My name is Paul Gerard. I'm the owner of Fine Lines.
We do custom furniture and cabinetry, and I also make guitars.
I like to create things that are different than some other cabinet shop would make.
When I see something I like that I know that I can use for a guitar body that's going to be unique and different,
I put it aside and I wait for that opportunity to come.
When I do get to start a new guitar body, we grab that piece of wood and we just look at it and we think,
how are we going to put this together to make something really unique and really different?
When I was young, my father had a woodworking business and I would always go down there with him and work with him.
That's basically where I got my start into woodworking and I ended up going to cooking school
and worked in local restaurants for about eight years and realized that it really wasn't what I wanted to do all my life.
I still had the background in woodworking, so I went to work for a company in Connecticut
and I was cabin making there for twenty years and decided to branch off onto my own and that's when I came here.
Whatever the type of project may be, I like using woods that have a lot of character.
I love contrast, so we use a lot of contrasting woods to make things interesting and just putting a clear finish on them.
The same thing with the guitars. I like showing the natural colors of wood.
The wood choices that we use in guitars are very important. Different woods give off different tones.
This is a mahogany body that we're just starting to work on.
It's kind of a design that we've been playing around with on our own.
It's got some reverse curves on it.
This is the type of wood that we like to look for when we do our custom pick guards.
This is walnut and it's got a lot of natural character in it.
I'm not really sure how we can use it on there yet, but there's a lot of different things that I see in there
that I think that we could probably make something really cool out of.
Here's the beginnings of the neck.
We've got some Brazilian cherry for the fretboard.
Again, we're using mahogany for the neck, which is going to get routed into the face of the body.
Then we'll do all of our cutouts for our pickups and all our electronics.
A lot of the things we do, almost old school, everything here is done by hand.
A lot of the guitar companies use high-tech machinery for routing out their bodies and their electronic cavities.
We do all that by hand with routers and a lot of sanding to get to the final end result.
In the guitar making, there is a lot of precision.
Measuring has to be right on the distance between your frets and the distance between your 12th fret to your bridge
needs to be right on when it comes to doing the intonation.
It's good to me.
The guitars are something very unique and different.
It's really cool when you take a piece of wood and you make the body, you make the neck, you do all the electronics
and you put that last string on and you tune it and then you sit down and play it.
It's like a different level of excitement.
Right now we've got about 10 guitars in the showroom where people can come up and try them and play them and see how they feel.
I was sitting at my desk and I saw a kid walking up the driveway so he sits down on the stool in there
and he grabs the guitar and he starts playing Van Halen and I felt like I was at a concert.
It was just incredible and it was just a cool feeling to know that this is something that we made here.
I mean, it's a passion.
Once you start doing it, it's hard to stop.
It really is because you see how it comes out and then you grab it and you play it and you want to just start another one.
It's in your blood so it's just kind of a natural thing.
