Inside the Martin Guitar in Nazareth, PA | Factory Tour

foreign [Music] hey this is John Bollinger with Premier Guitar we're in Nazareth Pennsylvania at the Martin Guitar Factory I'm here with Maureen shaigon who is the instrument design manager here and he's going to take us through I can't wait to show you guys around so first time visit first on visit long time fan long time Martin owner welcome to it man you're gonna see all kinds of cool stuff here today can't wait okay okay so Ramin where are we looking at here we are uh looking down over our machine room here um and we're going to take a trip into the machine room in The Sawmill and get a look at how wood comes in how we process it and what basically are the steps to take raw material and turn them into a raw part basically as it progresses through the factory you know this is so much different than I imagined it I was imagining saga's on the floor little Factory this is just huge we try to keep it pretty clean and some of these pipes that you'll see around this is part of our state-of-the-art world-class dust collection system so there is definitely uh sawdust and shavings on the floor in various areas but we try to stay on top of that stuff y'all and it's just been there's some big Factory it's no joke yeah yes serious operation got going here okay let's jump in so we are here in our acclimating area and taking a trip through the Sawmill as we get a look at how we process raw wood into guitar parts and John what you're holding in your hands here is a really interesting and heavy piece of wood this is a sort of a parallelogram shaped um a chunk of mahogany and as you can see we have uh five necks laid out on here these are actually all traced out by hand uh wood obviously every piece is unique and there are some jobs that you just can't have a machine do there's no way and so it's actually the most efficient for us to Mark out each individual neck blank by hand with a pencil and then physically cut them out on a bandsaw what we ultimately want to do is get the absolute maximum yield and minimum waste out of any piece of this material we get we take it really seriously as an environmental responsibility to not waste wood these are precious resources so it is interesting to think about in this in the age of where AI is kind of thought of as the most efficient way to do things actually the most efficient way is to have a skilled Craftsman know just how to get the most out of this channel it looks like you're doing it there's no way to teach a machine uh you know how to spot a defect uh in a piece of wood how to work around it how to get the best grain alignment on pieces of wood that are all unique and individual you know imagine the the shape of a tree and how this is cut out of the tree each piece is going to have a slightly different grain alignment and so it's our job to maximize the potential of every piece of wood well and when we walked into this room we saw so much wood and you saw that you said this is a small fraction just a just a taste of some of the wood that we that we have that we're very lucky and honored to be working with you know I I was thinking about you guys have probably been sourcing wood from the same places for over a hundred years I mean yeah one of the great things about Martin is uh being a family-owned company we have long-term family relationships that go back Generations we have co-workers here uh like Tim Taylor who you met earlier our director of instrument design his grandfather worked here and that sort of story is is very common here uh long-term connections between the Martin family and many employee families that have been in the Nazareth Area for almost 200 years so a little history Martin started in 1833 in New York originally right and then moved to Nazareth and you're actually New York like like Manhattan yes yeah Lower Manhattan yeah I think at the corner of uh Hudson and Houston Street it's a Houston or Houston and Houston there you go yeah yep wow well I can't wait to show you guys around our acclimating area a little more here okay great let's see it so John we're here now in our uh part of our acclimating room this is where we do really premium wood selection among other things so if you're a custom shop dealer and you want to personally come select some wood for that special project that special customer this is where that happens uh also a place where we store all kinds of necks and um it's a really great place to uh to sort of explain different neck joints you can see most of these necks uh looks like they're going to be for standard series guitars um and above they have compound dovetail neck joints uh some of them for example have a simple dovetail neck joints and um but when you see the scale of it it's really it's quite something so here's a one-piece neck mahogany very lightweight and it's got a Rosewood head plate yeah um ready to go we use these locator pins for matching up with our fixturing but there's a variety of different materials here as well for example cool uh here's a maple wow here's a maple neck and one thing that's pretty wild about this one is obviously our backs and sides we do a lot of matching with the wood tops and backs are book Matched as well so if you imagine opening up the leaves of a book we actually do the same process on these Maple necks you can see that this is a beautifully book Matched piece of Maple and that the grain all the way through this whole wood between the two halves is is perfectly symmetrical uh relative to the glue joint Okay so get it why go to that much trouble for things that people will probably not even see we have some