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Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Reso [sort of] done

Hiya! In between travels I hunkered down in the workshop for a bit to wrap things up. First up was marking the screw holes for the cover plate, using my clear acrylic template. I have no idea why some words seem to be links.


There is a controversy regarding padding under the cone, some use felt, some prefer using nothing. I use rubber, thinking of it as a speaker cone and those usually hang in flexible material. 



And here you can see the ring of rubber at the bottom of the well. 


I check the bridge for an ok string height, which I leave on the high side for these. A reso sounds best when you spank the strings I think, closely followed by it being played by someone other than me.


The bridge gets notches for the strings and swoopy bits for intonation, the C-string needs to be a tad longer. 


A look at the list says this is number 128!


And I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Headstock is my preferred shape, with offset tuners and the rough-sawn sides (I should tell the buyer that), inlays on the fretboard turned out super, and the spruce / mahogany combo is really elegant. But wait - what’s that dark spot at 10 o’clock by the coverplate? It’s a mark I made in the spruce and then tried to fill, invisibly. I kind of failed.