Sedgwick Harp Guitar Making

Making a harp guitar takes almost twice as long to make than a normal guitar due to the complexity and arrangement of the extra strings. With the 'one arm' style harp guitar the extra acoustic chamber adds on an extra amount of time and materials. In fact there is enough material in the arm section to make a superb mandolin. If you combine the cost a decent handmade guitar and a hand made mandolin you might being to understand why these kind of guitars cost more than your average hand made guitar. The other indearing cost is in obtaining the materials for the 'one arm' style harp guitar. Your average Luthier supplier doesn't carry these kind of sizes and so the wood has to be especially cut.

Here is a set of Rosewood sides being bent and put into the mould.

Inlaying 'Black Mother Of Pearl' for the Rosette.

Not only inlaying one rosette but also a second one. The smaller one takes longer and is more difficult to do.

Strutting.

Below is the makings of the bass harp string section. A little more complex to make than you might think.

The harp guitar coming together as one piece is always nice.

Below, the back struts in place but the main three are not shaped.

Once the edging is cleaned up part of the harp heel is shaped. You can see the pencil line below. Then the end graph is glued in. On my harp guitars there are two other end graphs on either side of the harp section. As regards to time, it takes 3 times longer on one of my harp guitars to do the end graphs than on a regular guitar.

Below, sorting out he purfling.

Fitting the figured Koa binding.

The back binding going on and then the heel cap.

Below is a great moment. Near completion and the instrument can sit on your lap. You get a real feel for it.

Start work on the bridge while waiting for some inlay materials to arrive for the fingerboard.

Gluing the Fingerboard on.

The next step was a request for an inlay of a cartoon character. Special thanks to KFS and Frank Caruso for their help and permission to use the Dennis Mitchell image both in the instrument and on my website. The reason behind it is that the customer shares the same name. (C)Hank Ketcham Ent.

His head is made of Pink Mother Of Pearl and for the dungarees I used a red veneer.

His hair is made of Gold Mother Of Pearl, His T-shirt was made up of black and blue veneers. The paper is still on the front of him so this is the reversed side of him, in case your wondering why he is the other way around. Half way there...

Apologies for the picture quality of the next two photos. My camera is not good for such close up work but you can see the details in him. His shoes are White Mother Of Pearl. His 'sling shot' is abalone and the catapult handle is made of rosewood. Thanks to Silversmith Steve Randell and special thanks to Goldsmith Chad McGill for some of the fine detail work on his dungarees. Chad made the bracket on the back of Kim Person's harp guitar for those who have seen it. Talent runs in the family as his sister is an award winning South African film director.