This pano pic shows four of the six benches in the Ridgewing shop. The left-most bench faces due north with a view toward the lower garden so it has very nice light, and from the height of the weeds in the window it looks like early summer. There is little shelf space in the shop, so bench tops are hard to keep clear. The north bench is completely buried in random shop clutter, and I have no idea what the two dreadnaughts were doing there. From the far left I see the venerable “Used Sandpaper” box, two diamond sharpening stones piled up, a rather colorful fabric back for playing the guitar in inflated acoustic mode, a blinky sound-effects stomp box with the power connector duct-taped on, an old oil sharpening “tri-stone”, a meter-long banner on the wall behind made of every business card I have every carried, power cord, dreadnaught guitar, a pile of disassembled guitar stands, a body frame mold standing on edge, other body frame mold (treble) sitting on the chair, lid for a headstock mold, inaccessible coffee maker, new treble frame ready to be painted, dreadnaught guitar, random old electric guitar, polish and lacquer shelf, Line-6 pod box, more body frames hanging, and an inexplicable device consisting of a vertical maple piece of wood with some sort of hinged blade on it. And that is just a sampling.

The three east benches are set up for loading molds. They are relatively organized, as they had to be cleaned off to cover everything with newspaper, a harbinger of things to come. The left bench has the old bass grill mold open for clean-up. When silicone molds get old, past 25 parts or so, they start to degrade, leaving more epoxy flash on the parts and more random hardened squeeze-out flakes on the opened mold faces. All of these surface flakes have to all be tediously chipped off with a glue chisel to get down to smooth silicone everywhere before being used again. Under the lid of the open grill mold is a closed neck mold box.

The black spools in front are two different weights of raw carbon-fiber, a 1K tow spool in front and a 4k tow spool behind. “Tow”, pronounced like “Toe”, is a carbon-fiber industry term for a ribbon of dry carbon-fiber, in this case one composed of 1,000 fibers and the other of 4,000 fibers. Before a mold is loaded, short pieces of each weight are cut and laid out on the newspaper until there is no room left. Two people work together to load a mold. One picks up pieces of fiber with some big tweezers, runs them through a puddle of epoxy, squeegees them out a bit and then hands them off to the second person, who lays them into the mold. As the strands are laid up one at a time, a woven structure is created with intentional strength vectors. This is important in the case of fine structures like the grills, so that all of the little tendrils have continuous fiber connecting each other through all of the myriad of intersections. Here, there are a few left-over carbon-fiber pieces on the center bench, some short thin 1K pieces below the glue bottle, and a few longer 4K pieces to the right, which tend to unravel when cut. These unraveled pieces soak up a lot of epoxy (and bubbles), so are used for space-filling in the mold, while the thinner 1K fibers tend to stay together and are used for laying up fine features. The mold box to the right that just got filled is a dual headstock body / lever mold closed with six hand clamps for about a half-ton of pressure. On top of the mold is a can of mold-release spray, which is VERY IMPORTANT to remember to use on all mold surfaces before they are loaded and closed. Sticking out of the mold lid just to the left of the crumpled paper towel is a clear plastic tube vent to let excess epoxy escape from the mold. If you look closely you can see it is about half-full of black epoxy that has oozed up.

Laying on its side on the window sill behind the mold is the broken-off headstock of my first 12-string guitar, an Italian EKO, purchased in Nairobi, Kenya in 1969, the summer after high school. This is an important little totem for me, because it served as the blade that cleaved life’s curtain for me and let me through to the other side where guitar spirits lived, as if they seemed to have expected me. I vividly remember first strumming this guitar, the only customer in that quiet little music store, and feeling for the first time that shiver coursing up my spine that only a 12-string guitar with new strings can create.

After two years of college I got sick of the banality of dorm life and moved across town into the local YMCA, which turned out to be inhabited by a far more interesting caste of characters from all walks of life. I also discovered that the bare walls of a YMCA room were perfect for full emersion in the 12-string’s symphony of overtones. Several months in, I made the mistake of loaning my guitar to a guy, and when it came back that evening, the neck had been shattered like someone had really stomped on it. I never heard exactly what happened, but instead of being upset I remember being strangely overcome with calm, despite having two final exams the next day, biochemistry and ornithology, which I had been cramming for. I put my books away and proceeded to carefully disassemble what was left of the guitar down to the last screw. I remember just staring at that pile of broken guitar pieces for a long time, knowing that something important had happened, but I wasn’t sure what.

Two immediate changes came about with unexpected consequences. The first was that I pretty much forgot about being in college and put my sights on figuring out how to get or make a new neck for my guitar, which was as distant knowledge for me at that time as making a moon rocket. Second, my guitar case was now freed up to carry what used to go in my backpack when I hitchhiked. I started to get rides easier, I think because a guy traveling with just a guitar looks a little more dedicated that a guy with a guitar and a big clunky backpack, plus I probably looked easier to fit in the car.

Asking around, I started running into people who knew a little bit about building and fixing guitars.  I still have a little folded-up piece of paper in my wallet with a drawing someone made for me then showing a cross-section sketch of a guitar neck and the name of a place that sold guitarmaking tools and wood. It was a revelation to me that there was this vast ocean of knowledge out there about how these instruments were built and worked their magic, and I was going to find it. And indeed I did! Every time I look at this little broken headstock, I think back on these things.