Esopus Creek classical guitar, #1!

[giametti]

This is Esopus Creek #1. Esopus Creek is a river in the Catskill mountains where I spent a lot of time over the years. So it's not "quite" finished, but I had to string it up and see if it sounded decent, and played decent. Overall, (warts and all) I'm very pleased.
I used the Hauser 1937 Segovia guitar plans from GenOne. (In the edge of the first picture is my only other guitar that I bought in 1967 when I was 15, an Aria classical). I've been a professional woodworker most my life, and almost tried building guitars 20 years ago, but realized that the learning curve was too long to try to make that a career. (I wish I had!) But now that I'm semi-retired it doesn't matter. So EC#1 is the result.
In my woodworking I've always preferred to use domestic hardwoods where I could, I had some walnut kicking around, so I decided to use that. The back is two pieces of 1/16" walnut veneer left over from a project that I laminated in a 15' dish in a vacuum bag. It's actually about 2.5mm thick. The sides were resawn from a piece of quartersawn walnut, drum sanded down to 2mm and bent on a homemade Fox bender using a controlled BBQ starter as a heat element (I now have a silicone blanket for the next one). I also laminated the linings from 3 pieces of walnut.
I bought the top plate from Alaska Specialty Woods, some very tight grain reclaimed old growth Sitka.
I started with the rosette, borrowing a design off the internet.
Pablo Raquena's videos on YouTube were extremely helpful along the way, along with Driftwood Guitars 3000 year-old project videos, and as much as I could find from Rob O'Brien, John Hall, Zimnicki guitars and many others. KitGuitars forum as well as classicalguitarDelcamp forum have taught me so much.
As I said, overall I'm very pleased. The guitar sounds good to my 70 year old woodworker's ears, and plays pretty well considering that I don't have the chops I had 50 years ago. I'm pleased with the binding and purfling.
I used a dovetail joint rather than a Spanish heel for the neck. I did a stupid and cut the body mortise wrong, so the heel is a bit wider that it should be. The neck isn't quite centered. The 19th frets are not equal. I cut a couple nut slots too deep and had to rebuild them with bone dust and thin CA glue. The first and sixth string touch the ramps in the peghead. Hopefully I'll do better next time.
The finish is shellac French polish. Pablo Raquena's 9 part videos were extremely helpful there. The back and sides are pretty good for my first real effort with French polish, but as the finish has aged and shrunk I can see that I need to build (and cut back) the finish on the top to get a perfect surface. Which I may or may not do.
My next projects are steel string guitars. I'll use the body forms for the Hauser classical, since I think I'd like a smaller body (very similar to a 00. I'm going to do them with bolt on necks as I may play with widths and radiused fretboards. I've alway played a nylon string guitar since that was what I got when I was 15. I can't play my daughter's Ovation with it's skinny little neck.