….nothing to see here…..at least that is the plan…..
Jun 8, 2009 @ 11:44
Replacing the inlay on Martin Taylor’s guitar signed by Chet Atkins.
Sometimes I even impress myself….I had been worrying about how I was going to remove the old inlays without leaving a horrible mess behind or wrecking the binding. I really didn’t want to get into repairing the binding as that would have meant a lot more work and it would be difficult to duplicate the colour as I didn’t have an exact match in stock.
My solution was to inlay a strip of wood down the centre of the headstock just large enough to take out the inlays. That meant I only had to fit it into the curve at the end – the sides are straight making them easy to fit.
I managed to find an almost exact match for the wood from a bit of scrap I had kicking about in the workshop. After it had been glued in and cleaned up I sprayed a coat of sealer to see what it looked like – you be the judge – do I sound smug? – good.
Now all I had to do was make and install the new inlay – Martin had told me he wanted some kind of ‘Horse inlay’ so I had a good trawl around for ideas….I didn’t want it to look naff or namby pamby so it took a long time to decide what to do. I also had the idea to recess the truss rod cover so the inlay could run into it. Then I had the problem of mounting the truss rod cover – normally you would use screws but I didn’t want to do that as it would have interfered with the inlay design, so I had a brain wave and came up with the idea of using magnets to hold it on.
In the end I went for the ‘FireHorse’ design – I could see that looking very cool made from Mother of Pearl, so I sent him a picture to see what he thought……