Part Two – “What’s he Building in there?!”

It is ungodly late—or early, depending on your perspective—and there is suspicious activity in the shed.  A sharp sliver of light escapes the cracked door, projecting across the starlit yard, only to dissipate as it is eventually overcome by the darkness of the night.  The normal low pulse of night noises is pierced with the varying high-pitched whines of a rotary tool, as it hovers above its unseen victim and then descends to exact its toll with a deeper, slightly nauseating grinding tone.  All the while, a bizarre and recurring soundtrack of Americana, folk music, nerd metal, and honky tonk yodels emanates with the light and the grinding from the unassuming shed.  The scene is set like that from some horror film, where the audience is led by alluring stimuli to discover a poor captured soul being tortured in the dungeon workshop of a lunatic dentist, who has a curious and unsettling compulsion to hum along to Jimmy Rogers while he indulges his sadistic bloodlust….  

Quite anticlimactically, however, there was no horror-film-worthy villain at work in the shed.  Rather, it was only a wannabe woodworker, completely consumed by a masochistic obsession with his grand artistic statement.   As mentioned in Part One of this saga, my preoccupation with the Lotus Les Paul that would become the “Cosmic Fern” began long ago with a night of impetuously carving, and I had been haunted by the unfinished project ever since.  With the arrival of 2020, I was confronted with the impending milestone of my 40^th birthday and all of the irrational, yet involuntary emotions that accompany such transitions in life.  I was particularly weary of carrying around so many unfulfilled, long-term life goals. Therefore, I resolved to enter my 40s having eliminated as many nagging objectives as possible, and foremost among these was the completion of that damned guitar living in my workshop!!!   

Then, most unexpectedly, the world was turned on its head with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I found myself adrift in what felt like a parallel existence of eerie quiet, where the normal hustle bustle had vanished overnight, and the lack of routine made it difficult to track the days (I still describe life during this pandemic as a “temporal smear”).   There was palpable stress, frustration, and uncertainty everywhere. Yet, as I’m fond of saying, Mother Nature doesn’t care about such things; and, accordingly, she dealt us a perversely beautiful and protracted spring to “enjoy” as we struggled with seemingly unprecedented societal challenges in relative solitude.  Like so many others contending with life in lockdown, I chose to assuage my beleaguered spirit with walks, music, evening beers by the bonfire, and, of course, neglected projects.  Truth be told, as a mildly-reclusive-artist-type, I was already an accomplished social-distancer, so this way of life was not so alien!  Even so, it occurred to me that present circumstances had suddenly granted me the leeway to be unusually antisocial while tackling my myriad projects.  Given my intentions for the year, I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t somewhat grateful for the opportunity.  

So, with time on my hands and due date of September 11^th (my birthday), I began working on my Lotus guitar project with a determination that I have rarely summoned in my life thus far.  My experience with previous projects has taught me the value of plotting the course and giving any unfamiliar task due consideration.  Having dedicated time to this, I was still had some major unresolved concerns at the outset; but, the most obvious and daunting obstacle was the remaining work to be done carving the body.  Fortunately, I had made a good deal of progress in recent years by periodically attacking the rough cuts that I’d made in my early 20’s.  I now had a pretty clear vision of the motif, so I began the tedious task of routing out and refining the detailed areas of the relief I’d created.  This was achieved using a suspended Dremel (rotary tool) rig that allowed me to work directly above the surface with very fine bits, some of which are actually dental bits.  Given the size of the bits and the surface area and depth of material to be removed, this part of the project was profoundly time consuming!  Subsequently, I continually reenacted the scene described at the beginning of this article, spending day and night in my shed, carving away like a possessed golem. 

Though our lots are conveniently arranged such that we all enjoy some distance and privacy, my idiosyncratic behavior did not go unnoticed by my neighbors.  My immediate neighbor, Candice, a kindred spirit who regularly holds Raku pottery workshops in her backyard, fire-breathing kilns and all, greeted me one day and then observed with inquisitive inflection, “I’ve seen an awful lot of trips to the shed lately….” This, of course, also meant that she had also heard an awful lot of trips to the shed.  Being sensitive to noise and wanting to be a good neighbor, I wondered how much of an imposition my carving might be (coincidentally, I always wore earplugs when carving with the Dremel).  I envisioned aggrieved neighbors jarred from sleep at 4 AM by the whirring whine and grind. No doubt they would stumble to their windows to survey the night while ruminating like Tom Waits in his song, “what’s he building in there?!!!”  Yet, obsession doesn’t allow much for such neighborly concerns! So, I abandoned whatever misgivings I might have entertained about potential noise complaints and continued my work.

Mundane activities, like carving, are actually highly meditative—the mind calmly drifts while the hands work away.  While engaged in this form of meditation, I contemplated some of the looming unresolved elements of the project.  I had puzzled over how I might finish the body for quite some time.  My original vision was of a two-tone finish, with the raised shapes painted one color against a black background, or perhaps vice versa.  Ideally, the colors would be sprayed to achieve a professional finish, but this would involve masking-off what was now an incredibly complicated relief carving twice!  After considering a variety of approaches, I could come up with no other solution than to paint the entire body by hand, a far more involved process than simply spraying a finish.  While mulling over color choices, I had the revelation that hand-painting the guitar offered even more opportunity for artistic embellishment.  In concert with this revelation came the image of the loudest embroidered western shirt one can conjure, where gem-toned flowers leapt from a jet-black background along with just enough mother of pearl accent to dance the line between garish and tasteful bling.  I resolved to make this vision a reality and purchased the paint.