structural considerations here and one of them is the orientation of um this grain so you've heard me mention the term quartersawn before and basically what that has to do is the orientation of the grain relative to the stresses on a piece of wood have a huge impact on the strength of that piece of wood in resisting deformation or warping and so here on this peghead you can see that the grain is almost perfectly perpendicular to the face of the peg head and uh also a perpendicular relative to the stresses that are going to be on this when it's under string tension so this makes for a much more stable piece of wood something that's not going to require constant truss rod adjustments and it's going to hold up over time because our instruments have a lifetime warranty so now we're looking at wood selection for sort of custom shop builds absolutely so if you're a dealer or a customer and you have a really special premium premium project that you're working on some dream guitar this is where we would make that happen and Jakey here is our assistant manager of all the Sawmill and machine room and he's going to show us um part of how a book match Works how we evaluate a piece of wood how we want to orient a piece of wood to make the most beautiful and structurally sound guitar great so what do we got here Jakey so at this point we have a match set of Guatemala that I'll show you here today Guatemalan Rosewood yes I didn't realize I had such that white in it yeah so that's called um sapwood and uh traditionally um people generally don't like sapwood and there's reasons for that uh sometimes sapwood can be a little Punky as we call it so to to lack the stiffness or density of the rest of the wood however we're able to evaluate that and it's so visually striking that there is a trend these days which we think is is great of um actually uh incorporating the sap wood into the design of a guitar and so you end up with this amazing contrast uh basically we're just trying to make it so you know you're obviously you know matching your color your grain all that fun stuff but with the sap Sap's a little tricky I mean you want to make sure that you're incorporating that sap on both sides and the backs and kind of keep it flush so really this is this is kind of the process we would we would uh we would be going through so here we can see our template this is an outline of a guitar every piece of wood obviously is not dry Dreadnought sized so smaller pieces of wood might be earmarked for a single o or a double o or even a Triple O and then on the D we actually we have templates for everything they're all matched and numbered and you can see that this the wings of the back here are basically going to incorporate that sapwood into this design wow it's just amazing seeing these patterns it looks like a van Gogh painting those crazy yes true and obviously you know the grain is you know this is this is some nicer stuff you have some Flats on in here but you know the grain the grain can get funky and we're just basically coming down here and you know mapping it up making it look nice and and trying to uh trying to incorporate the best we can absolutely there are surprises every day absolutely every piece of man nature is incredible yeah that's right every piece of wood is different okay so where are we now well John we're here with uh with Shane down in our uh in our Sawmill and base our machine room and basically what we're doing is we're looking at sides uh we're uh we're going through checking the flexibility making sure that there are no imperfections and we're going to look at them with a fine-tooth comb and uh and if we see any kind of pinholes or knots or any other imperfections we're going to mark them out and using this special Mark out pattern we're going to see both the orientation so where exactly it's going to fall on the side and if there was something that we wanted to make sure it didn't end up in the final product this would be the opportunity to check the fit it's amazing there's that much flexibility in that wood absolutely and that's before it's been steam bent or anything so it we haven't even introduce the the characteristics the processes that we're going to use to turn that into that familiar shape and it still has some flexibility and that's because it's only about three or four millimeters thick so really cool stuff we're checking them for uh for grain orientation checking them for any kind of cracks or wind breaks and knocks and pinholes and things like that so just for the Casual Observer these look like they are perfectly matched have you already as I already have you already kind of pieced them together to see what matches together or they just happen to all look the same because they're from the same batch or so um if you would imagine a log of wood or a big Billet of wood and you're taking slices out of that okay if you take the slice it's sort of double wide and then a double thick rather and then cut that in half you end up with a perfectly parallel uh matching but if you were to mix up your orientation uh you can end up with problems right visual problems structural problems and with Spruce you see that sometimes in like run out uh occasionally where one side of the guitar will look shinier than the other yeah to me not a big deal to some customers it's a big deal so you know we try to stay really uh laser focused on on all those aspects we are looking at a crazy Contraption it's called the clamp carrier we have a couple of them and interestingly enough if you look at old historical photos from Martin guitar you can see an almost identical uh setup and basically what we