony, with an ebony fingerboard.  All of the binding is layered maple, macassar ebony and purple heart wood.  For the various inlays I will use maple, ebony, cow bone and purple howlite stone which can be seen in Agnes's dress to the right.  I will use other materials too in a floral design inlay for the fingerboard, but what exactly, is not yet decided, as I will have to see what will work out best.

First I start out with a preliminary drawing, but it is not set in stone, rather subject to change, because I can easily change my mind on something mid build.  As you can see there is no bridge, pickups or controls yet, the bridge I want to use is around $300, the pickups I want have to be custom fit to the string spacing and fingerboard radius, and also priced quit high, so I omit them for now, until I have a bridge in hand, and establish the measurements for the pickups.

Making the body part 1:

Here are a few pictures of the build, starting with the planing of the body, after I had already joined it:

Here is a shot of the top being glued to the body, and one after gluing:

I cut down the swamp ash following the shape of the top, so that a large part of the binding will be lower than the top, allowing me to carve a more dramatic arch into the top.

Here is a shot of the first layer of macassar ebony binding applied, it will be seen on edge as a thin line separating the swamp ash body from the maple binding that will be visible on edge.

Then I bend and glue strips of binding around the top, which is not easy around the small radius of the lower horn.  The ebony is hard and brittle, and is extremely susceptible to breakage.  Here is the first layer of maple applied.

Here are a few pictures of the total of 9 layers of binding applied to the top.  The nine layers add up to a thickness of around 7/32", which is unusually wide, but it will make for a good look on the finished instrument.  If you look at where there is glue on the purple heart wood, you can get a good idea of how the purple color will "pop out" once finished.