by John Page.

I've decided to start building guitars again. I'll be making about 12-20 a year, all by my lonesome... no import bodies and necks... just me and my tools. It should be fun. It's the first time I've been excited about making a guitar in probably 12 years. This decision also means starting up a new website dedicated to my guitar building: www.johnpageguitars.com.

The tooling is complete and I've started painting the prototypes. That means that the first plugging in and playing should happen in about a month. I've built 35 individual pieces of tooling to build this one new guitar, and I've built it all very "old school". Each piece of tooling is built by hand, just as each guitar will be built. The photos below will give you some idea of the gearing up process.

The plan is to have the prototypes done by September 1, 2006, in time to unveil them at a small art opening that night. Of course, my philosophy behind building guitars will be the same that I've been applying to furniture - functional art.

Here I am while I was drawing the body chamber details. Notice the extremely neat and clean filing system I have behind me!

Okay, here's the old school method that Freddie Tavares taught me, after I draw the body, I get blueprints made, glue them to hardboard and then cut, file and sand, until the template is perfect. From there, I transfer rout the template to Baltic birch plywood. I use the birch ply templates in the shop and keep the hardboard originals as master templates in case the shop ones get damaged.

There are at least two big, old, beastly things in this picture. In addition to that, here I am pin routing out the first proto body.

Here's a shot of the acoustic chambering on the body.

The top being glued onto the chambered body.

Peghead veneers getting glued onto the neck.