use it for is gluing up uh tops and bats and as you know like on a d35 we have a three piece back on a 28 or an 18 we have a two-piece back and uh and basically what this does is it allows us to glue up those two panels with a back strip in the middle and a perfectly flat uh controlled environment with even pressure coming down both from the from the sort of laterally like this and from top and top and back like this and uh and what you end up with is uh it's rotating uh basically fixture so that by the time you work through the whole fixture and you've got all I don't know 13 or however eight or nine different clamping areas all full by time you get to the last one it's ready to pull out because the glue is dry okay so once that back panel those panels are glued together with their back strips all dried up this is what we're left with and you can see uh we try to really uh keep track of what's going on here so we have a d42 and you can see it's actually noted here it gets a 45 strip so this is a 45 style center strip I've always thought it kind of looks like a tire tread Mark like a really beautiful beautiful tire tread but that design goes back well over 100 years so this is going to be on a really nice uh high-end d42 beautiful poker straight grains on that Rosewood and something really special here we have just launched a new body shape new body size which is very unusual for us whenever we do that in Martin it's kind of a big deal right this and when I say a big deal uh this is going to be what's called a super dread it looks cute is it going to be this big yes a super Dreadnought uh it's about you know 15 to 20 percent more internal Air volume it's a little it's funny too because when you play it you're like it feels like a big guitar but until you see it next to a standard Dreadnought you really don't have a sense for just how big it is these things sound incredible uh in the bass and you know these are like scientifically numbers where you think that can't possibly be right but we saw a boost in the bass frequency certain base frequencies 12 DB that's it's it's nuts it's like twice twice as loud now in the mids and trebles uh you're talking more three to six TV booths yeah really incredible but here you can see um some of these panels so this is our custom expert program so these are only available at that select um dealers but you can see it's a 35 style as in three pieces two Mosaic um type uh back strips and just an incredible mix of wood this is a Guatemalan Rosewood it looks like on the edges and maybe a darker Guatemalan in the middle just like unbelievable contrast especially to think these are the same essentially the same species of wood and yet they look uh so different oh that's wild gorgeous stuff so did they go with the d35 three-piece back because of the way of projecting the base or was it an aesthetic I think they wanted to just make it look really special and it gives you the opportunity to do some play around with some cool visual uh visual aspects of the instrument oh it's so cool as you can see we've come back to the giant guitar and this actually used to be a parade float so they built this in the 80s I think maybe 82 or 83 and they marched it down Main Street and some employees are inside waving out to the public but it's a wonderful visual reference for showing you what is going on inside the guitar so even though it's uh obviously over scale all it actually really does a good job of showing what the internal lattice structure is of the bracing you can see your cross brace your Bridge plate your tone bars your back braces and it's a really great way to to sort of introduce uh you and your viewers to the the thing that they're all familiar with which is the x-raced acoustic guitar but many of them may not know that Martin invented the X-ray so right here yes so this is our our baby something we're very uh proud of in the history of the company and really led the way for guitars to be strong enough to be strong with steel strings or metal strings at all I guess they probably use some sort of nickel Cobar or nickel nickel alloy back in the day but basically prior to the invention of the x-brace guitars were braced or were strong with gut strings so we call them gut strains it's very Shakespearean but really it's a reference to the fact they were made from animal intestines and and Baines basically sinew right so that's still common in the in the classical uh World especially um you know bowed string instruments that's a different kind of sound but in the era before amplification people were always looking for ways to make their instruments louder how can it compete for example with a banjo or that fiddle that you're you're playing with so the the x-brace paved the way for all of that and uh the way that that was invented sometime around the mid-1840s Mr Martin was basically experimenting and came up with this new structure so previously guitars were braced with a fan brace and we still make some fan brace guitars it's very common in the in the nylon string world or they would be ladder braced which you see on a lot of inexpensive uh depression air instruments where they'd have braces that are going sort of transverse across the top it's a different kind of sound it's a little tinny but it's not the sound that people have come to expect from a quality acoustic guitar and uh it's almost the chicken and egg kind of question which came first you know the x-brace or the Martin guitar or the expectation that that's what a guitar should sound like and I think we have a wonderful and maybe even unfair advantage in that regard because Martin guitar has been around