My second revelation was that I had absolutely no faith in the quality of the original neck—it had spent two decades lazing about without tension; and it was of suspect manufacturing standards, given the quality of the body. The prospect of completing all of the body work only to discover that the guitar was total crap due to a bad neck was unacceptable.  After taking some measurements and referencing the necks of some of my favorite guitars, I ordered a custom neck from Warmoth that would remain faithful to the general Les Paul Custom aesthetic of the guitar.  Unfortunately, in doing this, I realized that the blank headstock would clash with such an ornamented body.  Being a glutton for punishment, I arrived at a “simple” solution: “I’ll just inlay the headstock…, and the ebony control knobs…, and why not the truss-rod cover, and the bespoke rosewood control panels that I just decided to make while we’re at it?  Hell, the only obstacle is a total lack of inlay experience….” Undeterred, I ordered some Nacre (a.k.a “mother of pearl”) and abalone shell and began designing inlays.  I ultimately landed on a design that incorporated a couple nerdy allusions: As my last name (Petsch) is so similar to Gretsch, I created a logo based on that of an early Gretsch. Then, to pay homage to the guitar’s origins under the Lotus brand, I designed some slightly irregular eight-point blossoms similar to their icon (apart from highlighting my unrefined technique, I’d like to think that the imperfection of these blossoms better reflects natural beauty).

Thanks again to COVID-19, the lead time on my hotly-anticipated new neck was protracted.  Having designed the inlays, I turned my attention back to the paintjob (I also decided to begin a new recording project as well, because who needs sleep?!). Though I was tremendously excited to see the body come to life, I was apprehensive about the painting process, as it involved a lot of unknowns. I had decided to work with an acrylic paint for the color for two critical reasons: 1) it would be easier to cut with water for areas that required very fine application, and 2) its rapid drying time would make it less likely to compromise the final lacquer by releasing buried moisture.  Before coloring could begin, however, I needed to create the black backdrop. Based on a suggestion from Jake Sharp in our repair department, I chose to darken the negative space with a high-quality black toy dye, rather than paint.  His suggestion was well-taken, as the dye highlighted a cool texture in the background, creating an anthracitic (black coal) appearance. With this task accomplished, I spent a good deal of time studying images of ferns, flowers, and leaves for color reference.  During this time, one might have come across me intensely pondering a flowerbed like a dude who’d eaten too many disco biscuits: “Whoa, man, is that one fern really red, green, yellow and orange? Far out!”  Once I felt sufficiently informed, I took a breath and made the first brush stroke, and with it came a wave of catharsis as my imagination began to flow.

In priming areas of the body, I became familiar with the behavior of the acrylic paint.  I also came to understand just how much work would be involved to create the desired degree of detail and color variation! In the end, this translated to somewhere between four to six coats of color on any given area, applied with tiny little #4 brushes (I used script, point, and round brushes).  Speaking of details, I’m particularly proud of the handful of ladybugs that are distributed over the body, as executing their tiny legs and antennae really took some control!  Once the coloring was complete, I then tidied up all of the edges by retracing the relief with the black dye, which was prone to running and thus eliciting the occasional stream of profanity.   Then, one morning, while sipping re-heated coffee that was more acquainted with the microwave than my lips, I stood back from this body that I’d hovered over for so many hours, so many years, and I realized that it was actually done! 

As I was completing the paint job, my beautiful new custom neck finally arrived from Warmoth. Now there was just the challenge of actually carving the inlays and then summoning the courage to cut into a brand-new neck that far exceeded the value of the guitar!  I prepped the headstock with yellow cutting tape and carefully measured my reference points (e.g., center lines and inset margins).  Then, using a cardstock template I’d made, I transferred my inlay design to the tape.  After scrutinizing the transfer for errors, I used the same template to trace the inlays onto the pearl blanks and then did all of the rough cuts with the store’s band saw.  The remainder of the inlay shaping was done either with by Dremel with fine grinding bits and dental bits, or by hand with diamond coated files.  

As I have neither a CNC machine or a laser cutter stashed in my shed, the routing of the headstock also had to be done freehand with the trusty Dremel.  Before I began cutting the inlay channels, I wisely consulted with Jake to learn a bit more about inlay technique. He grimaced when he learned that the headstock was pre-finished—apart from the general risk of user error, the heat from a routing bit and/or its cutting action can easily cause a finish to misbehave.  Nonetheless, his advice was the same: glue the cut inlays to the surface and firmly score around them with a fresh razor to ensure good sightlines for routing (he also told me to prepare for a lot of swearing).  I dutifully heeded Jake’s council, and perhaps twenty or thirty work hours later I had completed the routed channels and had fit the inlays (which requires continual slight modifications to either the inlay or the routing).  Once in place, the inlays were set with thin super glue, which flows readily and can make a big mess!  The final step was to pack any voids with a mastic made of ebony dust and glue, and then sand everything level. As is true of most forays into a new craft, I was beginning to understand the process just about the time the project was coming to a close! All in all, however, the outcome was decent for an initial effort (though there was indeed a lot of swearing, as Jake had predicted).

With the body painted and the inlaid neck in hand, the Cosmic Fern was nearing completion, and I was practically jubilant with anticipation.  An immense burden of misguided, youthful ambition would soon be lifted…, or so I thought!  Like a desiccated desert wanderer crawling towards a phantom oasis in the desert, I was about to discover that the finish line was actually not so close at hand.  Indeed, the Cosmic Fern project still had a lot of surprises in store and it was going to require all of the emotional stamina I had in reserve to prevail in the final battles to come…  – L. Petsch, November 2020