I've been busy in the shop so far working on this Rosewood custom RB-11. I've also done some restoration work for a few customers. I received an email from Dave over at The Healing Box Project and was informed that the green Keith Urban guitar I rebuilt last year will be signed by an artist; Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, Sara Evans, or Toby Keith are possibilities. Then it will be auctioned off to benefit The Healing Box Project.

 Colton James @cjd573 came into the shop and is now the owner of the Harmony archtop guitar we named Humpty Dumpty. I posted a video of him playing it over on Facebook @BrooksAcoustic.

Above is a picture of the braces glued in place before carving them to shape. Below is the rosewood back ready to be glued to the sides.

And here I'm routing for the binding.

  Stay in touch! I'll be posting more pictures as I move along with this build. You can always check Facebook and Instagram for goings on at the shop that might not make it into the blog.

So, I've decided to go ahead and do a sleeper conversion on the Keith Urban guitar that I'm fixing up to donate to the Healing Box Project. While the paint on the guitar is really pretty, I had to put a new headstock on and patch up the couple of holes that were in the body. So the guitar doesn't look new anymore, obviously. BUT, I figured that I could at least make it sound better with a sleeper conversion. When I get done, this will be the most expensive Keith Urban Player guitar ever created. 

​Take a look at the pictures below. The top one is what I found when I opened up the Keith Urban Player guitar. The bottom one is what a sleeper conversion looks like. The bracing is optimized for tone on the sleeper conversion.

The Keith Urban guitar had a very crude scalloped bracing (which is at least something because a lot of times the braces are block braces). Something you can't see from the pictures is the bridge plate on the Keith Urban is plywood construction, not solid wood.

I'm not quite sure how the neck is attached to the body. Generally, there is a dovetail that holds the neck on the body and I can steam that off. Or on some models, they have a bolt on neck that I can take off. However, I've run into the case where a neck is held onto the body with dowel rods and there is not really a nice way of getting it off so that I can put it back together the way it was originally. With that lack of knowledge, I decided to try something new to open the guitar up and was very happy with how that turned out. 

Follow the progress on Facebook and on Instagram @RobertBrooks1911. Stay tuned!

I've recently reached out to Dave at The Healing Box Project to sponsor the great work they are doing with injured veterans. If you haven't heard about them, you should definitely check them out. Dave and CJ are always looking for support to help them get guitars into the hands of veterans. They provide guitars and guitar lessons to veterans as a sort of rehabilitation.

I came across this broken Keith Urban guitar that had the headstock completely broken off and a couple of holes in it where it had controls for a pickup. Unlike with Dillon's guitar, I didn't have the headstock for this one so you'll see that I had to create one to glue on. 

It really is a very beautiful guitar. I considered taking the back off of it and doing a conversion but I think I'm going to keep it as it is (at least for now. Who knows if I'll change my mind later?).