since before the Advent of recorded music we've been around at the highest level quality for so long that even on those early recordings of a guitar it almost create aided the expectation that that's what an instrument is supposed to sound like because that's that was the highest quality guitar at the time that's what people were recording with in the days of you know Thomas Edison and uh and so uh is it the chicken or the does it sound great because it's a Martin guitar or is it a Martin guitar uh and that's why it sounds the way we expect a guitar I mean yeah to find the tone exactly so uh we love that uh to me there's nothing more sort of classic um in all those songs and you can really hear you say oh yeah that's that's probably a Martin yeah I find that very satisfying I know many of my co-workers do too yeah so we're going to take a look here at how the braces get applied to a guitar top uh what kind of hand work goes into shaping them but before we do that we want to see how do we incorporate New School Technology and Old School Technology and you're going to see so much of that throughout the factory of old school handwork and Ultra precise modern manufacturing techniques incorporated into one uh approach so uh we are slightly ahead of the process but basically what we're going to watch is Jonah here is gluing braces onto the top of an instrument so you can see she's got her glue wheel she's applying glue evenly to the underside of the brace and the top she has selected there it's in a a heated bracing press and basically what we're doing is we're going to put the braces in their correct locations which have been marked out using one of our various bracing markout patterns and once they're all in the right spot we have to work pretty quickly to make sure the glue doesn't start to dry but once they're all in the right spot we'll actually bring down the the overhead lid of this device and a a suction process will begin so we have these latex bladders and they're going to pull down evenly upon all the braces to fuse them to the top basically and uh and it's heated from underneath to help accelerate the glue drying time so so we're kind of in the middle of things here getting to see uh braces go on if we go backwards we're going to get to see some tops and backs being cut out before they come here and as we go forward we'll get a look at the actual brace carving process you know I mentioned that we we have a really interesting mix of new technology and old technology so very old school a very new school what you see here is sort of the Pinnacle of precision when it comes to profiling shapes out of a flat piece of wood so this is a laser machine it's a laser table and what it's doing is based on the inputs that our friend rocket man is going to put in there on the computer it's going to cut out the shape of a top or a back or even a side it can also cut out Bridge plates and things like that so we have some mahogany tops it looks like being cut out those might be 15 series guitars someday when they're all done when they grow up you know sure and you see those funky ears there on the side of the instrument with those wholesale now not really part of the shape of a guitar that's something that we use for our fixed rate so at this point we're going to pull off the excess you can see we're actually orienting things uh according to a an index line on the side there's a horizontal line and we're lining that up with the arrows and that tells us where relative to the final shape of the instrument where we want to put that piece of wood once again to avoid any imperfections and to get the most beautiful structurally stable top at the end of this lasering process so what we're going to do here is a process called candling and back in the day you would take a candle you know a single light source in a dark room and you'd hold up a wood panel against the candle so you could see through the thin piece of spruce and why would we want to do that well from the outside if you can ignore these circled areas here you can see we have what looks like a really nice piece of spruce right yeah but the truth is going to come out when we backlight it so now we're candling this piece of wood and as you can see even though it looked pretty nice from the outside we have a sap pocket there or something some kind of some kind of pitch pocket some kind of transverse line that looks like if we start sanding on that it might become visually unappealing it might even be structurally unstable so you never know how deep these things are you never know once you start working that wood if that's going to pop up to the surface and be really a problem we have templates for every single shape and style of body that we make left-handed orientation right-handed orientation a lot of the other ones will have cutaway marks on both sides and the reason we have all this is so that we can actually hold it over a piece of wood so if we were to we know our Center Line is non-negotiable the center line has to be in the center but vertically we have a lot of room to play around with how we locate the guitar top out of this piece of wood so if we have it here then this sap pocket is going to be exposed later on down the line potentially as we sand on that guitar body but if we lift this up a little bit now all of a sudden we know that that's going to be covered up by the bridge we know that this one is going to be cut out all together exactly cut out in The Sound Hole basically at this point uh we can make sure that the guitar is going to not be impacted by any of these imperfections so John what we're uh what we're watching here