Guitar building is the thing that just, you can take a week and just kind of forget about everything's going on in your life and just focus on building a guitar.

You have nothing else to do, nothing else to distract you from getting it done.

In Franklin, Indiana, there's a school tucked away in the cornfields that teaches people how to create things.

And it all started with one man.

My name is Marc Adams, and I'm the founder of the Marc Adams School of Fine Woodworking and Time Honored Crafts.

From 34 years ago, when I did all the classes myself to where we are today it's been a fun journey.

And in those 34 years, their scope has only grown.

So I knew that woodworking would be the foundational place to start a craft school in rural Indiana.

In time, my plan was to diversify and start doing other things that initially could be ancillary to woodworking, such as blacksmithing, where you can make your own hardware, your own hinges, and so on.

I also worked into glass, where you can start making leaded glass panels for what you were making, and those things did so well that we started to go into other directions.

And so now the subtitle to the name of the school is ‘and Time Honored Crafts.

So we do everything here from quilting classes to sewing classes.

We get into a lot of glasswork.

We do a lot of, foundry and forging work, carving on stone and on other materials.

This summer, we've got 270 classes taught by 130 instructors from 15 different countries.

So we've diversified into just about every type of craft imaginable.

And today, these students are learning techniques to make a fully functional acoustic guitar in a class led by longtime woodworking instructor John Ressler.

But John wasn't always the master, just a couple of decades ago.

He was a student just like them.

John came to take a class here in the second year of the school, and then we had a class that we offered on making a guitar, and John attended that and that was it.

He just fell in love with it and he started to make guitars and that has probably been maybe 20, 25 years ago.

But he's been teaching 2 or 3 or 4 classes here every year since then, and they absolutely always sell out.

I made a conscious decision at one point that I can either be a better guitar player, or I can be a better guitar builder.

I really was more interested in building a better guitar than playing guitar better so.

Which is good news, because this weekend, John and the class, we're challenging themselves to make a guitar in just two days.

Well, this weekend we're doing a two day class.

It's called ‘Build One Guitar in Two Days, and this is a charity class where the students will still pay the same tuition fee they would normally, but all the funds go to the scholarship fund for people who may not otherwise be able to afford to take a class here.

So what actually goes into building an acoustic guitar?

Well, you start by cutting out the front of the body, underneath which a series of thin wooden braces are glued in a specific pattern that allows it to resonate.

The sides are then soaked, heated, and bent to form their iconic hourglass shape.

The neck, carved separately, will get slots cut into it at incredibly precise intervals before fret wire is placed in the gaps to create the fretboard.

Then it's all fitted and finished.

And getting this all done in two days requires some planning.

Everyone's participating.

Everyone's doing a little piece of the guitar.

It's very ambitious, and I don't think many people here thought we could, but we will.

A big part of it is the organization of it.

I have three pages written out of different tasks.

Yesterday morning everyone was given a specific task.

So I would say, here's a template.

Trace this I had just simple instructions about here, do this and we'll watch and make sure that you know you're not going off the beaten path here.

One of John's students, Chris, has taken several instrument crafting courses in the past few years and while he came to the school looking to develop new skills, he ended up finding a whole lot more.

The first class I took with John was a weeklong build, and each person was building their own guitar for that full week.

And it was intense ten hours a day for seven days.

And it was a very, very intense process and learning all of the little intricacies of it's not just building a box, but creating a musical instrument that has a resonance, that has millimeters of things that you have to pay attention to in order to make that instrument sound wonderful at the end.

As well as look wonderful.

I didn't think that I would enjoy and love it so much.

I just really, really love the process of really love and building those instruments and invigorated me to come back and do it again.

And let's say you're on the fence.

Chris has a simple answer.

Do it.

Everybody in the class helps each other out, and it's a wonderful collaborative learning experience.

Everybody works together to lift everybody up, to give them the skills and the opportunity to finish the instrument and have that sense of accomplishment at the end.

And seeing things click for the students, is something John never gets tired of.

In the beginning of the week?

You know, the deer in the headlights look like “I don't know if I can do this.” Even somebody who's done a lot of woodworking because the guitar is more than just a woodworking project.

You're building a breathing, living organism.

When you strum that guitar for the first time, it's just like, amazing.

And it's like, “I built it and I can make it sing ” and and just bring life to this thing.

And it's just fun to watch them get excited about it.

And then come back the next year because they had so much fun.

This is just a messing around song I call it.

By the end of the day, John and his students actually pulled it off.

So this guitar is finished and ready to be sold, but this isn't for profit.

After the sale, the proceeds are donated to the Roger Cliffe Foundation, which helps underprivileged students enroll at the school.

The foundation got started shortly after Roger passed in 2001, and aims to continue the legacy he left not only as an instructor but as a mentor.

Roger wrote books about woodworking, and he did... one of the first people to do videos about woodworking, and I bought his book when I was a teenager.

It was a great book, and I learned a lot from it.

And I got a flier in the mail that said, Roger Cliffes doing this table saw seminar.

Im like “Roger Cliffe, my woodworking hero!

?” Most people have like sports heroes and that kind of thing, I have woodworking heros.

So I went to the seminar and I introduced myself to him and so he's the one who introduced me to Marc when Marc started the school.

And I learned a lot from him.

How to work with a group of people and how to keep them occupied, and how to keep them engaged, and how to make the class fun.

One of his, one of his favorite phrases that I know would make Marc cringe is “Try, try and do your best, glue and putty does the rest.” *Laughs* And,uh... that's not really the motto of THIS school, but that was just something funny that Roger would always say and kind of put people at ease, you know?

“Okay, I can I can do this.

There's ways to take care of things.” So he really enjoyed helping people to learn and see what they can produce on their own and then using that, what they've learned to help others to learn as well.

But they all agree that Roger's love of learning and craftsmanship lives on inside of everyone who walks through those doors.

A lot of people in the class who might be an engineer, they might be a physician, they might be a surgeon, but they don't know anything about what I do.

And to see someone who is so advanced in their field to humble themselves enough to say, “Hey, I don't know, something that I really want to learn” even though they might be very highly skilled at something else.

You need to always be learning.

And if you're not learning, you're probably dying, *laughs* is what I think.

John Ressler *cheers* There you go.

All right!

*claping* For more Across Indiana stories, visit wfyi.org/acrossindiana