Official Luthiers Forum!

My Facebook friends know that I run a column that I call A Day In The Life Of Hesh Dennisovich which I shamelessly stole the idea for the title from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I remember this masterpiece very well and how they would leap into an open pit toilet to recover a cig. butt that had a single puff left on it. So I thought that sounds like being a professional Luthier these days...

This is Lance's Les Paul and I'm checking it out for him and setting it up this fine Sunday morning. I came into the shop at 3:00 AM and do this most of the time now we have so much business I now work nights and weekends to try to snag it all.

Lance got a good one which as you know is not always the case and g*bson's can be all over the place these days too.

I set her up for Lance with UBER low action that I set at 3/64th" for the high e at the 12th and 4/64th" for the low e at the 12. Nut slots are low as they go and relief is minimal. Lesters have a bad habit of a ski ramp of sorts over the body at times. This one has the beginning of one but nothing I could not set-up around.

Anyway the primary reason for me posting about working on one of Lance's guitars is that I am proud as punch to be able to do this and return the favor for all that the OLF and Lance for creating it did for me. I'm very proud of my skills now and happy to share with my friends and provide great value to our clients too. This is not work for me it's fun and now that I am 65 and supposed to be retired I tend to work more now than ever and I like that just fine.

So this is a small token of my appreciation to and for Lance for creating the OLF.

Hope y'all have a great Sunday.

Nice looking Paul and nice looking work station there too.

Yeah real nice looking bench Hesh, looks like a relaxing place to work. Mine looks that orderly - for a few minutes, when I arrive on Monday morning

Got a chance to use Hesh’s bench years ago during a setup class. The bench design works quite well and I copied it for my shop. I have to admit mine is not as tidy and I don’t have the cool window.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Have you ever considered purchasing the OLF from Lance? Seems right up your alley, given your tenure and commitment here. Your prolific and detailed posts are legendary hear!

I have considered it and don't think it would be a good fit for me. The current format of the OLF I would change and that would ruin it for many here.

Back over ten years ago when we had a demonstrated problem with the few pros who came here not staying I went out and surveyed the pros who had participated here. I contacted over 25 of the names we know in this trade commonly. They all told me the same thing and that was that participating here as a pro who feeds their family from Lutherie was a risk because they were using their real names and newb members often were not. They went on in all cases to describe how they can get flamed by a member.... with no retribution to the member....

I would change that from the get go and require real, verifiable and complete names for participation. I also would be like Frank Ford and if you violate the rules you may be banned.

This would result in an exit for some which would be fine with me but it would also set the OLF back at least for a while. I'm not young enough to struggle with that anymore nor frankly do I care knowing as I do that I have always given back all that I can so I don't really have any regrets or feel much of a duty to share anymore.

My mouth has been flapping for years here it's time for someone else to have a turn:)

And to be very clear the OLF is not for sale as far as I know and I am not in the know so take it all with a mountain of salt. Only Lance knows what Lance wants.

As usual you bring up many good points. That said today's climate has made the use of real names on the Internet a less than slam dunk decision for individuals. There are two sides to that coin, it seems.

I know you are busy doing repair work (I resemble that remark). Are you doing any building for pleasure? When doing lots of repair, the building can more easily be the art and done for pleasure and honing of the pursuits one enjoys.

Carry on!

Mr. B:

For a pro, the hard facts of compensation enter into the decision to both participate in or manage a forum. Short of a way to monitize the time spent on or running a site, it becomes a case of making $100-$140 an hour repairing guitars, $25-$100 an hour building guitars, $15-$30 an hour teaching guitar building, or absolutely nothing but adding to your favorable karmic balance for talking about building or repair work.

While I'm still new enough to this craft to benefit from any transaction here, the more experienced builders and repair people I worked with at Greenridge seem to be past the point of needing daily participation in online fora to feel engaged with the community. That may be a case of the rich local ecosystem they created in the Purcelville-Germantown-Gaithersburg triangle (to include the dozen or so former students that remain active), but I suspect that their other interests are consuming any time which might otherwise be spent on social media or online forum membership (Mr. Stock is building another airplane, Mr. Morelli is building custom BMW racing cars, and Mr. Verhoeven just relocated to a very nice piece of ranch land in the Hill Country west of San Antonio in the Texas Republic so as to have enough acreage to indulge his precision long range shooting interests from his back porch).

I have noticed that some of the pros that Mr. Breakstone mentioned do occasionally drop back in for a chat, but it seems like those visits are more in the way of seeing what is new in terms of tools or techniques after a long absence, or in some cases, an inactive or fully retired builder or repair person checking in with old friends.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

You bring up good points. I do drop in from time to time, mostly if it crosses my mind (in front of 100 other things luthiery that constantly cross my mind). There are many people that have successfully run forums while making good money at it. But making money at this is not the same skillset as making money working on guitars. Maybe this placed has not figured that out?

Oh that reminds me - seems like a great community for classifieds, I don't see anything ever mentioned for sale or WTB. Is that a thing here or not for some reason?

$15/hr teaching guitar building, eh?

Thanks Andy and I completely agree with you about real names on the Internet these days. Kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't thing.

I got bored with building near the end of number 55 and just didn't want to do it anymore. It happens to lots of us and I know countless others who got bored with it too. I think I did too many OMs or something but the thrill left sadly. I have a living room with eight prototypes too so no need for any more acoustics.

What I love about repair is if I get bored with a guitar the next one may be more fun. With building and I got up to two a month at one point it just seemed like more of the same ole after a while. Early on I was fascinated by it all and the wood, the wood left me speechless it was too cool.

So no desire to ever build here again unless it's something with less of a time commitment. Amp building is great fun too and much less of a time commitment.

Thanks for your comments Andy. If you ever get out Michigan way you too have an open invitation to visit us at Ann Arbor Guitars and we would love to show you our shop. Glad to hear you are busy too. In this part of the country everyone who people want to go to is booked solid for months now.

I wanted to thank you too Woodie for your comments, very much appreciated.