K.V. Johansen

Here he is ...

The guitar is done! Only one mild soldering burn (me, not the guitar), and one faulty switch that Solo immediately replaced (they have excellent support), and a couple of days tinkering with the set-up.

The sound is everything I hoped for in choosing a mahogany-bodied set-neck -- deep rich full bass, good sustain.

Renaissance stuff sounds wonderful, played on it. I need to be working on my assorted Pink Floyd and Dire Straits and Queen and Led Zeppelin and such, though.

Well, actually I need to be working on my next book. My guitar-making, brain-resting, soul-revitalizing holiday from writing is over. Time to get back to real work. I've got one nearly done and one in the research-reading and notebook-scribbling stage.

I'm kind of nervous. I was so, so burnt out. This was the first break I'd had from writing, the longest I've ever stopped since I was in high school. No rest, ever, on top of having a long succession of soul-draining off-farm-jobs -- I find it exhausting facing people and all my jobs, as the publishing industry crashed and burned around me from early 2000's on, have been public-service in one way or another -- it ate me hollow. Today I need to open up the file, look at it with fresh eyes, and write again. And something is saying, what if it's still dead inside?

Tell me my guitar's pretty? Better yet, if fantasy's your thing, pick up one of my books. (Best yet, pick up one of my books, tell me you loved it (presuming you did), and tell all your friends, too.) (If you're saying, um, what did you write, anyway, my website is here.)

Finding 4000 grit sandpaper is not easy. Nobody sells single sheets of sandpaper any more, so after much searching, I had to buy a mixed pack that went from, I think it was 1000, up to 4000. So I paid $15 plus hst for the single sheet of sandpaper I needed. This is a bit pricey. (I will have to become ruinously addicted to making guitars to justify this, right?)

Anyway, I sanded with 4000 and put a final coat of Tru-oil on the back of the guitar body. Then, discovering a dog-hair, removing the dog-hair, I left a fingerprint in the tacky oil, so I recoated just a portion of it -- and so it goes. I left that upstairs for twenty-four hours or so to harden in a warmer room once it was dry. And then, well, it's still not the glassy-to-the-touch surface I was aiming for, so time for wet-sanding.

Where are the mineral spirits? Why are there no mineral spirits in the cellar paint cupboard?

Can I use kerosene for wet sanding? If I can, should I? The answer is probably no.

Do I want to have to go off and go shopping? I hate shopping. Also, the cupboard is full of excitingly volatile things, some of which must be useful. What the heck is Taltine?

Our house came with a lot of the previous owner's stuff (late parents of a friend), and one did beautiful china painting. Taltine is a turpentine-alternative for fine oil painting. So, can I do wet sanding with turps? Sounds good.

Spouse, dubious, quotes various things about harmful vapours and necessary ventilation, and I do admit that there's no ventilation in the cellar to speak of, particularly as we can't even leave the door open because the dog will immediately come blundering in and fall down the stairs. (Yes, this happened. He's very old and unsteady and now we always make sure the door is tightly latched.) (He was okay, though alarmed and upset.)

However, the sunroom is easy to shut off from the rest of the house, with the added benefit of being sunny and therefore rather better lit than the cellar, and though it is very narrow and full of plants (including an olive tree currently in bloom), it has a door that can be closed, a window that can be opened, and an ottoman which can be covered with newspaper and used as a guitar-finishing workbench. Hooray!

So, a little Taltine on a yoghurt-lid, the 4000 grit sandpaper and a sanding block, and a light pass over the back of the body, the back of the head, and a rub around the sides and the curved edge and it is now beautifully smooth to the touch, while still having a bit of the organic look this guitar, which has a forest sort of theme to its colours, seems to be suited by. (I.e. you can still tell it's wood.) Still nicely glossy, too. It's as smooth as the perfect satin silky neck, with which I am very please, though uncertain exactly how I achieved that.

I'm going to put a few more coats of Tru-oil on the front of the body, as that will get the most battering in life.

How much Tru-Oil does it take to finish a guitar? The answer is either two 90-ml bottles, or infinite. I have been almost but not quite done the finishing for a week. I may stop when this bottle runs out. It's mostly ending up on rags, gloves, and other experimental applicators, anyway. This would of course be easier if the lint-free old clean rags made from t-shirt (on their own or wrapped around a cotton ball, the prevailing advice on the internet), didn't leave tiny fibers all over. Resorting to applying with disposable glove is leaving streaks. Rubbing it with coffee-filter paper got it very smooth after the worse fibrey application, but streaky. There is no perfection.

