The 49'er? Jack started off with Jimmy Burns ('at four bob an hour') and rapidly
rose to manager there when the original four pick-up Bisons were made. The first
forty-nine were completely hand-made, and jack remembers them with justifiable
pride......'Custom jobs they were, it was all custom work, every one of them was
a work of art - the shaping, the rasping...... the work that went into them, it must
have cost a fortune. Well, of course, it did.' Jack had to plane up all the rough
cut fingerboard ebony by hand (from 5/16ths to 3/16ths) and he still remembers the
blisters. He did the first shaping of the horns, that beautifully vulgar exaggerated
cut-away - 'All I could picture was an animal charging down towards me......and all
the necks were moulded by hand then, until forty-nine. Forty-nine guitars actually
went out, all hand made they were'. The necks were beautifully dovetailed into the
bodies, with a smoothed out heal. Problems developed with the gold plating on the
fittings - it kept coming off - and the design was changed to a bolt-on neck (taken
from the Vista-Sonic) two-pickup job with chrome fittings. Norman, also working at
Burns then, prior to his shortlived emigration to the land where they make guitars
out of billabong trees, was involved with this model, and still rates it as a really
good instrument.
Bob Pearson, originally with Vox, joined forces with Jack and Norman after the
collapse of Hayman. He had the interchangeable modular control system idea while
working at Hayman, and Jack and Norman were already in business supplying the
necks and bodies for the Hayman guitars, so it was a fairly natural conclusion
that Bob should bring his electronics flair to the new Shergold enterprise. We
asked Bob about his module idea.
'Originally, when I had the idea, I decided to give it the Hayman thing. I've
been working with guitars since way back in the early Vox days, and you could
never satisfy a guitar player - being a guitar player myself I could understand
it - you were always stuck with (the fact that) once the guitar was made, somebody
would want another switch to do something else......it was just impossible to keep
changing the guitar, it meant cutting it about and that didn't do the guitar (any
good). The idea just came one day, drop a module in, we can change the circuits, and
there's no end of different modules we can make up and then put on the guitar
without actually changing the physical nature of the guitar itself'.
Unfortunately, just as Bob's idea was starting to cause a stir, Hayman 'went broke'.
Cleaning up width on router
Jigged up for drilling
Underneath locating plates for body drilling
That's life, I suppose, but the Hayman collapse also lumbered Jack and Norman with
a hefty five-figure problem as a result of their involvement supplying the basics
of the Hayman guitars, but a simple and heroic stoicism kept them together to get
Shergold off the ground - Jack 'We just had to starve ourselves a bit till it got
better'. It did and they are now slogging away from dawn to dusk to meet orders for
their own guitars (the bulk of them export, so lay off musos
Healey).
Jack will enthuse about their necks at the drop of a template, and rightly so. They
grace other guitars than Shergold (an
old connection still persists!) and if many other makers had their way, would grace a lot more. The
enthusiasm in the trade for them tends to justify Jack's opinion that, as far as
the electric goes, the neck is the most vital part of the making - a thing I agree
with along with a many other players. We thought our readers would be interested in
the process that evolves a neck from a lump of maple to guitar handle, and I was
fascinated as Norman and Jack took us through all the stages on the way to Bob's
final fitting up.
The maple for the necks comes into the country at around 18-20 per cent moisture
content, and is kiln dried down to 10 per cent by the importers. When it arrives
at the Shergold factory, Norman stacks it and leaves it entirely alone for a minimum
of six months - he's absolutely rigid about this rule since a customer pushed him
into using some too early, and ended up with a slight bit of movement in the wood.
After this period, the pieces are planed and flattened out. We'll take just one
piece from here on, to avoid confusion, although the operations are done in batches
to cut setting up times. Our lump is now fitted into a guiding jig, and taken to
the spindle moulder - several small blades set into a spinning holder - which still
owes Norman a piece of finger. This cuts out the flat of the headstock, and the same
machine, with a different cutting tool, takes out the groove for the truss-rod. From
there the piece goes to a bandsaw, where it is marked up from a pattern, and cut
roughly to shape. The actual width is then cleaned up on a router, one side at a
time. The next stage is the drilling out of the machine head holes, truss rod access
points and so on. This is done in a jig which has locating templates fitted underneath
which relate to a guide pin fitted to the working plate under the drill. So far,
all this is Norman's end, and now our lump goes round to Jack.
Bodies
Queuing up for stringing and final checking
Jack hammers the truss rod down into the groove, and then forces and glues a fillet
in on top which bends the truss rod against the internal curve of the truss rod
accommodating groove - it stays bent now, and for a very good reason. At the adjusting
end of the truss rod, a square metal collar which retains the screwer-upper is fitted
rigidly into the neck wood, thus enabling the curved rod to push the neck forward, as
well as pushing it back, and because it is curved, without putting a direct lengthways
stress on the neck which might ripple the finger-board. Tricky to explain, but brilliantly
simple in concept. Norman invented this idea in the old Burns days, and now Music Man
are using a similar bent rod principle. This principle was used on the Haymans, Burns,
and Ned Callan ('nobbly Neds' Jack calls those guitars) necks. Meanwhile, back at the
lump, the protruding excess fillet is chiselled off, the fingerboard is glued on,
and the lump goes into the press with twenty-seven others.
From the press, it goes back to Norman and the spindle cutter, the fingerboard is
trimmed and rebated for purfling, and cambered and dotted. The fingerboard has
already been slotted for fretting - this is done by a 14 thou blade set up on the
circular saw bench. Marker holes for the fret positions have been drilled onto the
jig which holds the fingerboard, and these are fitted against a centralising pin on
the saw guide, and the whole lot is pushed over the blade which is set to the necessary
depth.
Back to Jack for the fretting - hammered in by hand the usual way. They are sanded
off for the correct edge-angle, and finished with a file mounted into a wooden block.
The next stage is to fit the purfling. The glue goes on, and is 'quirked' with a small
pointed stick to get the excess out of the bottom of the rebate. The purfling is put
on, and Jack pulls it down hard into the rebate using an old screwdriver type truss
rod tool. It is then bevelled, and made to lip over the fret ends to help avoid
lifting. At this stage, the back of the neck is still square, so it goes back to Norman
for some treatment from his special cutting tool. He made this blade eight or so years
ago, and it is still going strong. It has two cutting edges shaped like U's, which
are spun against the wood to shape the back of the neck, and this is done twice, with
the neck both ways up to ensure an absolutely even curve. A touch with the sander,
and it's ready for finishing and mating with its body, which is Bob's department.
Shergold currently make a range of nine instruments, including an excellent twelve
string, and the Masquerader standard guitar is being phased out on favour of a Custom
model, which features Schaller heads and a six piece bridge (an area of criticism in
our report on the standard model). The Modulator range has five different control modules
available for it, and Bob tells us more are on the way.
Jack has his ear to the ground for players' requirements, and I'm sure we'll see some
more and exciting developments in the range. Meanwhile, It's nice to have a home manufacturer
doing well so that many of us players can save a bob or two on foreign currency, and
we wish the firm lots of luck - they deserve it.