Meeting Steve Klein

It's my wife Julee's spring break.  My spring break lasts for three months (followed by my summer break, fall break, etc.), so she gets to pick where we go. Yes, retirement rocks!

We came to Windsor, CA - one of Julee's favorite locales.  Whenever I go someplace, I start looking for guitar makers and vintage guitar shops.  While she went shopping in Petaluma, I visited Tall Toad Music  - arguably the coolest vintage guitar store in Northern California.  I had the awesome chance to see a 1918 Martin, fully restored.  And I got to play a 1942 Gibson L5, complete with the Varitone "top crusher".  (The Varitone is basically a barrel of brass hidden under the tailstock, which can be adjusted up and down by turning a screw to exert more or less pressure on the top of the guitar - resulting, more often than not, in some not-so-skilled guitar tech cranking down on this thing hard enough to crack the top of the guitar.  This thing never did much at all for the tone of the L5, but it has resulted in making pristine guitars extremely collectible.)

Unfortunately, the 1963 Epiphone Texan I was secretly hoping was still there (and seriously discounted) from my last visit was gone.  The owner said he knew where it was, though, and could connect me if I was really interested.  And the $8000 Les Paul Custom in a sweet deep blue stayed in the shop when I left.  Hmmm....

Julee wanted to see some consignment stores in Sonoma.  I figured that as the perfect opportunity to hunt down Steve Klein's shop.  Yes - Steve Klein, of Jerry Garcia / Joe Walsh / Leo Kottke / Joni Mitchell / most of my favorite artists have a Klein guitar fame.  Thus began an epic hunt that even Julee got into.  All I knew was he had a shop in Sonoma.  I found a newspaper article that said his shop was on Eighth Street East and it was a really cool place to visit.  So we found Eighth Street East, and rolled through every industrial building we came across.  Nothing.  We asked a guy in a cabinet shop.  He'd never heard of Steve Klein.  Julee found a consignment store.  After a quick round through the store (and finding no vintage woodworking tools) I stood near the register looking for more info about Steve's shop.  The owner of the shop asked me where I was from, and I told her.  She asked me what we were doing in Sonoma, and I said we were vacationing in Windsor, and I was trying to find this guitar maker named Steve Klein.  She started Googling and found a newspaper article about him.  It turns out she knows the author of the article, so she texted him.  He couldn't remember the address but remembered it was near the airport and he had gotten lost trying to find the shop.

Off we went to search around the airport.  After driving around a bunch of industrial buildings, several alleyways, and a couple side streets, we drove by a mechanic's shop.  Julee decided she'd ask them if they knew of Steve Klein.  I told her that if a cabinet maker didn't know Klein, the chances of a mechanic knowing him were pretty slim.  She jumped out of the car and asked one of the guys in the shop.  It turns out he did know Steve and knew exactly where his shop was.  Off we went, but even with the specific directions, Steve's shop is not easy to find.  Ultimately, Julee spied a small sign:

On the other side of the fence was a small shop in the back corner of a courtyard.  

We found Steve finishing up a sandwich, but he was extremely gracious and agreed to show me around his shop.  Fifty years of guitar building, people know things.  And Steve definitely knows things.  Things only a luthier (or someone pretending to be a luthier) would appreciate.  This doesn't happen often - but I was so enthralled with his jigs and machines, and so engaged with talking to him about his builds and techniques that I forgot to take pictures of things.  Like the special fret saw he designed to precisely cut the fret slots on his fingerboards - first used on a guitar he built for Jerry Garcia back in the '70s.  Or the special jig he uses to put the correct radius on his necks, which he then presses the fingerboards onto with a custom made press that uses spring steel, a heating blanket, and a bunch of downward pressure to laminate the fingerboards to the neck.  This is such a unique approach - but the cool design feature is that unlike most fingerboards, which are narrower in the center than they are at the edges, Steve's fingerboards are the same thickness throughout.  His feeling is that the transference of energy from the strings is better with this approach.  (All I can say is his guitars sound beautiful!).