Except the neck. The satin finish on the neck is perfect. I have been unable to achieve this elsewhere, partially through obviously having forgotten some step that was so secret I kept it from myself. I shall expect you all to admire the neck.

I did a Danish oil finish on my big wall-clock in grade twelve woodshop and I do not recall this degree of fuss and bother, though Tru-Oil is more or less a Danish oil type finish, as I understand it.

I decided to finish the guitar kit in Tru-Oil because it was pretty low-tech and low-chemical and forgiving, according to what I read, and if you're doing this stuff indoors in the winter in Canada, and the only place you have to work is a corner of the unheated cellar by the woodpile, that seemed my best choice. (Now that I know more about wipe-on poly, maybe I'll try that next time? But I got fed up with modern polyurethanes after refinishing all the floors in the house and finding it really quite bad, not the polyurethane of the eighties.) (Or tung oil. I've always wanted to try tung oil but some stuff I read said it wasn't great for instruments. But now I've seen some beautiful tung-oiled guitars that people seem happy with, so that's always a possibility too.) (The Spouse doesn't read this so, hah hah, I can talk about a next time without sarcastic comments about you can only play one guitar at a time anyway and so on.)

Anyway ... where was I? Oh yeah, Tru-Oil. I do like it, but it's been very frustrating. I've worked with Danish oil before, and this seems pretty much the same kind of thing. However ... wipe on thinly, wait, another coat, wait, 0000 steel wool, clean thoroughly, another coat ... ARGH. Is it dust, is it lint? I try different Very Clean Lint-Free rags, I try the carefully folded bit of rag, I try the paper-towel or cotton-ball inside a rag, I try the 'just use your fingers', and it's the same thing, over and over. Hideous. And the cellar, I'm sure, is the only dust-free and dog-fur-free place in the house.

The guitar, by the by, is not dog-fur-free. Like a bug in amber, there it is. An Ivan-hair. Kind of like when you get your kid to make their handprints in some bit of home-repair concrete, only not. But the back, due to an unfortunate encounter with the rather peculiar cellar doorway, and due to wet-sanding an early layer of Tru-Oil with what turned out to be really junky quality 600-grit sandpaper, has a bit of an aged and well-lived, though not outright relic'd, air about it anyway, and people put hair in lockets as mementos, right? So the single white hair of the dog that, yes, bit me rather frequently when he was a small wicked puppy, remains.

I digress. I am a maze of tangents.

So my really horrible rough finish on my really lovely silk-like sanding ... Is it because I'm applying the stuff at 8 C? No way to change that. I keep the bottle up in the living room so it's a reasonable temperature when it goes on, and I bring the guitar itself, once it's not tacky, upstairs to dry properly in the living room, which is the warmest room in the house. No, it's the damned steel wool.

I've always used superfine steel wool, 0000, for rubbing down things I've been varnishing, but I conclude, like the junky sandpaper, that this is bad quality steel wool. It's not Bulldog; I couldn't find Bulldog. It's just some stuff in a bag. And it's leaving tiny steel fragments all over my finish, which the tack-cloth is failing to pick up. Or that's my best guess.

So today, for the ?tenth? coat, I sanded the back and sides with 1500 sandpaper (good quality but it's my last piece so I need to find more somewhere). Dry sanding, just lightly, to take off all the nasty grittiness that is probably steel-dust that eluded the tack-cloth. I've gone right off wet sanding for the time being, after the Horrible Scratching Incident. Wiped it all clean. Feels like silk again. This time I used a cotton ball with the Tru-Oil on it wrapped in a bit of official Clean Lint-Free Rag, and wiped the oil on with long, quick strokes, as instructed by what's come to by my favourite guitar-finishing video channel (a chap named Manicuro, I think).

Now I wait, and then I'll do it again. And again. Because damn it, that back is going to be Nice before I do anything more to the front.

