Some time go, a mighty wind brought down some of my neighbor’s trees on my backyard fence and outdoor furniture. He never said anything to me about “the incident”, and I went about repairing my fence and cutting up the trees (and outdoor furniture) for firewood.

Half way through this exercise I realized “hey, this is ash”, so I started cutting the tree (not the outdoor furniture) into guitar length sections. I have started to build a guitar with this wood and have dubbed it the TNT … “The Neighbor’s Tree”…

The TNT will be a semi hollow archtop jazz-rock guitar. Mama warned me about archtops. They are difficult to build, because you need to carve them to shape using finger planes, scrapers, chisels, and fingernails. And since Mama warned me about archtops, I was immediately drawn to them.

Please join me on this journey of building a premium quality guitar out of stuff that fell into my backyard.