Good morning and happy Tuesday.
This morning I was working in the shop on making a pickguard out of a piece of birdseye maple for my current guitar build. For this build I needed to paint the body so I had my dad spray it, since that’s what he does for a living. While it was at his place getting sprayed, I made a really neat half pickguard from a piece of maple so that it would tie the whole guitar together nicely since the neck is maple with a padauk fretboard with maple inlays. I spent some time working on this half pickguard based on another body that I had handy and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Once I got the body back from dad, I realized I made a crucial mistake… The body I had him paint was one I made a couple years back and the body I based the half guard on was a recent build. My original body building technique for Telecaster style guitars was traditional and had a few more routes on it, including one between the neck and bridge pickups for running wires. Over the years I have gotten rid of a few routes for ease of building and instead drill holes. So the half pickguard I took the time to make, and looked pretty sweet, ended up not covering the wiring route that I had forgotten was on the body while it was getting painted..
It’s not really an issue. I can use the half pickguard somewhere else, and fortunately I had a nice piece of birdseye maple big enough to make a full pickguard for this build. Honestly, I think the full guard will look better anyhow since it will break up the chrome hardware a bit better (this build has a Bigsby tremolo, so it was a lot of hardware on a black body). The biggest issue with building the full pickguard was that I don’t have a bandsaw with enough capacity to resaw pieces over 6”.. So I had to resaw it by hand and do a lot of clean up work to get it flat and down to thickness. Now I am back on the prowl for a bandsaw..
Anyhow, this morning I smoked a Puro Ambar from Artista Cigars. After my blog post a couple weeks ago about brand recommendations, I have talked to a few brands. Artista was kind enough to send me some samples, so I have been smoking through their stuff and have honestly been pretty impressed!
This week I decided to shake up my giveaway a little bit and instead of a gift card, I am going to award the winner a sampler of Artista Cigars’ Buffalo Ten lineup. One each of the Natural, the Maduro, and the Connecticut!
This week’s giveaway is about samplers: Do you prefer brand samplers or variety samplers? Does it depend?
For me, when I was a consumer I LOVED brand samplers and never really cared for variety samplers. I enjoy discovering new brands and I think that brand samplers are the best way to do that.
To enter to win the Buffalo Ten Sampler, just comment below with your answer. If you want bonus entries - buy a sampler from the site! Each sampler earns an extra entry! It wouldn’t hurt to check out the Deals Page..
Take care,
-Trevor
7 comments
I like brand samplers when I like a cigar from a particular brand i’m curious about the other lines.
For me, the variety sampler of similar cigars is the best. Different brands but similar makeup. Call it a “habano throw down”. With that being said there are times when I will just go ahead and buy a brand sampler for example I did that with Jake Wyatt cigars just to try out everything he had to offer and one thing I did like about that was you could take notes on a certain type of wrapper and filler combination and then knowing that you had a different one right next to it and it was a really good way to see the broad spectrum of cigar choices. As a more experienced cigar smoker now I don’t necessarily want to gravitate to a brand sampler. I want to stick with what I know I like, but maybe try four or five or six different brands of something that I know I’m gonna like.