Recent content in Blog on Michael Winston Dales Guitars
I like visual CAD tooling, that is designing things by clicking and dragging and drawing on screen. A lot of what I build has a visual element to it along side any technical requirements, and so this makes sense. But once in a while I design something quite simple where most of the complexity is hidden away in the mini-spreadsheet that is the parameters form, that I might as well be doing computer…
Continuing on from last update , these “weeknotes” (ahem) follow the new neck I’m building for the second guitar I built . When I started writing about this neck in my notes here I couldn’t say what it was for, as it was a surprise present for my brother, who is the owner of that guitar. I knew he was bringing the guitar back to me as there was a problem with the…
Picking up a story of a neck build from a little while ago . This neck is actually a new neck for the second guitar I built, The Chuncaster . That build I made for my brother, and is the first guitar body I made myself rather than buying, but I still bought the neck, which is generally a strategy I recommend to first time guitar builders: you can make a lot of mistakes on the body and still have a…
This year was the tenth birthday for Liverpool Makefest , and I was delighted to be able to return as an exhibitor once more and attempt to explain guitar building to the people of Liverpool. I started exhibiting at Liverpool Makefest in 2017, having only just started building guitars the previous year. Whilst it wasn’t quite my tenth anniversary of building guitars, it felt a good time to…
In addition to the bass-guitar build I’ve been writing about , I’ve got a couple of electric-guitar necks I’m building at the same time. Both of these are regular (to me) 25.5" scale-length guitar necks, so in theory nothing new here. But I know that for the bass-guitar’s neck I’ll need to change things up, as some of the techniques I’ve used don’t scale…
In the previous update I talked about the process of designing my first bass guitar, my Delfinen Bass , looking at how it differs from a regular electric guitar design. This set of notes will catch us up on how the build of that has got going. Refinement Before we start in the workshop side of things, a quick update on the CAD model, as it’s had a couple of tweaks since I started it. On the…
It’s been a couple of months since I’ve been able to get into the workshop, which has happened before, but it’s always a little hard to get back into the swing of things. Mostly I’ve been dragging my heels on getting back into doing design work, of which I have a bunch to do. It’s all felt quite overwhelming knowing where to start, but thankfully a conversation with a…
This set of week-notes is a bit of a catch-up on one guitar I’ve been fixing up, and another I started reworking a little. Whilst it’s easier to get people excited about new builds, every luthier I’ve met does work to maintain, repair or restore old guitars. Even the best guitar if it’s being used will need occasional work: new strings being the most frequent and obvious…
There’s an easy assumption to be made that because I’m always taking photos for this blog of the guitars I build, and because photography is another hobby of mine , then I must have lots of nice photos of the guitars I build. Alas, that’s not really the case. Whilst I enjoy photography, I mostly take photos of things I see when I’m about, and product photography is its own…
Being back in the workshop last week for the first time in a month, I was keen to press on with the nearly completed Hästen . It got so close last month, so I was keen to see if I could get it playable this week. Pick-guards R us When I last wrote about progress on Hästen I’d had to re-design the pick-guard slightly, to make it fit with the bridge better. The original pick-guard I cut was…