Michael Winston Dales Guitars: Delfinen

A Few Weeks in and Out the Shop

17 Sep 2023 - Älgen, Delfinen, Hästen, Wuthering Bytes

A catch of events both out of (attending Wuthering Bytes, talking at OSHCamp) and back in the workshop (a lot of carving and sanding).

A photo of me talking in front of an audience. I'm stood wearing a guitar on a strap in front of a slide showing a CAD model of the same guitar, and I'm doing the devil's horns gesture with my hands for some reason.

A Brief Week in the Shop

20 Aug 2023 - delfinen, hästen, painting, spray-booth, verkstaden

Making some scary holes in one guitar body, getting two more further along the spray-painting process, and getting very excited about how one of them in particular looks.

A shot of a guitar body still in a clamp in a spray-booth, showing a yellow stained birds-eye maple front, and then about 5mm of natural wood colour as you go down the side, and the rest of the side is black paint.

A Week in the Shop

13 Aug 2023 - älgen, delfinen, hästen, OSHCamp, painting, spray-booth, templates, toothbrush, verkstaden, wuthering bytes

A busy day in the workshop, including finally learning how to spray paint bodies using the booth and spray-gun, and prepping my talk for OSHCamp at the end of the month.

Two guitar bodies are mounted on a rack in the wall of the workshop, the lower one is painted in white primer, and the upper one has black primer around the sides, the top being covered with a cardboard screen.

A Week in the Shop

5 May 2023 - delfinen, emily hopkins, harp, hästen, jigs, routing, templates, verkstaden

A quick review of all the in-progress guitar builds, a bunch of progress on the offset build, putting an excessively complicated jig to use, and finally some fun facts about harps.

Three work in progress guitars sit on a workbench, each a body with a neck beside it. All are raw wood and unfinished. The left body has pickup cavities and a neck pocket cut, and the neck is just roughly shaped with a template on top. The middle one is the most complete, with the neck fretted and all the body holes cut. The right body has only a neck pocket but no other holes init, but the neck is fretted and otherwise complete.

A Week Out the Shop

26 Feb 2023 - archtop, bhm, cad, delfinen, fusion 360, rendering, templates, verkstaden

A week spent paying off some CAD debt to fuel the workshop time, and a look at another builder of some amazing archtop guitars.

A 3D render of my älgen guitar design, which has a central wooden core that starts as the neck and continues the full length of the body, and then has a 3D printed latice either side where the guitar body would usually be.

A Week in the Shop

19 Feb 2023 - 3d printing, älgen, bhm, delfinen, fretwork, memphis minnie

A shorter weeknotes this week, as I've been heads down on slow tasks: fretwork and 3D print iterations. I also learned about the person who wrote one of my favourite Led Zepplin songs back in 1929.

A work in progress guitar neck, shaped and fretted, sat on a workbench. Beside the neck is a black sharpie pen, and closer inspection reveals all the frets have been drawn on with the sharpie ready for fret shaping work.

A Week in the Shop

12 Feb 2023 - 3D printing, älgen, bhm, blues deluxe, delfinen, grant green, neck, orca, sanding

A bit of everything this week: more neck carving, inspirational jazz performers, 3D-printing with carbon-fibre, finding odd imperial sized screws, and having fun with obtuse seeming digital music tools.

An unfinished guitar neck sits fretboard down on a workbench, surrounded with sanding disks.

A Week in the Shop

29 Jan 2023 - älgen, carving, coffee, delfinen, generative art, screws

Why go to the gym when you can carve a guitar neck? This week we get a bit of a work out, and then fail to finish a guitar due to some stripped screws, before playing with some generative art.

The neck is on the trestle stand still, with the rasp resting on top of it. You can see that what was a squared off edge now has a flat angled edge cut into it along the length of the neck on one side.

A Week in the Shop

22 Jan 2023 - delfinen, fretting, kerf, laser-cutting, neck, palm router, verkstaden

Getting back into the swing of things with making dust in the workshop: a neck gets prepped and fretted, and I try out my new ferrule block technique to learn that it needs improving.

A guitar body sat on the workshop, with a couple of parts laid on top of it to give the impression of how it might look when finished. The top is a nice birds-eye maple, and on one side it is nicely rounded, and on the other side it has a pointy horn to it.

Getting back to the Shop

16 Jan 2023 - älgen, delfinen, jigs, laser-cutting

Getting back into the workshop after a brief hiatus, and starting out with finding a great new way to radius my fretboards.

The rear body of the guitar on a carpet mat on a workbench, showing the copper covered inside of the electronics cavity. To the side you can see a scalpel and bits of tape, and on the body to one side you can see the translucent orange acrylic cover for the cavity that will let the shiny copper inside be visible once the cover is on.

Tags > Delfinen