Traditional luthiers, look away now.
Luke, our graphic designer, has spent the last couple of years building a guitar. It's not his first big woodworking project in his seven years here. He's also made extra large Christmas baubles and a pretty cool looking witch. Here's the part that gets us: before he joined Arbortech, he'd never really done any woodwork. What a legend. (It also says something about how intuitive our tools are.)
For the guitar, he skipped the usual templates and conventional tools and shaped everything freehand with our Power Carving Unit and a few of its attachments. The one jig he did lean on was a levelling jig our co-founder Kevin Inkster made a few years back, which is still earning its keep.
The whole build is condensed into a 20-minute video. It took Luke a bit longer. He worked on it a couple of Fridays a month, around his actual job, and in the odd spare few minutes after work. He can't say exactly when he started, but the earliest footage we can find is from July 2024. That's a lot of Fridays.
Those Fridays added up to a long list of jobs, and a handful of tools really pulled their weight. The Power Carving Unit with the TURBOPlane removed the bulk of the wood, the TURBO Scraper refined the contours and cavities, and the Contour Sander smoothed the curves. The Jarrah fretboard came together with the help of our Mini Grinder MG1000. Plenty more tools went into this one, so watch the video to see the full lineup.
Finally, he strung it up and got one of our engineers to play it. It works. You can hear it at the end of the video.
You can look again now, luthiers.