Back to work

After taking a bit of a forced break (sadly I had nowhere to work for about a month and a half), I have just recently been able to get in my new dedicated workspace! There is something brilliant about not having to your work space with your parents (I am sure they would agree)! Now I can go to my garage and find everything where I left it (again, I am sure they would agree)! Now, if I want to, I can squeeze in a few hours of more quiet work (no power tools, fret slotting, hand sanding, things like that). So has this increased my productivity? Well no, not at the moment, it is still taking me months to complete a guitar! However, at the time of writing, it is currently reaching highs of 33℃. I should mention also though, that I have had a couple of repair jobs more recently as well. This is a very exciting new development as it has come from the development of SB3 and handing out my business card to practically any one I meet! The first job was replacing broken nut on a Percussion style bass. Needed for a day or two later for a gig. I didn't have a replacement nut, however, I always stock some uncut bone, from which I made a replacement.
Additionally, I also had a fret leveling and set up of Squire Strat which had just recently had Quartertone  frets installed! The guitar itself, was second hand and was fitted out with the slightly odd frets buy a carpenter. The frets where fairly well fitted, but not leveled so required grinding and re polishing. The other major flaw with this guitar is mainly just that it needed a proper set up, the intonation was quite off, the neck seemed to have a slight kink and the action was set so high most of height adjustment screws were barely in the saddles and as a result, some were slightly bent. Fortunately, all of the screws went back in to the saddles and I was able to lower the action, this made the intonation issues instantly better! In addition to loosening the trussrod to match light gauge strings, the guitar was made highly more playable! The really interesting thing about this guitar was of course the additional 12 frets per octave. I am still reading about the uses of quartertone/microtonal guitars but it is my understanding that the origins of this increasingly popular modification come from Turkish music and that by retuning using quarternotes, you have access to a host of new scales. After leveling the frets, I fmput the guitar in to standard tuning, I found the new frets made conventional open chords and bar chords very difficult, however, when playing single notes and power chords, for my somewhat limited talent as a credible guitarist, came into it's own! Sure enough, this guitar modification has found a niche home as well with rock and metal players!