Palen 7 String Blonde Archtop Guitar w Case #95

Product Description

This Palen Archtop is one of the last archtops built by Nelson Palen-Listen to the sound clip in the description played by Mike Oria. PALEN ARCHTOPS are among the finest archtop guitars ever built. The Palen Archtop is an “X” braced traditional instrument, descendent from the D’Aquisto school of instruments- very light and acoustic. It features a hand carved and graduated top and back, slightly thicker than many typical archtop guitars, with a very resonant and acoustic tone. Englemann spruce, hand carved and tap tuned. EIGHT piece highly flamed neck and constructed from matching flamed maple with laminated ebony between the  pieces of maple. The front of the Headstock is covered with polished ebony and features an inlaid “Palen” with his Unique shaped 7 string Headstock.  The back or the headstocks are multi-laminated with an array or gorgeous exotic woods, which ad great strength and beauty.

All Palens are built with traditional style F-holes to allow excellent clarity and chordal note separation. Scale length is 25 inches, nut width is  2 1/8″ for the 7 string. All Palens come standard with an ebony fretboard with inlays,   standard body depth is 3″ at the rims, and comes standard with a KA hand wound floating pickup. High gloss,multi layered Nitro cellulose finish.  Hardware is the best available quality. and tailpiece, pickguard, bridge and fingerboard are ebony are ebony. A single Venetian cutaway is standard on the floating pickup model.

Specs: 2.079”Nut 2.42” at the 12th fret, neck depth 0.836” at the first, 0.844” at the fifth fret and 0.87 at the 10th fret

Specifications

About Palen

Nelson Palen started building his acoustic archtop Palen Guitar in November, 1998 and finished it the last week in June, 1999. He read the book and viewed the 6-hour video by Bob Benedetto, who has been building guitars and violins for 30 years and is considered the premier archtop builder in the country. The Palen archtop is unique in that the soundboard and back are carved from wood approx. 1″ thick to a domed shape similar to that found on a violin.

Before Nelson made Palen archtops, he had been making decorative wooden bowls as shown here for approx. 12 years. His woodworking skills and attention to detail began here and from his ancestry. His dad, Benedict Palen, has been doing woodwork since the 1930’s starting out with a pedal-powered lathe. His dad’s enterprise, Artistic Woodcrafts started with a Shopsmith and then homebuilt a heavy-duty lathe capable of swinging up to 32″ diameter blanks.. The blanks for the bowls are made up of segmented rings stacked and glued. Various wood species, domestic and foreign are used. Examples are walnut, white gum, padauk, wenge, mahogany etc. Nelson Palen added a CNC desktop mill in 1998 that can be mounted on the lathe for engraving. The spindle is slowly rotated by computer command with approx. 1000:1 reduction. The basic turning operation is done with conventional hand tools.

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