Harvey Leach
Cutting Edge Inlay
Cedar Ridge, CA
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| Above: Geisha fretboard: Agoya shell, crushed pearl;
blue and black Atlante; red Micarta; red,
midnight, sand and lavender Corian; brass,
mahogany, ebony and mammoth ivory. |
Harvey Leach thought he was going to build
banjos, because they have that big resonator
on the back that’s like a blank canvas. His
first inlay project was on his first banjo—with
a ten-page instruction book on how to do
inlay as his only guide. “Banjo players like all
that flashy stuff,” he says with a chuckle, “I
thought you couldn’t build a banjo without
covering it with inlay.”
The transition to guitar came pretty quickly.
He realized that there were a lot more guitar
players in the world than banjo players, and
being a guitarist himself, it felt right. His first
guitar was a wedding present for his wife in
1980: “Well, I gave her the parts as a wedding
present; I assembled it a little later than that!”
Leach eventually parodied his struggles with
time management on one of his own guitars:
there’s an angel painting the brand on the
headstock—so far there’s “Le.”
Despite his propensity to get things done at
the last possible moment, he’s become one of
the go-to guys for boundary-pushing inlay for
a long list of premier builders, including Paul
Reed Smith, D’Angelico, Kevin Ryan, James
Olson, the late Lance McCollum and Martin.
“Martin wanted stuff that looked like it should
be hanging in a museum,” he says, “a whole
different level. That led me into finding ways
to do stuff nobody else was doing.”
His work is often almost holographic, a
technique he says he discovered almost by
accident: “Abalam is basically shell—like
abalone and mother-of-pearl—that has been
sliced very thin, approximately .007 inches
thick (about the thickness of a human hair),
and then laminated like plywood into thicker
sheets. You can buy Abalam as thick as you
want, but the more layers, the more expensive
it gets. A single sheet might be ten
dollars, where a piece 1/16" thick might be
well over one hundred. I had a polar bear
inlay project where I needed to create the
look of ice, and there is a shell called Donkey
Shell that has a look that reminded me of
the way ice would form on the windows in
the Vermont winters where I grew up. So, me
being a Yankee and therefore thrifty, I figured
I would just buy a single sheet and glue it
to a black substrate to make it thick enough
to work with. When I did, the black showed
through in places; amazingly the effect was
exactly like ice! That got me thinking about
the possibilities of using the translucence and
the chatoyancy [the effects of light and angle
on reflective material] of the thin shell to create
mirrored effects.”
This “smoke and mirrors” technique [so nicknamed
by Dick Boak of Martin] was the inspiration
behind his commemorative September
11 guitar. “The first time I used it intentionally,”
says Leach, “was to create fog at the
base of the Statue of Liberty.” Leach broke
new ground by using materials with different
shades of the same color to create dramatic
shading effects and 3-dimensionality: “After I
finished it I would take it to shows and people
would walk up to it, stare at it for a while and
then walk away crying without even saying a
word to me.”
Leach doesn’t like to think anything is impossible,
and relishes complicated challenges.
“In really complex designs,” Leach continues,
“the biggest challenge is deciding which
things to do first. Sometimes the place to start
is determined by how you are going to get
in and out of the cut, and sometimes it’s how
you are going to hang onto the piece while
it’s being cut. I like to cut pieces that are very
small. Most often, impossible means somebody
wants an inlay in the top of the guitar
itself. Inlaying complex shapes into spruce is
nearly impossible because of the dramatic difference
between the summer and the winter
grain of the wood. Winter grain (the dark line)
is like rock maple and the soft grain is like
cork. Ironically, it’s the soft grain that creates
the problems. Really, nothing is impossible,
but I have to do the Mona Lisa someday, and
I’m not quite ready yet for that.”
Leach’s Cherub: 14k gold lettering; mammoth ivory, red coral, Corian, brass, gold pearl and walnut cherub; malachite, green rippled abalone vine; green heart abalone headstock trim; crushed pearl headstock binding.
Martin Cowboy Pickguard: black walnut, Bastogne walnut, mahogany, madrone, maple, African blackwood,ebony; malachite, malachite web, green lizard, obsidian, pipestone, spiney oyster and denim lapis recon stone; denim, midnight, red, granite and bone Corian; brass, silver, mammoth ivory, thin mother-ofpearl and crushed pearl.
Back of Samurai guitar: sycamore, madrone, black walnut, Bastogne walnut, maple, koa, mahogany, laminated veneers; various Corian “stone” colors (midnight, red, blue, bone, evergreen); Agoya shell, pale abalone, green rippled abalone, silver, malachite, mammoth ivory, thin mother-ofpearl; blue and green Atlante; obsidian recon stone.