First I am happy to report that Martin Guitar's customer service representative, Paula Primrose, contacted me via email to let me know that my 1971 D-18 guitar has now been officially registered in my name as the original owner!  This means that any repair work that I have done by an authorized repair shop will be covered by warranty ... significant because I recently left that guitar at Guitar Tex in San Antonio with a repair estimate of ~$500 ... clearly I am pleased that this expense will be covered by warranty instead of me.  The work will be performed by master luthier John Thurston.  John is a renowned guitar repairman from the Baltimore area that just recently moved to Texas (he lives in fact out at Canyon Lake) and Baltimore's loss is definitely our gain.  The work he will be doing on my D-18 includes a "neck reset" which entails actual removal of the neck from the body of the guitar, correcting the angle at which the neck and the body join and re-gluing the neck back to the body.  This is a very critical and non-trivial repair (in this case due to poor quality control in the 1970-'s at the factory) and should only be done by a trained and experienced repair person.  I might try it on a wall hanger but not even maybe on a vintage Martin (particularly not one covered by warranty!!).

And ... I am pleased to report that Carolyn and I will be taking a fairly long road trip in early October ... I have been "selected" to be one of six attendees at a "Siminoff Lutherie Camp" for building Florentine style (Bluegrass style) mandolins.  This camp will be five full days of instruction by the author of the definitive text on constructing "F5" style mandolins, Roger Siminoff .  Roger is a world renowned luthier, master builder and it will be a real treat for me to have the chance to get personal instruction from such an artist of the craft.

The seminar will be taught at Roger's shop/studio in Atascadero, California.  That's about 1600 miles one way from Bulverde, Texas and we will make the trip over three days in the Mini-Cooper.  Should be a fun (but really long) drive ... gotta get Mini-Rita in the shop before then for its scheduled maintenance. 

The seminar will include 5 days of lecture, demonstration and hands on construction.  At the end of the seminar I will come away with an "almost complete" F style mandolin that I will complete in my own shop.  This will be the 3rd mandolin build for me.  The consensus in the craft is that it takes about 50 builds to get to the point where you actually know what you are doing ... I'm hoping that by attending the seminar I can skip ahead at least 3 or 4 ... but we shall see ... I'm going to build an F4 style mandolin which is a bit different than an F5 ... I have an A5 and and F5 so I'm branching out a bit.

The decision to attend this seminar has been a bit of a "... teach a man to fish ..." decision for me.  The cost of the seminar and the travel expense is significant and equal to the cost of an upper-mid=level F5 mandolin built by either a well recognized individual builder or a well respected company (Gibson, Weber, Collins ....) ... BUT ... I do enjoy the hobby of making stringed instruments and the opportunity to learn directly from a recognized master doesn't come around every day ... consider this like a week of almost private 8 hour a day guitar lessons from Chet Atkins ... Roger is in fact that well respected in the craft.

It will be my intent to document our road trip and the seminar experience via this (or an associated) web log ...

I'll keep you posted ...