METAL WORKER FINDS TRUE CALLING MAKING FINE GUITARS.

Byline: Ron DeLacy The Modesto Bee

As he sands, chisels, files, saws, glues or polishes, he constantly talks to himself or to the dozens of wooden pieces he is assembling, ordering them to behave.

His movements are confident, graceful and rhythmic, as though they've been with him for a lifetime.

But 45-year-old Michael Hornick, builder of Shanti (Sanskrit for peace) instruments, is relatively new to the art. He was an industrial sheet-metal worker in the San Francisco Bay Area, liking the money and hating the work, when he started shaping his first guitar 11 years ago.

``I had always been into woodwork, but I never liked anything I ever made,'' Hornick said in his workshop a few steps from the Calaveras County mountain home he shares with wife, Margaret. ``It was, like, as soon as I figured out how to do something, I lost interest in it.''

The guitar project, by contrast, consumed him. Reading everything he could find by other luthiers - the name for the creators of stringed instruments - and using the best Sitka spruce and Indian rosewood he could find, he worked on the instrument every night for a year after work and every weekend.

``I wanted to do it right.'' he said. ``I didn't want it to look like an amateur built it. And when it was done and I strung it up, I felt like, ooh, wow, this is what I've got to do.''

He's been doing it ever since.

In 1991, he quit the sheet-metal gig, and now he makes his living lovingly and meticulously creating about 10 guitars per year. Two are for music stores, one for Colorado's Telluride Bluegrass Festival as the grand prize in its flat-picking competition, and the rest for an ever-growing clientele that includes some of America's finest acoustic players.

Among them is Pat Flynn, a former member of New Grass Revival and one of Nashville's top studio musicians. He owns a rosewood and spruce Shanti 12 string that Hornick built in 1989.

``It's a beautiful guitar with a wonderfully balanced sound, and it keeps getting better as it ages,'' Flynn said. ``Some guitars have a rich low end, others have bright highs, and others have a great midrange. With the Shanti, it's all there. I don't know how he does it, because on paper a lot of guitars are similar.''

There is a waiting list for Hornick's guitars, which start at $3,600. Flynn is in line for a six string, and so are a few dozen other people. If you ordered a Shanti today, you could expect to have it in 1998.

`I tell people there's an 18- to 22-month wait, but at my rate of building, it's way closer to 22,'' Hornick said. ``I shipped one out yesterday that a guy ordered in December 1993. What's that, 2-1/2 years? My customers can't be in a hurry.''

Among the painstaking parts of the process are installing the miters, ornamental purfles, inlays and finish work.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Michael Hornick ``voices'' a guitar. The master craf tsman makes about 10 guitars a year with prices starting at $3,600 and a waiting period of two years.

Associated Press