But the neck -- the neck is lovely. (So it isn't the temperature.) For some reason, the neck is perfect. If it's the steel-wool dust messing it up, it did come off the neck properly with the tack-cloth. The only issue with the neck is that I was intending for it to be satin, because I really like the nearly-raw feel of my Squier necks, and I rubbed it down to satin and decided, bleah, it looked much nicer when it was glossy, because I did a neat thing in staining the neck that doesn't show up as well on the satin. So I wiped on another coat, then, being indecisive (I write like this too) vigorously rubbed it off --

So, progress on the guitar kit. Everything is sanded, stained, very gently steel-wooled, feels like satin ... touched up, fondled, admired ...

Time to actually start turning it into a guitar. It's a set neck. This means gluing, and means getting it very precisely positioned, or well, it'll just be pretty but not playable. This is why bolt-on necks are easier! I have in the past made furniture, as in, taken a slab of rough wood and turned it into a nightstand, a bookcase, a big Vienna wall clock, that sort of thing, and I've taken furniture apart and fixed it and put it back together. I can do this.

The Solo kits seem very well made; the joint is very precisely cut. Dry-fitting it, everything aligned perfectly and it was difficult to get the neck and the body apart again after. So I dry-fitted it and clamped it twice, measuring everything, checking everything, making sure all my clamps and protective blocks of wood and stryofoam and such were perfectly in place and that I knew exactly where they should go. Twice. I did this twice, taking it apart, putting it together, clamping, checking the position of everything.

And then, the gluing.

And the tightening of the clamps, for the third time.

And the damned neck slipped, with the added slipperiness of the glue meaning the tightening of the first clamp pulled it forward a mere one milimeter, and I didn't see it till I'd put the second clamp on. (This is 'forward' as in lengthwise, towards the head and away from the body, not tilting, which would have been a disaster. The neck angle did not change.)

I was, of course, not using anything like authentic fish glue, but good quality yellow carpenter's glue, with a fast tack time.

You see where this is going?

No way was that tightly-fitting joint coming apart. Nope. Not ever.

So, it's a good tight joint, a nice flat fit, but with a one milimeter gap between the end of the neck and the body, within the neck pickup cavity. You might think this is nothing, something no one will ever see, but it's a structural problem, because the strings are going to be pulling back against that gap that shouldn't be there with quite a lot of force. The neck is meant to be braced there. (Not sure what it would do to the sound, either, as part of the reason for a set neck is the increased continuous contact between neck and body.)

Fortunately, an old high school friend of mine comes from a family of instrument-makers (real professional ones, not assemblers of kits) and he told me to fill the gap with a mixture of glue and fine sawdust, and another friend who's a carpenter/cabinet-maker/sawmill person happened to be working on a big table and gave me some nice yellow-birch sawdust so I didn't even have to sand up some scrap wood (because of course I cleaned up my workbench thoroughly before gluing and was short of sawdust). I cut up a yoghurt tub lid into little wedges with flat rather than pointy ends and used those to apply the glue-sawdust paste and tamp it down into the crack, a little at a time. Got it right to the bottom, I think, and kept adding more and tamping it till it was coming out the sides, then scraped it all off smooth. Now that it's dry it should be pretty strong and enduring. The neck, so far as I can tell, is still perfectly aligned. The bridge has adjustable saddles, so I should be able to get the intonation right despite the neck being a mm longer than it should be.

Next time, I will use a slower glue, to give myself time to make adjustments. (Wait, next time? I'm not done this one yet.)

Here you can see the gap, the finished and smoothed off fill. In these photos it hasn't cured yet. It's less evident now that it's completely dried, not that it will be visible at all when the guitar is done. And here's the guitar, lying on a coffeetable I made a long time ago. It's still awaiting an oil finish and its hardware.

Guitar staining in progress. See the previous post for what I'm doing!

The sanding and staining is done. I started with the neck and head, as less daunting. Dark oak on the head, forest green on the neck. For the neck, I rubbed it on and off fairly quickly and then put the dark oak over it, which gave a nice effect. And then ... the quilted maple top of the body before I lost my nerve. It's a very thin veneer. So, sanded, stained it dark oak, stained the sides and sort over the edge onto the back (the body, like the neck, is mahogany). Sanded the back to fade the dark in. Sanded the front down, nervously, because I enjoy sanding and that makes it way too easy to go too far on veneer. Once I was finally happy with that, I applied emerald stain to the front, using 0000 steel wool to rub it on and then rubbing with a dry cloth to even it and make sure I didn't get lap marks.

