March and April 2023 Update

Posted on April 17, 2023 by Scott French

March started slow with sickness and bad weather, then ended with even more snow. Throughout the month I continued making progress on digitizing the SF3 design into 3D for future CAD/CAM options. For now I will be doing a lot of the work on this next SF3 by hand because I don't want to waste any of this good weather on the computer. Speaking of the new SF3, there is some new progress here and at the project page below. Just look at that one-piece claro walnut top!

Chambered Claro Walnut SF3 Carve Top Guitar

By the end of the month I got the new pickup ring prototypes made so now we're able to see the rings and top plates together. This should work nicely for the carve tops I have coming up.

So if the theme of March was cold weather and computer work, the theme so far for April has been WOOD. I built a pair of basses using boire almost 20 years ago, and since then I've tried on and off to find more boire without any luck. I had given up a few times, but on a whim I decided to give it another shot recently and found some wide boards available online. They look awesome so I am stoked to use this stuff soon. I guess that find must have awakened the wood hound in me because from there I started looking for more wood locally. I stumbled into a small stash of walnut in my area and grabbed some really nice pieces. I ended up deciding to use one of the nicer ones on this new SF3. All this new wood also inspired me to dig out and surface some imbuia I found a while back. I've got some nice stuff stashed away for future use now.

I probably won't have another update until later in May, but by then I hope to have some good progress to share on the new SF3. The nice weather is really inspiring and I am so glad I had been lining things up so I was ready to start right away when the warmth came. One last note for this update, I turn 42 in a few days... another trip around the sun!

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