is uh part of our brace carving and shaping process um Sitka Spruce is an incredible material it is so strong relative to its weight so we call that the strength to weight ratio and basically it's so lightweight and so stiff uh with the right grain orientation that people used to use this stuff to build airplanes you might think these are small changes that are happening to the braces but for every 20 percent of height that you add or subtract from a piece of spruce like this you're gaining or losing 50 of its weight bearing capacity so these very small changes um in peaking the braces to remove excess mass for example while retaining the stiffness and the shape of that triangle that pyramid shape Feathering braces out to nothing these are not random uh decisions these are amazing how much wood she's taking off it's wild they're right down to nothing so calculated that's actually going to be feathered down to nothing and when the rim of the guitar is actually glued on it's going to compress there so it's going to perfectly capture that brace end even as it's only a few microns thick you can see they go on the braces are tall they're long they're oversized and they're you know they're roughly in the right profile but they're not very elegant and they certainly uh have not been treated in a way to to remove excess Mass without removing the strength so that's what that pyramid shape does for us a triangle very strong like a sphere also very strong shape those you know arched Bridges for example so when the process is all done you can see we have perfect little Peaks here we have a slightly more troughed out tone bar we have feathered uh brace tips all the way down to nothing and um and we're even going to clean them up with some sandpaper just to take out any chisel marks well John you've seen sides being selected and uh and matched and laid out now we're going to see what actually happens in order to get that familiar shape that we've done that we've come to know and love that that beautiful outline of a guitar so in order to bend the sides of the instrument we take these thin pieces of wood like I mentioned maybe three and a half millimeters thick and we're gonna apply steam to them steam which we generate through soaking them uh or dampening them with wood or water sometimes we'll use additives in the water if we have a really stiff piece of wood for example and then we'll use heat and pressure to turn that water into steam and that will allow the wood to relax into the shape as we bend it against a form now the first step in um getting a really good glue joint is to make sure that your surfaces are nice and clean you don't have any debris or anything else that's going to interfere with the gluing up of two pieces of wood and so the first thing we do we actually cleaned our calls here and our base plate to make sure that everything is looking good then we're going to take our set of sides we locate them sort of a bump fit against the specially made front and rear block clamping calls once those are secured in position using those throw clamps we're going to take our front block and our rear block and using a paintbrush we're going to apply glue to the gluing surfaces there so it doesn't take a lot of glue but again you can see our operator there has just cleaned off around the edges so we don't get too much squeeze out the clamps go on nice and easy they're slotted into position so it's pretty pretty straightforward to make sure they're positioned correctly again we're cleaning our excess around the edges the rear block goes in the clamp goes on and now that Rim is ready to be liberated come out inspected we're cleaning up our surface so we can glue the next one and we'll even go in there um in a moment with a with a sharp chisel or a a knife uh wrapped around with that that nice cloth and clean up the glue squeeze out now while it's fresh so uh what Patrick is doing here he's actually got a piece of this ribbon lining and he is gluing it on the inside of the rim of the guitar what that does is um because as you know the sides are so thin if you were to glue the top and back directly onto the sides of the rim you really wouldn't have much surface area holding that guitar together and so to create a nice level surface that provides adequate gluing surface for for our top and back to adhere to we actually take this and glue it in with the orientation such that this big flat piece is on the top or back and then once it's in the inside of the rim we're going to sand the whole thing flat so you have a nice you know quarter inch wide gluing surface instead of that three millimeter wide gluing surface the next step in assembling the body of the guitar is actually going to be to apply the top and back onto the rim now just before we arrived you can see Steve actually pocketed out inside the ribbon lining he made some pockets for the braces to actually tuck into and you can see those here here and further on down the line and the reason for that is so that when you glue the the top and back on not only are the brace tips secure so if they were going to want to come loose they can't they're physically restrained from doing so but when you look inside the instrument it's so clean and so pretty and it just you can really see the craftsmanship at work and we talked earlier about how we kind of sweat the small stuff here at Martin these brace tucks those are on the top of the instrument so you literally unless you were to go inside the instrument with a mirror you're never even going to see the detail level of craftsmanship that's that's really happening inside there but we do it anyway because