Luthier Garry Knight watches as his homemade computerized router carves out the face of a new guitar at his shop in Tucson.

Photos by Ron Medvescek / Arizona Daily Star

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The spiral router bit sank into the block of lightweight swamp ash wood, spewing curlicued wood shrapnel.

The computerized router danced along the outline of luthier Garry Knight's latest design, a Fender Stratocaster-style guitar with flames on the face.

"I'm really looking forward to this design," the owner of Catalina Guitars yelled, his native English accent barely audible above the harmonic whir of the router.

"It sounds like a song," Knight said, as the motor swooned and hummed along and the bit dug deeper into the wood.

Knight is among an elite group of luthiers in Tucson who create one-of-a-kind custom stringed instruments, from guitars to cellos. Most of them are crafting high-end instruments geared toward professional musicians, with price tags running into the thousands of dollars.

"Generally when you buy an instrument made in a factory, made almost entirely with machine tools, the consistency is not going to be there," said Tucson violin maker George Blum, a 14-year veteran of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra violin section. "The instruments oftentimes tend to be too bright, almost shrill. A good violin-maker can work with each piece of wood to create a sound that is appealing to a professional player. You can always tailor that to some extent."

Blum's violins can fetch $12,000, a tad more than those of his former business partner, Cesario "Cy" Amesquita, who sells his violins for $8,000.

Most of the Tucson luthiers take months to build one instrument because they spend most of their days repairing instruments. Blum found himself spending so much time repairing violins that he couldn't build any, so he left his namesake partnership with Amesquita — Blum & Amesquita Violin Makers, near Tucson High Magnet School — to concentrate exclusively on building. Amesquita left Blum's name on the sign and continues to sell Blum's instruments.

Repair work also drives Knight's shop, tucked in the back of an old medical office building that's been converted into an industrial park of sorts.

If he had the luxury of time, Knight would be cranking out instruments and selling them just as fast, he said. But it takes him anywhere from three months to a year for each guitar, time squeezed between repairs and his sometimes bustling Internet business selling strings and parts like pickups to customers around the globe.

In the front room of his shop, he displays nearly a dozen guitars, including a few of his own. There also are a couple guitars that Knight, a 45-year-old transplant from London by way of Alabama and Los Angeles, has customized with new frets and one-of-a-kind necks.

On a recent weekday morning, Knight showed off a 1962 Guild T-100 in need of new frets. It also could use a few small repairs to the body, which had a small nick near the base of the neck and a scratch on the backside. But in no way, he explained, would he tamper with the finish.

"A guitar like this is probably not worth more than $1,000," he said, noting that the restoration would cost the owner $600. But the owner was sentimentally attached; it had once belonged to her late father.

"It's a cool guitar for someone who likes a retro-looking guitar," Knight said.

Knight led a few visitors to his backroom workshop, a large, neat space with a rolling garage door in the back wall. He boasted that he is the only Tucson luthier crafting guitars from a commercial shop; others work from home. Blocks of ash wood and Honduran mahogany leaned against one wall; around the shop were other slabs of wood, some with exotic names, others laced with intricate tree rings, swirling and dipping.

A former engineer, Knight built his own CNC router from parts he bought on eBay. The machine can be programmed to follow three axes. It effortlessly cut around the sharp edges and grooves of the guitar body to make the flames. After a few minutes, the router had carved out the holes for the pickups, tailpiece and neck, and neatly cut the body from the block of wood.

Knight turned off the whirring machine and removed the wood frame, then the guitar body. At 24 inches, it was slightly small. He envisioned making it as a child's guitar.

"This is my favorite part," he said, peeling blue tape from the back of the wood. "This is where I find out I have a lot of work to do."

Now, he said, comes the hard part: at least four hours of sanding the edges, then sealing the wood and deciding how to finish it: Should he paint on flames or use airbrush? Then comes the hardware — the pickups, the saddles, strings, control knobs and jacks. Finally the neck, frets and tuning pegs.

Depending on his repair workload, he could have it finished in three months — a conservative estimate, he said.

Knight usually makes only one of each design, but "I might want to try to sell a few of these," he said, fingering the shallow flame cutouts.

"It's got a lot of appeal. It's really nicely curved."