Posted on March 3, 2024May 8, 2025 by Dale Phillips Where Are They Now? Where Are They Now? by Tim Olsen 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 The Business of Lutherie, 1984 by Ted Davis, Steve Grimes, Bob Meltz, and Matt Umanov Five years ago, the Guild presented its first Business of Lutherie seminar at our 1980 Convention/Exhibition in San Francisco. I recently contacted the five panelists to see how lutherie has treated them in the interim. I found that times have changed, and that the panelists have changed as well. Vintage and fine guitar dealer George Gruhn told of a wildly fluctuating and vastly changed market, and pinpoints late 1981 as the sudden end of the relatively good market conditions which prevailed throughout the seventies. At that time, the rise in value of the U.S. dollar shut off the lucrative export market, which had previously accounted for 40% of American-made guitars. The dismal conditions of 1982 and 1983 brought Gruhn Guitars to the brink of bankruptcy, and only in 1984 was George able to “climb out of the ooze onto dry land.” 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 August 1, 2022May 20, 2025 by Dale Phillips Glass Jars for Spray Guns Glass Jars for Spray Guns by Tim Olsen Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #91, 1978 Commercial spray guns, such as the DeVilbiss type MBC, typically use aluminum cans to hold the juice. Aluminum cans are lightweight and unbreakable. They are also expensive and inconvenient, in that they must be labeled; the contents can not be viewed without uncorking the cans. By substituting glass jars for the aluminum cans, many advantages can be realized: Jars are cheap. Jars are clear, allowing one to observe the contents instantly, and to check for sediments, precipitates, jungjills, farfles, and other forms of grungus. 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 July 8, 2022May 12, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Guy Rabut Meet the Maker: Guy Rabut by Tim Olsen Originally published in American Lutherie #32, 1992 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Three, 2004 On a recent trip to New York, I had the good fortune to visit Guy Rabut in his uptown Manhattan apartment above a small grocery store. We sat in his tiny shop, which was piled high with cardboard boxes in anticipation of Guy’s imminent move into a freshly renovated space in Carnegie Hall. He made the move in October, and now shares this classy address with two violin dealers, Charles Rudig and Fred Oster, and Michael Yeats, a bow maker. Artifacts of wide-ranging artistic sensitivities surrounded us, including Northwest coastal Indian carvings which Guy made during a summer seminar with renowned artist Bill Reed; his intriguing logo in which the proper curves of a violin appear in a cubist jumble; a glass case holding a few of his beautiful finished fiddles; and a pine mock-up of a banjo he plans to build someday. Guy Rabut is one of the Guild’s most faithful members. The May ’74 issue of the GAL Newsletter listed him as a new member, and he hasn’t missed a day since. He is also a member of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. 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 May 21, 2020May 19, 2025 by Dale Phillips A Laminated Neck Design A Laminated Neck Design by Tim Olsen previously published as Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #50, 1977 and in Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1997 The most obvious way to make a neck is to start with a chunk of wood big enough in every dimension to engulf the entire completed neck, then simply chip away at the block until only the neck remains. The advantage to this is that there is no joinery to perform and no joints which might fail or look sloppy. More importantly, those who distrust the integrity of laminations, whether structural or acoustical, will opt for this procedure. The disadvantage is, of course, the considerable waste. The waste can be reduced by using a block of wood which will accommodate the widest portion of the fretboard, then adding wood to the peghead through the use of “ears” as in Fig. 1. 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 January 17, 2010May 13, 2025 by Dale Phillips In Memoriam: Leo Bidne In Memoriam: Leo Bidne June 20, 1954 – March 6, 2019 by Tim Olsen Originally published in American Lutherie #137, 2019 Unless you have been a Guild member for a very long time, you may not remember Leo Bidne as a GAL staffer. But he was, back in the long-gone days of the mid-’70s when it was a strictly volunteer position, and we would sweep the chips off the workbench to paste up the copy, then hand-collate and staple the newsletter. GAL staff members in 1975. From left: Bon Henderson, Leo Bidne, Bob Petrulis, and Tim Olsen. Deb Olsen was holding the camera. These hippies posed in front of our current GAL headquarters, which is the same building as Tim and Deb’s house. At that time it was the location of Tim’s lutherie shop, where Bob and Leo joined Tim in lutherie pursuits. (This photo was part of the slide show, The Making of a Newsletter, which was prepared in 1975 for the 2nd GAL Convention held in Evanston, Illinois, which Leo attended with Tim and Deb.) Both photos by Deb Olsen. From left: Tim, Leo, and Bob at the 2014 GAL Convention. Bob continues to serve the Guild as a member of our Board of Directors. Leo was a guy who could just do things. It seems like anything that caught his interest, he would simply do: repairing and building guitars; writing and arranging music; playing most any musical instrument. And then, as he grew older and our paths diverged, he moved into audio and video recording and production, and became the proprietor of a music store. He was a family man with children and grandchildren, for whom he would build amazing things like a full-sized R2D2, and produce elaborate Star Wars fan films starring the neighborhood kids. I guess he never lost that naive belief that by doing the fun and create stuff that came naturally to him, he could make the world a better place — which he did, for American luthiers and for many others.
