Posted on June 6, 2024May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Letter: Public School Lutherie Class Letter: Public School Lutherie Class by Glen Friesen Originally published in American Lutherie #91, 2007 Dear Tim, I am a high school industrial arts teacher at Waldheim School Industrial Arts. Waldheim is a small community of about a thousand people located about thirty-five miles north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the heart of the Canadian prairies. I have constructed electric guitars and basses with students for years, but this year one of my 12th grade students, Trevor Boehm, completed our shop’s first steel string guitar. Traditional woods were used: mahogany, Sitka spruce, and ebony. Trevor added a number of personal touches such as using abalone for the peghead inlays, rosette, and pick guard; cocobolo and poplar purfling and binding; and a Tru-Oil finish. This is not a kit guitar. Each of the pieces was cut from larger dimensional stock. What makes this project even more amazing is that it was constructed in a multi-activity shop environment. Oxyacetylene and plasma cutting, arc and MIG welding, several furniture projects, and two electric guitars were all being done in the same small shop while Trevor was constructing his guitar. This is Trevor’s third guitar. His 10th grade project was a 6-string electric, and in 11th grade he designed and constructed a unique electric baritone guitar. Trevor will be graduating in June and hopes to explore a career in lutherie. Both photos by Glen Friesen Trevor’s steel string guitar marks the culmination of several years of planning and jig construction. We were really excited to hear the first notes from it. In my opinion, he did an exceptional job. The steel string is now a project that students can choose to attempt if they desire. All of this would have been a lot more difficult if I had not had access to your publications. I just felt that I needed to thank you. ◆
Posted on May 15, 2024June 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips In Memoriam: Frank Ford In Memoriam: Frank Ford 1944 – 2023 by The Guild Staff, Staff of the Roberto-Venn School of Lutherie, and Dan Erlewine Originally published in American Lutherie #151, 2024 Frank Ford at he 1980 GAL Convention in San Francisco. Photo by Dale Korsmo. Frank dives into the world of lutherie workshops at the first “Dan and Frank Show” at the 1995 GAL Convention. Photo by Jonathon Peterson. "Frank and Dan Show" at the 2004 GAL Convention. Photo by Jonathon Peterson. We were very sad to hear that Frank Ford, a great friend to the Guild and the entire lutherie community, passed away on December 17, 2023. Frank was an icon of the instrument-repair field and an overachiever when it came to sharing information with this fellow luthiers. His buddy Dan Erlewine talked him into doing repair workshop demos in 1995, including at the 1995 GAL Convention. Those workshops became what we called the “Dan and Frank Show,” and the show was a highlight at six GAL Conventions, up through 2008. After that, Dan and Frank intentionally passed the torch to some of the younger luthiers they had mentored. Many folks have written about what a help and inspiration Frank was in their lutherie work, especially through his groundbreaking Frets.com website. Frank exemplified the Guild’s spirit of sharing, and he will be greatly missed by all his friends and those who benefited from the knowledge he so freely offered. — The GAL Staff Frank lectures at the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery. Note his extensive and organized tool boxes. Photo courtesy of Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery. We were deeply saddened to learn of Frank Ford’s passing. What a loss for all of us who knew him. Frank was such a dear friend to us and everyone he met. We send our heartfelt condolences to Frank’s wife Joy, his longtime friend and business partner Richard Johnston, and the guitar tech staff and employees of Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto. Frank served on our Program Advisory Committee and as a consultant to the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery for over three decades. As a guest lecturer, Frank traveled to Phoenix to give our students in over sixty classes demonstrations on neck resets, refrets, pickguard replacement, and many other repair operations. We called Frank a “performance artist” as he did these demos in real time, while talking through each step of the process. His knowledge and experience in the world of guitars and guitar repair was truly remarkable. His tales of repair experiences, customer relations, tool use, and everything guitar related was always fascinating, insightful, and informative. The creation and evolution of his website Frets.com is an amazing resource for luthiers and hobbyists. Choosing not to produce a fretted instrument repair book and instead offering his repair knowledge for free through his website, was and is an exceptional act of generosity. What a wonderful gift to leave for the stringed instrument world. Through his dedication to training his tech staff, teaching at our school, his many appearances at the Guild of American Luthier’s and Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans conventions, appearances at Northwoods Guitar Seminar, and tag team demos with Dan Erlewine, his participation in lutherie forums, his writings in Fretboard Journal and many other publications, and all of Frank’s associations and vast network of clients, he leaves a considerable legacy with his boundless sharing of information to the guitar making and repair world. His partnership with Richard and the creation of their Gryphon Stringed Instruments is legendary, and a real testament to what a music store can bring to a community. Frank was truly inspirational in his expression, passion, and love for the art and craft of repairing and making things. It is hard to imagine a world without Frank Ford. We love you always, Frank. You have made such a contribution to us and so many lives. We will miss you, and cherish the memories of our times together. We are pleased to announce the launch of the Frank Ford Scholarship Fund, a collaboration with Frank’s wife Joy Imai, Richard Johnston and the staff of Gryphon Stringed Instruments, and the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery to honor the legacy of Frank Ford. Donations to this fund will allow learning experiences for aspiring luthiers for years to come, including educational opportunities at lutherie schools, stringed instrument workshops, forums, luthier presentations, and other information-sharing activities. For more infomation on how to make a tax deductible donation, call or email the Roberto-Venn School (602-243-1179 or info@roberto-venn.com), or go to the Frank Ford Scholarship Fund section of our website: (https://roberto-venn.com/news/frank-ford-scholarship-fund/). — Staff of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery: William Eaton, (Director), John Reuter, Bart Applewhite, Steve Davis, Jim Prater, Robert Manzullo, Mark Allred, Brady Shreeve, AJ Machnes, Joe Vallee, and John Lippi; and all of the students and graduates of Roberto-Venn. With the passing of Frank Ford this year just before Christmas, the lutherie world lost one of its greatest repairmen, inventors, and teachers of our trade. In 1969, Frank, along with his partner Richard Johnston, founded Gryphon Stringed Instruments, a more-than renowned music store and guitar repair shop in Palo Alto, California. Frank’s reputation as a repairman drew me to visit him in the early 1990s, and we became fast friends. He was my go-to answer man for many a repair dilemma for over thirty years. On that first visit, I knocked on Frank’s door, and he asked me in. As we walked through to his dining room (which at that time was his shop), there was a black Gibson mandocello lying on the dining-room table. Its finish was pristine. I said, “That finish still looks like new!” Frank said he’d just French-polished it. At the time, I had delved into Mohawk and Star Chemicals bottled French polishing products such as Qualasole with little luck, and had just read George Frank’s Adventures In Wood Finishing, so I was all ears. Frank showed me a board that he had French polished every day until he’d learned how to do it. I went home and did the same. Frank’s dining room/shop had one long wall filled with red Sears Craftsman tool boxes — bottoms and tops; there must have been five or six along the wall. Every tool he needed was right there within arm’s reach (I went home and did the same). His garage, which later became his home shop, was filled with typical garage stuff except that he had a South Bend 10˝ lathe that he was anxious to get running. I had been using a metal lathe for over a dozen years, and had purchased the first Grizzly Mill-Drill in 1986, so we connected on the importance of metal working in a guitar-repair shop. It wasn’t long before Frank went very deep down that rabbit hole and was on the road to being a high-level machinist and tool maker, in the blink of an eye it seemed. Frank was a very generous man. As I went through all the tool chests in his shop, I came across two small Vaco brand nippers, or needle-nose pliers, that had been remade into a fret-tang masher (Photo 1) and crimper (Photos 2 and 3), used to lessen the size of fret-tang barbs, or to add more barbs to the tang for a better grip in the slot. I was amazed by the idea of these nice little tools, and shocked when he gave them to me to take home. Remember, this is the first day we met. “I can make myself another pair,” said Frank. Eventually, StewMac made versions of them, but they were not the equal of the originals. Photo 1. All photos by Dan Erlewine. Photo 2 Photo 3 On one of our many phone calls I said, “I wish I had a die that could chase mangled threads on a Gibson or Fender truss rod.” A month later, this tool came in the mail (Photos 4 and 5): a four-flute die, just as I’d dreamed of. Frank made this way before his garage was filled with every kind of machine tool you could imagine that might have made it an easier job. “This was the hardest tool I’ve made so far,” said Frank. I still don’t know how he made it, to be honest. He warned me that it couldn’t cut threads, only clean them up. Frank’s tool became the model for another StewMac tool some years later: the Truss Rod Rescue Kit. Photo 4 Photo 5 Then there was time that a package from Frank arrived at my shop, and