we we really care about that so again Precision glue applicator uh also known as your fingertip does the job just fine you know we don't need a special tool for that um so here goes the top perfectly aligned into the brace tucks and we're going to do the back next those pins help make sure nothing shifts during the glue up process uh now you may be wondering about the the funky metal form around the guitar that's a casting form and basically what that does is it serves a couple purposes one it holds everything together during the glue up process two it is a final check to ensure that you've bent things to the right dimensions that the guitar is going to fill out the form properly that the body is going to be consistent with other instruments of that body size and shapes and uh and third of all it allows us to hold the sides hold the rims steady when we do our Rim sanding which we didn't get to see but essentially what you're doing is um applying a a dished sanding tray and uh and sanding off any excess material to make sure that the that the rim that the sides and the uh the ribbon lining are all perfectly flush so that you have a nice flush gluing surface for your top and back to mate onto so John you're familiar with herringbone yes um sure yes I am well we have all kinds kinds of amazing trim levels of our instruments whether they're a 28 with herringbone whether it's a 45 with pearl all the way around the outside or an 18 with a simple binding and inlay and the way we achieve all that is here through what we call the phrasing process this is a really difficult job and what Mercedes is doing is she has a spindle that's coming off of that machine that has a cutter package on it and a lot of mathematics goes into figuring out exactly how to do this so we have as you can see all these different uh rub collars and cutter packages and every one of them is going to be appropriate for a certain type of binding trim and the end result is a consistent Channel or ledge which is then going to result in a really beautifully visually appealing and also an instrument that is protected against dings and dents from the outside sure without the binding if you were to take a sharp wrap on the corner of a guitar body the topper back could separate right but with the binding you have a softer material it's like a shock absorber ready to absorb those blows that might impact against the corner of the instrument these are some instruments that are have been bound and the tape is here to hold the binding in place until it dries at which point we're going to take it off and they'll continue on down the line but the actual process of applying The Binding back in the day would have been done with a rope which is why they called it binding because you would be binding the whole instrument with a ribbon or a rope to actually pull all that tight especially into the more difficult areas like the curvatures of a cutaway or at the waist of the instrument those are areas where it's challenging to you know to make something conform and glue in and stay stable so all this tape serves very important purpose when it comes off we're going to have a really beautiful instrument so um we've talked a lot about guitar bodies as they're going through here we've seen the bracing we've seen the side bending we've seen so much to do with bodies and not a lot to do with necks and I wanted to reassure you that the necks are going through the factory as well yeah um they definitely are they're on a separate track but this is the first point at which a guitar body and neck are going to be mated together so we call this our pre-fit area and we discussed some of our neck joints a little earlier and I will show you those again this is a compound dovetail neck joint which means that it's dovetailed in two different um uh axes two different dimensions uh it'll be really easy to visualize this when we see a loose front block and a loose neck in a few minutes but essentially what Chad is doing right now he's got this neck pre-fit and he's going to cut the heel down to the correct length so that it lines up perfectly when he puts that heel cap on that the that the trim the the black white black and then the final layer are going to line up exactly with the trim that's in the side of the instrument we glue our necks in place but these things are mated so well and so closely that you know I don't want to I don't want to Hype anyone up too much but I am confident that you could probably string up a Guitar that's been pre-fit like this it's been nicely neck fitted even without glue and I I would feel 85 percent confident that you could string it up and it would hang together just fine now of course we don't do that um you know we we do we glue them on um but you'd be amazed at the strength and structural stability that a properly executed compound dovetail joint will give you against that 200 pounds 180 pounds of string tension sure it's amazing so um the reason that we pre-fit next here even though the guitar and neck has to go through finishing still is that the dimensions are going to change further on down the line when you sand the body when you apply finish you you thicken you know you add some coats on there you know a couple thousands of an inch thick but all those little dimensional changes are going to add up so if you didn't do this step now it would be much more difficult to do the final dovetail joint later on to do that final mating so this is sort of like a we call it pre-fit and that's exactly what it is uh these things they're tagged they're serialized they're going to go through the factory their separate ways but they