Stop Giving Your Guitar the Finger

by John Calkin

Originally published in American Lutherie #73, 2003 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015



Sometimes we make little changes to our shop routines that end up making large differences to our working lives. These small changes may have scant repercussions at the time, but they are cumulative. Comparing your instrument-making procedures from one year to the next should find that they have been streamlined and improved. Sometimes the result is nicer instruments, but just as often it is a nicer time spent at work, though in the end, I believe they will be the same thing. If your shop life is more pleasant and efficient, it has to show up in your instruments as higher quality and/or higher production.

These changes seldom come as a thunderbolt that makes a quantum change, but more often as a nudge in a direction that feels good and makes me smile. At the same time a bit of self-rebuke may arise for not installing a change when it was first thought of. In some cases years may separate the birth of an idea and its initiation in the shop. I here offer you some of my little changes. Your reaction to some of them may be, “Well, heck, I thought that was obvious!” That only means you should have shared the idea with us long ago.