Found another (couple of) Kawai guitars!

There will be more about this posted on my Kawai guitars site (http://www.kawaiguitars.com/) but I thought I'd add a quick post here as the blog as a different readership ...

I never thought that I'd find one of these anywhere

It' s a Kawai "Rock 'n' Roll Star".  Dates from the late 1970s / early 1980s.  I've never seen one before, and if I didn't happen to have copies of the Kawai guitar catalogues from the period, I'd never have known that it existed.

This guitar has had a bit of a hard, working, life, with plenty of scars, dings and dents.  But the neck is undamaged and perfectly straight, and everything still works fine.  It has the feature Kawai headstock (albeit a slightly damaged one) used on their guitars of that period.

And the second acquisition is this Kawai Aquarius.  Dates from the early 1980s ...

The twin humbuckers are coil-tapped via a push/pull on the tone knob.  It's a nice enough guitar but isn't quite as "special" as the other Kawais.  This one has been well cared for as there's barely a mark on it.  I've seen a few for sale recently ... so I bought myself one to find out what they're like.  I'll find out as soon as I put some strings on it!

Another Kawai guitar ...

Ooops ... I think I just added another Kawai guitar to my little (but becoming bigger) collection.  Details and pictures will follow when it arrives.

ps - don't tell anyone - especially my wife  ;-)

Fretboard Radiusing

Usually, fretboard radiusing is done using a shaped radiusing block, a lot of sandpaper, and a lot of effort.  It can easily take an hour or more to work on an unshaped fretboard blank.

A couple of months ago, I bought a router bit which had been designed specifically for fretboard radiusing:

The bit actually came from a workshop in Vietnam!  After 90 mins of using it in the router table, I had 10 nicely radiused fretboards ...

Now I just need to make 10 necks to glue the fretboards to!