Guitar Maker: Instrument player turns hobby into business
SUMMIT TWP — Gary Neyman isn't letting any grass grow under his feet.
When he retired in 2012 from Lebanon Seaboard Corp., a supplier of home lawn and garden products, he began a hobby that he is turning into a business.
Since 2016, Neyman has been building steel-string and classical guitars in a workshop in the garage of his home at 184 Valley View Drive.
Born and raised in Butler County, he learned to play guitar in college in the early 1960s.
“I kept up with the guitar on and off,” Neyman said. “I hadn't played for a long time, and when I picked up the guitar, it sounded bad.”
Neyman took his ailing instrument to a professional luthier: someone who builds or repairs stringed instruments.
That got him to thinking.
“I'm a tinkerer,” he said. “I've built my own computers. Building a guitar would be a challenge.”
He read books on guitar making and studied the subject for years before he set out to build his guitar.
He sent for plans, but as he noted, “It was quite a while before I got my courage up. In 2016, I built my first guitar.“I was pleased with the way it turned out, but I didn't know what I didn't know at that stage,” Neyman said.For instance, he didn't realize the humidity in the air can affect a guitar. Wood is swollen in high humidity. A guitar built in the summer and then taken inside for the winter will make noises as it tries to pull itself apart when the wood contracts as it dries.He built five steel-string guitars when he decided he needed more instruction.“In 2018, I started to work with a mentor, Brian Burns, a classical and flamenco guitar player in Fort Bragg, Calif.,” he said.For two-and-a-half years, Neyman used Zoom sessions with Burns to learn more about guitar making before beginning to construct classical guitars.He has made eight classical guitars since Burns' instruction.
Neyman's guitar building uses both ancient and modern techniques.He uses a magnet and a computer to test the wood.“The magnet excites the wood to get a vibration that registers on a computer program that generates sound waves,” he said. “The wood will show where it wants to vibrate.”“I do a lot of pretesting to know the quality of the wood,” he said.While he employs routers and band saws to cut some of his guitar pieces, some steps of the operation require that he use knives, rasps and chisels.He imports spruce from the Italian Alps to make the guitar tops, or faces. He uses rosewood to make the sides and back.The guitar necks are made of Spanish cedar, which is chosen because the wood is light and straight-grained.He uses homemade molds to shape the wood, traditional glue made out of animal hides to join pieces together and a polishing technique using shellac flakes and alcohol that can take 12 hours to complete.“The most difficult part, what I call the pucker factor, is cutting the notch on the top and back of the guitar, so the perfling (a narrow decorative edge) can be inlaid,” he said.It's complex, painstaking work, and Neyman admits that having a touch of obsessive compulsive behavior can help the process.
He estimates it takes 130 hours to build a guitar, and he chronicles every step of the process for each guitar, complete with pictures and computer graphics.“If they want, they will get a history of the guitar,” he said of prospective buyers.Neyman said he received about $4,000 for his first and only sale so far, a classical guitar.But Neyman said building one is a labor-intensive process. Factoring in the cost of materials and his time, he's making about $10 to $12 an hour on the transaction.After gifting some of the instruments to his family, Neyman is hoping to sell his guitars through his website, roundbarnguitars.com. One customer won't be his wife of 54 years, Nancy.Asked if she played the guitar, she said, “I do not. I was left-handed, and nobody wanted to teach me.”
