Forget-me-not/Museum Guitar

[Diane Kauffmds]

I have 1 month to ready the quilted Honduran Mahogany OM for the North Carolina exhibit. I'm making another fretboard; I've never been happy with the hummingbird fb.

I've been tossing over ideas. I really don't want to make another traditional vine. I'd like something with forget me nots, to honor Grandma. My grandmother always made a special effort to ensure that a tiny patch of dirt, by the kitchen steps, had forget me nots, just for me.

I brought out the sketchbook and found a bunch of sketches that I made several years ago. I made them for fretboard ideas. I'd completely forgotten.

As you can see, there are lots of sketches, but 1 stands out as a possibility for the forget-me-not board.

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[Diane Kauffmds]

I've decided on this design, it's a juxtaposition of a design concept that I had in my pile. So, it's mirrored when viewed vertically, but it's really meant to be viewed horizontally, so when the guitar is being played, left-handed or right-handed, it's right-side up.

[Diane Kauffmds]

The design will be center board; it's about 8" long. Forget-me-nots are blue, white, pink, and purple now, so these will be multicolored, rather than just the traditional blue.

I'm considering using some figured wood, dyed blue, for some of the flowers.

[Diane Kauffmds]

I've traced the design onto the fretboard. I've programmed the flowers and leaves into the CNC. I'm getting ready to cut the leaves/flowers and inlay the vine.

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[Diane Kauffmds]

Got all of the flowers cut. I'll cut the leaves tomorrow (already programmed and have the gcode for cnc). I'll cut the vine pocket and inlay the traditional way (no cnc).

Tomorrow, I plan to get the vine and flowers in. Perhaps the leaves too, depending on my stamina.

I'm putting a small butterfly or 2 in also. But I want to get the main design inlaid. As you can tell, I'm pressed for time on this one.

Also, I'm doing these things to ready the guitar to show:

I'm going to sand the top and French polish again. This is my personal guitar and there are a couple of small places on the top that I want to correct.

I was looking closely at it, when I measure each side of the neck, I get a variation of 1/16" off of center at the tail. That may be acceptable, but it's not acceptable to me. I'm going to set the neck again.

Third, I used a bridge that I had laying around. It's thinner than I normally use, so I'm replacing the bridge.

Fourth, I'm going to bind the soundport.

Might as well do everything that I think it needs before it's displayed.

[Diane Kauffmds]

Got a lot done today. Besides cutting all of the leaves, I've inlaid.allmof the stems/vine, and all of the flowers. I've inlaid 3 leaves. I called it quit at 3pm, after starting at 6am this morning.

It's coming out nice. I decided to glue all of the flowers and vines into place.

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[TEETERFAN]

Looks like another beautiful inlayed fingerboard from Diane! You sure put in the time. Wonderful work.

[Diane Kauffmds]

The design is completely in. Still need to:

Scribe detail into flowers and leaves
Drill hole in center of flowers and put yellow epoxy in
Design and inlay butterfly

I plan to do all of this today.

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[Kevin Sjostrand]

MY GOODNESS!!!!

[Diane Kauffmds]

I've filled the center of the flowers with yellow mica and I've inlaid a butterfly that I put together. I'll have photos tomorrow of the board


Made the butterfly the old fashioned way, with jewelers saw. The body is copper, which I hammered.

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