Mine should be arriving soon, but in the meantime, and with the luthier's permission, here's a couple of photos of a work in progress.
The first shows the modular body construction of the Smoothtalker
Mervyn is using kiaat, his usual choice, for my guitar and the others in the same batch, but he has used other woods. His "plantation worker" line uses felled invasive trees - a neat alternative to using species that are under threat. Some of these woods are visually quite interesting - on his web site you can see pictures of a couple of instruments made from poplar.
Obviously Mervyn takes a lot of care to apply a good finish once the pieces are cut and assembled. Not a sprayed on gloss finish though.
Note that the way the "frame" of the guitar is constructed, the neck does no make contact with the top at all. This is such an interesting design, and I think part of the beauty of it is that that top bears so little stress.
The second pic shows a top with struts attached but not shaped.
The top also has to be cut to it's final shape.
The bracing is pretty different from what you'd usually see on a steel-string acoustic. Again I think this is because there is so little stress on the top, so Mervyn has less need for braces that re-inforce. As we've already seen the neck and top never actually meet. The strings are anchored on a sort of jazz-style trapeze tailpiece, but this is anchored at the back end of the framework, so the top only takes the downward pressure of the strings on the bridge.
Mine hopefully will arrive in the next couple of weeks. It will not look particularly different from any other Smoothtalker, but there will be a couple of deviations from the spec. One is the neck, which will be wider at the nut than Mervyn's standard neck. That standard neck is narrower than my Morgan, wider than my Taylor - smack bang in the middle. Because the neck is one of the last things built Mervyn allowed me time to decide what I wanted, but in the end I went for the same width as the Morgan.
The other difference comes about via the generosity of Mr Chris Mason who gave me a piece of warthog tusk from which the nut will be cut.
I am also having the pick-up option. Mervyn fits a Baggs Active Element. I have one of these in the Morgan and I am not unhappy with it. If you have it fitted during building it's cheaper than having it retrofitted later.
Hopefully I will have it in my grubby mitts by the end of the month. Then I can start making sarcastic comments about guitars with a hole in the middle.