I hadn't been taping bits off, other than the fretboard, because I was finding that the tape was lifting splinters from the mahogany. Also, all the curves that fade into one another make deciding on edges tricky. I mostly wanted the two greens and the brown to fade into one another. However, I went over the edge onto the sides a bit with the emerald where I didn't want to, so once I was done the front and it had dried I did the sides with emerald and then went over that again with the oak, before doing the back with forest overtop the oak fade. It's not noticeable enough to be called a 'burst'. (And does one do bursts on the back? Well, why not, I mean, it's your guitar and you'll see the back, even if nobody else does.)

I find the Saman water-based stain does raise the grain, even though it says it doesn't, so after the first bit I did I took to wiping over the wood with a damp cloth and then giving it a final light sanding, just a touch, with 400, and that prevented that. Using 0000 steel wool to apply it, rubbing it around with a clean cloth after, made for a rich, dark colour and very even application. I had used a cloth on the neck, which made for a less saturated colour, but that was an effect I wanted there.

So, now the staining is all done and I need to glue it. Solo recommends gluing the neck before starting the finishing on set-necks, but I decided that handling it for sanding and staining was going to be easier in two pieces.

Experiments with Saman water-based stain. It definitely seems to work best using 0000 steel wool to apply it; colours blend much more smoothly than with rag. It does seem to raise the grain, though the bottle says it does not. Also, I haven't used the test-piece of elm I have for the staining tests; it's too pretty. I'll keep it clean to practise applying the Tru-oil on, if I ever manage to find any. My most successful attempt to accent the grain using 'dark oak' and 'emerald' was on the piece of yellow birch; that gives me hope I'll get it right on the guitar ... (The maple pieces I had didn't have very strong grain to accent, though one was quarter-sawn.) The dark oak looked really nice on the piece of black walnut, though I then put some green over it in a less than successful blending attempt. Anyway, gave me an approximate idea what the various colours would look like on the mahogany, I think. So that's a reasonably successful bit of testing.

Er, that means I maybe need to actually set sandpaper to guitar tomorrow.

Eep.

Unexpected day off, since on the way to the off-farm-job I drove into the freezing rain and there was ice on the trees, the powerlines, the road ... turned around when I found a safe place, came home, called the Powers-That-Be and was told I could close for the day. (And now that the freezing rain warning is cancelled, there's freezing rain freezing all over the trees, etc, here at my house, go figure.)

Anyway, decided to start sanding my scrap wood and testing stain and stuff. And it's really weird, because my life is always a stressful feeling of being pressed (that old form of torture), always trying frantically to get things done and find a tiny bit of time for the de-stressing things, which then become stressful because it's so hard to fit them in around my real work (i.e. being a novelist), the off-farm-job (i.e. the thing I've had to do since the publishing industry was destroyed just as my career began to take off), life, i.e. all the stuff you have to do to eat and not have the house fall down or turn into a filthy mess, caring for the dog, who is very old, and yay, my chronic exhaustion and various health things ... usw. But this afternoon, I am sanding ...

And this is turning into, pottering around, sorting the various accumulated sandpapers into labelled envelopes. Loading some new audiobooks onto the MP3 player. Finding a pair of sneakers, so as not to fill my wool house slippers with sawdust. Having a mug of hot chocolate while thinking about what I'm going to do. (Sand all my test strips. Try a bit of the Saman water-based stain on each. Experiment with blending. Experiment on the bit of maple with layering to bring out the grain.)

And -- not fretting about it. (Ooh, fretting, almost a guitar joke.) Not thinking, I must do all this before dog-walking-on-the-ice-in the sleet-time before supper; I must get this done so I can start supper in good time because unlike me, the Spouse doesn't have that 'don't bother to eat till you've finished the Thing You Are Doing' override in his head. Not, I must get this done so I can do the next thing.

Just, I'm going to get everything ready, sensibly organized, for ease and enjoyment, lay out all my stuff, drift vaguely around finding what I forget, and then just do some sanding. And if I get to the stain, that'll be fun. If not, there's tomorrow. Because I'm not writing tomorrow. Yes, Sunday is Day of Chores. But between the chores I'm not going to try to write. I'm just going to go to the cellar and work on the guitar.

I'm horrible at holidays. I am either writing, or twitchy and stressed because I'm not writing, or anxious because I'm so exhausted from my off-farm-job that I can't write and I only get nine days holiday a year and this is my only unbroken time to write and I need to get a whole lot of writing done or I will have wasted my holidays ...

