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this picture is a bit misleading (it was taken a few weeks ago now) but it was a high point of the winter, so it's here...  This was the day that i got to do the finest bit of sea-ice travel i'll probably ever get to.  i and 5 others got out on beautiful sea-ice between 25 and 45 centimetres thick and travelled round the point, leaving rothera to the north, and going in a looping field-line round to the east, and returned from the south, at times skiing over water several hundred metres deep.  it doesn't get much better than that.  photos are all by john loines. 

below - another few pics from the guitar making, covering up to the completion of the guitar body.  the photos show small parts of the binding process which involved cutting channels all round the rims of the body, then bending strips of wood to inlay, gluing and taping the pieces in place, then tiding everything up with a cabinet scraper and sandpaper until it looks like the last two photos.  the next challenge is to join the neck to the body using a dovetail joint.  (edit:  i messed up my first attempt at this and will have to make the neck again...  learning, learning). 

 rob

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nightwatch has allowed guitar building activity to continue under cover of darkness...  here are some of the results:

above : halfway through "binding" the back of the guitar, which involves cutting a channel out all the way round to inlay the banded strips of wood you can see to seal the end grain of the rosewood, to add protection to the edge and to look rather nice...  i bent the thin strips first using a kettle that i taped the switch down on so it continued to produce steam.  below i have finished the binding of the back - next is the more complicated soundboard binding.

i have also marked out the shape and fretlines of the fretboard which was really scary because if you don't achieve very high accuracy during the fretting process, the guitar will play out of tune and the whole thing will fall on its face... scary!

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more freshly recorded musique...

so, few updates in the last 2 weeks; now a week of nightwatch is affording time for a few lines and a few photos...  weather on my winter trip was poor, and my camera found the cold distinctly unpleasant and went on strike.  in fact factors have conspired against taking pictures recently and therefore i have to nick some images off others for this post.  the wind has dealt decisively once again with the growing sea-ice and it has exited stage south - i have mentioned this before but rothera point and the marguerite bay area is about the worst place in the whole continent for sea-ice formation - because of it's aspect, oceanic currents, and prevailing winds.  but hey ho, the life of the mind and the hands are the staples of nightwatch - i am again working on the guitar - although still stuck on a very tricky problem to do with adding "bindings" to the edges of the guitar body.  i am getting round this problem at the moment by ignoring it, and working on another scary bit of the process, the fingerboard...  the accuracy required during this stage is higher than in anything i have done before - and it absolutely has to be bang on, other wise the instrument won't play in tune.  which could prove problematic for my temperament...  but i try my best and i won't find out if i have been successful until i string the thing up...  anyway!  a few photos.  the crevasse pictures were taken a week or so ago during another crevasse exploration by myself, ali massey, and dan fitzgerald - ali took the photos....  and the band shot was taken by feargal buckley what seems like ages ago now; the last week that i was on nightwatch which was also the week that the sun returned to base.  we celebrated with a little "intimate gig"...  hasta luego, rob