Thanks for the comments. Much appreciated.
Yes, Lucas is an amazing guitar player. He's currently in the jazz performance program at Concordia University in Montreal. He and my son have been playing guitar together since grade school. My son is good, but Lucas is a prodigy. The guitar I'm starting now is for him and, when I get closer to retirement and able to spend more time building, I hope to get a few guitars and Lucas to the show in Montreal. Aside from being a great guitarist, he's an unassuming, great kid without the ego that you might think would go with that kind of talent.
As for bending bubinga, I should have added that as another first for me with this guitar. I have to admit, I was pretty nervous as I had read that quilted bubinga can be tricky to bend. Prior to doing the bending, I bent a lot of scrap to improve my bending methods. In the end, I made two changes to my approach which I think are significant: The first is I'm now using the spring steel slats from Blues Creek Guitars which I feel provide support for the bending wood because of their resistance to bending (you have to ram in pretty hard to press the wood and spring slats into the cutaway region of the bending form). The second is that prior to bending, I spray the wood with Super Soft II veneer softener. This stuff really makes a difference and I won't bend sides again without it. In the end following this approach, the bubinga bent with no problems.
The other thing I found with the bubinga I had was that it was light (my previous guitar was in macassar ebony and relatively heavy) and porous. In fact, there is some spotting on the inside of the guitar where the epoxy I was using to pore fill went all the way through the wood. I'm not sure if I should have or could have done something to prevent that.
Finally, I liked Colin's observation about the third and fourth strings pointing to my name. I never noticed that before!
Pat
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