So, what happened?

I know at least some of you have been wondering what exactly is going on with my Harley Benton SC kit guitar build.

Not much, but I still haven’t given up.

Kiddo came back from vacation, and I had to do some office work.

I only visited the shop once. Wasn’t interesting enough to take the camera with me, so no nice photos.

I gave the headstock a light sand and cleaned up some of the marks that have been left by the wood stain seeping through the tuner holes to the back side of the neck.

At first, I was afraid it will warrant a sanding job, but in the end baby wipes with a splash of the non-acetone nail polish remover did the trick.

I owe my wife a bottle of it now since I shamelessly stole it in our bathroom closet to avoid going to the store.

There’s also a massive flaw in one spot, due to some poor staining and/or sanding on my part.

I cannot for the life of me sell this spot as looking (un)intentionally vintage/rustic/worn out.

It’s big enough to haunt me in my dreams.

If the haunting won’t stop soon, I might consider giving it a name.

It takes all my mental energy to not take any action on it at the moment, before figuring out and committing to an approach to fix it.

What’s the rush?

Some friends have actually asked me that, point blank.

For the first week it seemed, I have put a lot of pressure on myself to finish the build as quickly as possible. In reality, waiting for me is more stressful to me than rushing.

Still, to be honest, I wanted to get 80% there as quickly as possible.

In my day job, 80% is the golden standard.

It doesn’t mean half-assing it. It means trading a pixel-perfect and nice-to-have wonderland, which takes forever, for the iteration speed.

If you can build 7 projects in the same amount of time as building one close to perfection, your knowledge acquisition compounds much quicker.

Getting 80% there also means allowing the focus to narrow down.

Instead of 20 things, your focus shifts almost naturally to the $h!t that needs your attention and/or focus the most.

That $h!t is mostly your doing, so you have to learn to embrace it too.

How to build guitars without building them

Despite my lack of shop visits, I’m still trying to scale my knowledge in the digital world.

For reasons I will keep to myself for now, I started spending some of my time in CAD (CAD stands for Computer Aided Design) tools, specifically Autodesk Fusion 360.

It’s a slow process with lots of mistakes.

Every detail missed can result in multiple repetitions of the same steps and long, non-scenic detours.

I’m forever grateful for people, who take the time to show click-by-click tutorials on how it’s done.

The “Telecaster in Fusion 360” series from Dorset Design Build is one of those guitar modeling Youtube gems.

So, I’m slowly learning Fusion, as well as picking up technical dimensions and specs of various guitar parts along the way.

So far, I’ve made it to Episode 2.

Or, to be concrete, most of the Telecaster’s neck with a heel.

What have I learned on this journey so far?

I first got into tech for real 17 years ago and made it/IT my career almost 10 years ago.

And while I have chosen woodworking to sharply contrast my digital-first lifestyle, the thing I miss the most is a real-world equivalent of the undo button.

Especially, since I’m making a lot of dumb mistakes at the moment.

So every now and then, you need to engineer small wins.

Fusion 360 has an undo button. That’s a win, although one as small as they come.

Real wood has an undo button as well, it just takes a f*cking long time for the operation to complete and it is not at all effortless.

About technical stores though…

I grew a massive love-hate attitude toward the technical stores in the last couple of weeks.

The main reason for the change is the depth of my knowledge or to be more precise, the lack of it.

There are few things that piss me off quite as bad as my own lack of knowledge in an area I’m deeply interested in.

Maybe it’s due to my disability, but I hate being reliant on other people.

Then, there’s also the confusion angle.

Ask one person, and get a detailed response. Ask another and get an equally deep and diametrically opposite one.

If you can’t verify either in any great way, except through costly trial and error, it’s a pain.

On the somewhat positive side: after this is over, I will never again tell my kid that he should calm down since this is just a lesson in patience.

My kid is happy with that one. And I’m still waiting for my own version of the promised land.