I opened it to find this set of “the drill bits we use most in everyday work at the Gryphon repair shop” — all inserted into hex drives and nesting in a beautiful brass base (Photos 6 and 7). Photo 6 Photo 7 Frank introduced me to a number of his luthier friends in the Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco area: Richard Hoover, Paul Hostetter, Jeff Traugott, Hideo Kamimoto, and others. I returned to Ohio and StewMac with gusto, ready to get back into the shop. Frank’s knowledge of vintage stringed instruments was vast, and I never asked Frank a question about them that he couldn’t answer. His long-running instructional website Frets.com has been, and will continue to be, a great source for thousands of us in the guitar-repair biz, and a legacy for luthiers of the future. Frank was a super-bright, warm, and generous person, and a killer guitar repairman, and I will miss him dearly. I loved having Frank in my life. ◆ — Dan Erlewine
Posted on March 7, 2024May 12, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Byron Will Meet the Maker: Byron Will by Jonathon Peterson Originally published in American Lutherie #31, 1992 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume Three, 2004 Why are you building harpsichords and how did you get started? I studied climatology for two years at the University of Wisconsin. I was really interested in long-range weather forecasting. However, you cannot be a climatologist and not work with computers. Now I think that computers are great, but this was the dark ages of 1970. I hated key-punch cards, writing programs, rewriting programs, sorting cards, and computer rooms, but a lot of the upper-level classes I was taking required this work. I found myself taking more and more music classes, and I started taking harpsichord lessons with one of the music professors. I really enjoyed it. I love the music of the Baroque Period, and I became more and more interested in the harpsichord. After a semester I switched majors to music history and literature, and I studied harpsichord. During that time I built a small harpsichord from a kit so I’d have something to practice on at home, and I really enjoyed that. It was an early Zuckermann kit. Not a slab – (straight) sided one; this was after David Way took over. It was a Flemish II or something. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on March 7, 2024May 8, 2025 by Dale Phillips The Business of Lutherie, 1984 The Business of Lutherie, 1984 by Ted Davis, Steve Grimes, Bob Meltz, and Matt Umanov from their 1984 GAL Convention panel discussion, moderated by David Sheppard Originally published in American Lutherie #2, 1985 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume One, 2000 See also, The Business of Lutherie, 1980 by Richard Bruné, George Gruhn, Steve Klein, Max Krimmel, and Robert Lundberg Where Are They Now? by Tim Olsen We’ve got four people up here who are involved in the business of lutherie in various areas. We’re going to start by letting each of them take a few minutes and tell you about their situation currently. Then we have some questions, some of which we thought up out of our own heads and some of which were turned in by you. So then we will ask these questions and let each person give a brief answer as regards his particular situation. After that, if we have time, we will take questions from the audience. So let’s start down at the end and find out a little bit about each person. Bob Meltz: I did my first repair in 1969, when I was actively involved as a sound man for a variety of rock-and-roll bands in my area. I was one of the first people in the area to rent out small sound systems, to fill the gap between Shure Vocalmasters and humongous concert systems. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on March 3, 2024May 9, 2025 by Dale Phillips Marvels among the Reeds Marvels among the Reeds by Susan Norris Originally published in American Lutherie #11, 1987 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000 Maybe it was my fantastic upbringing with parents who were (and are) scientists, lovers of nature and animals; people who loved to have fun and who nurtured the inquisitive mind in all of us, their children. I grew up sleeping with a bobcat curled up around my head, swimming with dolphins in warm lagoons, and tramping around in pursuit of lizards in the desert. When I think of where my inspiration comes from, these marvelous communications with animals and people from all over the world come swimming colorfully into my vision. When I walk out in the woods near our shop, the trees and mountains sing inspiration to me, and I can’t help but create in ways that speak their soul and mine combined. A number of years ago, soon after I moved to Vermont from Oregon, where I had been studying violin making with Paul Schuback, I met Fred Carlson and Ken Riportella at a Guild convention in Boston, which I had miraculously stumbled upon. Their approach to instrument making excited me and rang true with my own feeling that instrument making is an evolving process, and perhaps it’s been getting a bit too stuck. There is absolutely no reason why it can’t continue to grow and flower along with the rest of us! Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