But this guitar kit is, I have decided, my holiday. Not a time, but a Thing. And when I work on it, I don't have to be doing anything else, or thinking about anything else, and it has no deadline, no end goal, no I must do this so that I can do that ... it is not a horseshoe nail for anything else. (You know, for want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, a horse was lost, for want of a horse, a rider was lost, for want of a rider, a battle was lost, for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a horseshoe-nail. That.) So, the guitar kit isn't a Thing That Must Be Done. It just ... is. And someday, it will be a guitar, hopefully a nice one. But not any day in particular. And by just being, like running water, a waterfall, it's making me a headspace where I can find that for myself, for a bit.

I think I am still failing to sort out how to have a conversation here, as opposed to reblogging something I didn't realize had anything to do with the thing I thought I was responding to.

Yeah, the first step is, find a place to work on it. Two days of sorting all the junk we piled on a table in the cellar when we moved in, and I've discovered the table. And cleaned the table. And moved the table over under a light.

Which is beside the woodpile. Yes, the cellar doubles as a woodshed.

[Just in case ... I'm assuming you've read these, because how can I talk about them properly if you haven't? Don't read on if you haven't read Tinker Tailor, think you might want to, and don't want to know what happens. Here be spoilers.]

I’ve been on a LeCarré kick lately, mostly rereading. I tried A Legacy of Spies but it contradicted so many things in the history, Peter Guillam’s parentage and past, most immediately, that I gave up and went back to old favourites. I can’t believe in the reality of a story if it starts contradicting itself in a way that says the author doesn’t care and is, what? Dismissing their previous work as “not real” and not mattering? Is that more offensive than “not caring enough to look it up?” I’ve found a lot of more recent LeCarré doesn’t hold my interest, actually, but I love his earlier work. I read most of those in high school off my father’s bookshelf. The two I go back to reread most often are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, which I’d guess are probably most people’s favourites. This time I’ve been listening to them as cooking audiobooks read by Michael Jayston, who played Guillam in Tinker Tailor (the proper one with Guiness, not the weirdly bad later one), though Jayston was not in the companion Guiness Smiley’s People, presumably due to some other commitment; too bad, because he was an excellent Guillam. Listening to Jayston’s reading led to getting the DVDs from the library and rewatching those as well.

I think what I’ve always liked about those two books in particular and the other early LeCarré in general is a threefold thing. There’s the impression that this is all part of a long history stretching back into the Second World War; you can puzzle out its roots, see it connecting to real history. There’s the meticulously compounded character portraits -- of the men, anyway. (LeCarré, like Deighton, the other master espionage writer I also devoured as a teen, presents nearly all his women as either functions or as pathologically childish. I realized watching Smiley’s People last night that Madame Ostrakova is a notable exception to this; she has personality, she takes action, she’s a grown-up in her emotions and she has a life beyond her plot-function.) And thirdly, there’s the intricate puzzle of the plots, slowly unwinding. Rereading, you also realize that that is, sometimes, illusion. There’s an intricate puzzle in Tinker Tailor, but Smiley knows that Bill Haydon is the answer; he knows that from the start. He’s only unravelling the proof for himself and for his audience, because he doesn’t want to know it.

Another interesting thing about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that I’m pretty sure it was the first overt depiction of a queer relationship that I came across in fiction, back in the early eighties, and a sympathetic, if tragic, one at that. There’s nothing of the “punishment for being gay” about the tragedy. It’s a grand, proper, Shakespearean-scale thing, emotionally, Haydon’s great personal betrayal of Prideaux entered upon as part of his ideological betrayal of both Prideaux and his country, and the way that leads, inevitability, to his own death. Shakespeare would probably have followed up such an intimate extra-judicial execution with Prideaux’s death in turn, whereas LeCarré sends him back to his school and his students, to the great relief of Bill Roach, who has found in Jim’s brusque acceptance and care the paternal understanding and mentoring his life lacks, while Smiley, who knows damn well how Haydon ended up in the grounds of Sarratt with a broken neck, says nothing. In the end, Jim Prideaux is the emotional core of the story, and he survives betrayal, shooting, torture, discovery of ultimate betrayal, and his own meting out of -- does he see it as justice or vengeance? -- and is shown, through the eyes of Bill Roach, to be finding his way back to living.