Steve showed me several of his guitars, both electric and acoustic.  He showed me how he builds his necks, how he braces his guitars - absolutely nothing like anything I've seen (there are some pictures of his bracing in a Japanese guitar player magazine he showed me), how he designs his bridges, some incredible inlay work based on Fibonacci's series, and he showed me the most unique nut and headstock transition I've ever seen:

His guitars are incredible - and I want one.  Actually, I want two, because his electric guitars are just as incredible as his acoustics.

Hey Joe Walsh - if you're reading this, I saw your new guitar, and it's incredible!  I volunteered to deliver it to Joe, but Steve said no, he'd prefer to do it himself.  Go figure!

I could have spent the entire day haranguing Steve with questions about building guitars.  But Julee, ever more perceptive than me, picked up that Steve had a whole shipment of guitars to get ready before the end of the day to send off to Japan.  So she made me leave.

Steve Klein is a legend for a reason - he's forgotten more about guitar building than I'll ever know.  But he was gracious, open, and a real joy to meet and talk to.  And it was a great honor to have the chance to visit his shop.

 

The Scamp Gets a Heater

It's winter, and there are Scamp trips on the horizon.  Which means it's going to be cold.  Last time I slept in the Scamp in the cold was a few years ago in Flagstaff, AZ, when I spent a long weekend in the snow and sleet during the Overland Expo.  We had a small, Mr. Heater catalytic heater that ran on propane, and it actually kept the trailer nice and toasty.  Problem is, when propane combusts the by-products are carbon dioxide and water vapor.  It's the water vapor that is the problem - it condensed on every surface in the trailer, and pretty much everything was soaked by the time we left.

Not wanting to relive that experience, I hit the internet and found the Propex HS2000 heater.  The cool thing about this unit is the air for combustion is piped in from the outside of the trailer and the exhaust is routed outside the trailer so there won't be any water vapor to form condensation on the inside surfaces.  Air from inside the trailer is pushed by a fan across the heat exchanger and blown back out.  And it's all controlled by a thermostat.

We had an Atwood furnace that used a similar process in our pop-up trailer when the kids were young, and it worked great - except when it kicked on it sounded like a jetliner during takeoff.  I was a little worried about noise, but the Propex is very quiet.  There's a soft sound of blowing air when the heater is on, but that's about it.

This heater is manufactured in England, basically for vans and it's very popular here in the states in VW Westfalia builds, where it directly replaces the gas heater that these vehicles generally come with.

Basic installation is straightforward, especially after looking at how Isabelle and Antoine (foroutride.com) did theirs.  Installing it in the Scamp took a bit of thought and adapting.  The best location for the heater is inside the starboard side settee, but that's also where the water tank is located, so I built a bracket that would allow me to mount it on its side ( you can mount it on its side, but you can't mount it vertically).

Here's a better view of the bracket:

The intake and exhaust pipes are routed through the floor.  I was a bit concerned about the heat from the exhaust pipe causing problems with the plywood floor. An email to Isabelle and Antoine allayed my concerns, and after using some red Permatex sealer to keep the pipe insulated from the plywood, everything works great.  I may wrap the exhaust pipe with some hi-temp insulation in the future if it turns out that it's creating excess heat under the seat.  We'll see how it works.

With the seat back in place, things look quite good.  Testing the heater, it works really well - things heat up quickly inside the trailer, and the noise level isn't anything significant.

The thermostat mounts up higher - I placed it on the wall of the large closet.

All in all, this install came out really clean, and ultimately didn't take up any significant storage space.  Placing the heater next to the water tank just used up some space that was otherwise unusable.  Routing the heater duct to the bottom of the settee leaves the top open for a drawer (coming soon).  The Scamper is now a fully functional, all-weather, all-terrain base camp!