Pete Howlett
Well-known member
Trained as a designer, I cannot live with images that I have control over and that are not pleasing to my esoteric sense of 'rightness'. It's taken 15 months of painstaking labor to modify the spectacular inlay Larson and Lyon and Healey used for their most expensive guitars. This past week I have got up close to the edge of satisfaction only to be confronted with another unsightly disproportioned element. However, after another six hours at the computer, this is where i am now with the elements in proportion and making more sense than the Faerie Fella's Masterstroke/ Hieronymous Bosch nonesense of the Larson inlay. You can see if you get out the magnifier I lost my way with the offsets so this looks more like a hand cut inlay... I am not going to finish it as I have to revise the offsets for each individual type of pearl and Ablam. It's got to be one one the other and at the moment, it is looking too much like the other!
For those who would like some technical stuff - it takes an hour to cut the inlay pocket. There are nearly 60 separate elements (peanuts for somebody like Chuck who can have hundreds in his wonderful designs) each taking on average 3 minutes to cut and 30 seconds to fit. I use 10 pearl tiles at around $5 a piece and a strip of Ablam costing $25. Clearance pockets and fret slotting take aboout 20 minutes and profiling the fretboard, 21/2 minutes. The machine has to be minded - pearl dust sticks to the cutters unless it is blown away, so you are looking at a total of around six hours from raw to finished and fretted ready to go on a neck near you.
And I've got another three to four hours planning how I am going to organise the cutting and fitting. I've learned that it works best assembling elements rather than fitting all the white MOP then the gold and so on. By the time I've done 3 more I should get it down to 3 hours....
For those who would like some technical stuff - it takes an hour to cut the inlay pocket. There are nearly 60 separate elements (peanuts for somebody like Chuck who can have hundreds in his wonderful designs) each taking on average 3 minutes to cut and 30 seconds to fit. I use 10 pearl tiles at around $5 a piece and a strip of Ablam costing $25. Clearance pockets and fret slotting take aboout 20 minutes and profiling the fretboard, 21/2 minutes. The machine has to be minded - pearl dust sticks to the cutters unless it is blown away, so you are looking at a total of around six hours from raw to finished and fretted ready to go on a neck near you.
And I've got another three to four hours planning how I am going to organise the cutting and fitting. I've learned that it works best assembling elements rather than fitting all the white MOP then the gold and so on. By the time I've done 3 more I should get it down to 3 hours....
