Frustrating day yesterday hitting the low point of three screw-ups in one day. Hopefully, all are recoverable. Two are already unnoticeable. I wanted it to be perfect but that's life . . . .
The morning was spent finishing my lizard inlay, refining the fingerboard and cutting the frets which was a surprisingly delicate job. Fitting them by hammering in without damaging the delicate rosewood fingerboard was a little stressful. Serious cock-ups at this stage don't bear thinking about . . .
I now have a real fretboard!
Eric got hot and heavy with his wood, drillin' and drillin' . . . .
Then he attacked his own lizard!
The bass is looking good . . .
At lunchtime the professor suggested we all go to the beach for lunch and continue with a lesson on 'pickup theory'. This generated a lot of interest with Jo assuming we would be picking up what he called 'strandleufers' . So, off to the beach . . . . .
Lunch on the beach!
Deputy professor Ignacio, from Palma di Mallorca is a good laugh. He is an accomplished blues harmonica player and is often found with his gums firmly around expirated wood and nickel. He owns what sounds like a great blues bar in Palma called Bluesville Bar, where he has live bands every night. Must check it out . . .
He is very particular about achieving the correct icy temperature of the beer we keep in the fridge in the workshop (cerveza helada). He says it is his 'beer laboratory' expertise but I think he is just anally retentive. After too little sleep and too much wine he gets a little grumpy when I take 'the piss' out of him, but you can see where my lizard got his attitude!
The 'lecture' followed the lunch and many glasses of Hierbas (we had to finish the bottles - it would have been rude not to . . . ).
We set up the blackboard on the side wall of the beachside restaurant, gathered round to hear about pickup technique.
It ended up being the theory of electromagnetism and how single coil, double coil and humbucking pickups worked. Of course, by this time we were a little 'relaxed' so there was a lot of banter. I am pretty impressed that the professor managed to work his way through our banal jokes and stupid questions with good humour, even developing them into his blackboard explanations. Nanofarads, volts, ohms, resistors, capacitors and all sorts of stuff I have either forgotten since school or never learned in the first place were bandied about like a night out with Stephen Hawking . . .
I shall be winding my own pickups (apparently this is better than factory made), but it involves 5000-10000 winds of hair thin copper wire around four separate 'AlNiCo' (Aluminium, Nickel, Cobalt alloy - the best and most expensive) magnets. Thats the downside of two twin humbucker pickups, but that's what I need.
Then, back to the office. This is hard work . . .
Back to work . . .
Cheers!
