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Hello Everyone! (Sorry about the previous post - a little trigger happy on the submit button)
I must be a doofus with the photo upload process - they were supposed to be inline and in the reverse order that they appear below - sorry!

Hope the Christmas and holiday season has found all of you well and the new year brings you great success and satisfaction with all of your builds.
Just days before Christmas I received my first inlay from Andy Depaul and having a difficult time containing how pleased I am with it, I thought I'd share a pic and the process I went through coming up with the final design.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am currently one of Tony Karol's students building an OM (actually Tony's Signature model) with a florentine cutaway. Top is Lutz; back and sides Madagasscar Rosewood. I am quite fond of celtic designs and wanted to give the guitar a celtic touch on the head stock. I started looking around on the internet and came across Cari Buziak's web site (an artist currently n Calgary, Alberta) where I found this sea horse design (through an agreement with the artist, Andy offers the same design on his web site):

Cari also has a variation of the sea horse which is a depiction of a dragon; much more to my liking and says celtic to me more boldly:

The difficulty I had with the dragon design was how it would fit on the headstock with the tuning peg placement so I altered the design of the tail to give it more of a longitudinal aspect. I also changed the knot slightly on the underside of the body to more aesthetically follow the curves of the body shape. I played with some shell combinations (MOP, GMOP and Paua Abalone) and how it might look on my headstock design:

Great job Andy! I can't wait to get it installed.

Cheers!
Rick

Once I was happy with the look I fired the Illustrator files off to Andy and he and his team took it over from there. A couple of weeks later, voila:

I love that pattern I have inlayed it on several project over the past 4 years. My favorite combo is the figured White MOP with gold MOP center and paua eye.

WOW looks great. beautiful combo.


Lars.

I can see there is a very slight modification form the Celtic horse Andy has bee selling for the past years. Like I said this is one of my favorite pieces Andy has retailed over the years. I have used it in several projects. My favorite was a photo album I did for my oldest granddaughter year before last. This pattern has superb flow and really a pretty easy channeling project.


I tried to find the photo of the book mark I made My wife in 2004 with this but I gess I have deleted it. Still to this day one of my favorite pieces Andy has ever offered.

looks great Rick .. cant wait to see it in person !!!!

_________________
Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

That sure looks cool.

Is the headstock picture just a mock up? Those upper tuner holes are pretty far out and I think your D and G strings will rub on the A and B tuner posts. You might get buzzing from that. Just layout the strings from the nut to the post to verify.

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Hey Rod - we did that - I am not sure if thats the real pic of the template. When we had it layed out the strings looked like they will be fine. It does look wierd in that file though.

_________________
Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Cool is right - that is one heck of a nice inlay Rick!!! Outstanding!!!

Thanks for the comments folks.

Rod - Yeah, the headstock illustration was a very early concept drawing. As Tony indicated, we double checked a later version I drew up in Turbocad and although close, there was still clearance. Having said that, I am thinking I still want to flare the sides out a little further near the E and e string tuners. This will ensure I have loads of room.

Cheers,
Rick