will come back together in final assembly is it difficult to get it out once it's in there oh you gotta use a hammer yeah oh absolutely absolutely and and you know it's a testament to the resilience I know many guitar players like you know we baby our instruments we take really extra good care of them uh you know but in the process of building these things they come into contact with some you know some serious tooling whether it's a bandsaw or a hammer or fretting hammer or something there you know you can't baby them during the building process much like The Binding that you saw going on the guitar bodies sometimes fingerboards get bound as well um but you can see that it's slotted uh and these slots obviously have to be in very precise uh locations the ratio of a relationship non-negotiable you can't get around it unless you're going fretless which is a little extra extra weird um but but we have such a variety of fret wire here um all the way from Old School bar Frets which are available through the through the custom shop only um to Gold you know gold Evo fret wire um and different Crown Heights different things like that so what we do is we uh we press the Frets in we do glue them in either with a hammer a few Taps of the hammer dead blows um or with the hydraulic uh press that comes down and pushes them all in all at the same time and and once they're in there we actually are going to snip all the excess uh Material off the edges of the Fret you wouldn't want to play that guitar that's like a recipe for a disaster um and and we're gonna actually come in and bevel of the the nice Edge the nuts get installed later on so I'm not sure why we have a nut on this visual aid here but that's all right um and once the board gets glued onto the neck blank then we'll have the nut go on there we'll trim up the head plate make sure everything fits nice and flush and um and then they're gonna go get shaped so John this is Eric he's one of our highly skilled operators here to meet you uh Erickson in neck shaping and maybe uh maybe he can tell you a little bit about what he's working on I got a uh d42 modern Deluxe right here and an 18 authentic right over here now this one right here is gonna have a thinner Barrel on it it's gonna have a nice glute on the back extend it out for the modern Deluxe series the diamonds yeah the diamond how cool beautiful piece right there you know hand shaped and then we hand sand them so this is our Finishing Touch on with everything we do while the 18s do not oh and this is going to be following our classic spec that RNG worked really hard to perform a match to a 37 I believe for this year but not mistake oh great so this has a nice pull thickness to the barrel so this one's gonna be a lot thinner and smoother to play up and down so the shape of a guitar neck is absolutely critical for the comfort of the player um it can be the you know it's the point of interface where you're really interacting with the guitar the most sure and it can make or break your XP variants the first step in getting that perfect mirror finish on A Martin guitar is starting with good Surface Prep so here what we're doing is we're sanding up these guitar bodies starting with 120 grit we're going to sand them up to 320 grit and it's a delicate thing it takes a steady hand but a good eye and you got to know when to quit so it takes a lot of experience and a lot of skill to do this job and to make sure you're doing it well that's why we got skilled guys here like Glenn they're standing in there getting in the way what you see here is the first coats of lacquer that have been applied to this instrument so our lacquering goes through a multi-step process the first step after all that Surface Prep is we get uh four or five coats um sprayed on here clear coats that go on the instrument we have a robotic spraying fixture and they go through the you know the Carousel and they get sprayed then they dry for a few days basically uh once this first set of coats has had a chance to cure then the guitars will get what's called a first sand a sand back so uh you'll go through with uh you know 320 grit sandpaper you'll knock back most of the shiners or the fish eyes or the pinholes or all the other or the orange peel all the million different terms we have to describe things that can go wrong with a finish that you know that don't look good so we knock all that stuff out of there and then they get inspected so in the event that there's a little uh air bubble or something that's going to be taken care of it's going to be filled drop filled with lacquer um drop filled with glue if necessary to make sure that everything looks perfect and then they're going to go get their final coats so they'll get three or four more coats of Placer in this case it's a full gloss nitrocellular slacker package and once that has cured for a few more days at that point the guitar is ready to be polished which is pretty hypnotic actually if the polishing robot is running I can't wait to show that to you you're going to really get a kick out of it now we still do have to polish this guitar by hand every one of these instruments needs to be hand political go through the same process uh yet again a few more times but this initial rough cut is what we call it this is an abrasive wax compound that's on the wheel so that big wheel that's spinning there it has an abrasive wax Compound on it and the robotic arm is gonna suction cup the guitar body up and actually rub the guitar against that wheel so that that initial um that initial buffing with the most aggressive abrasive whack is going to be handled by the robot basically what we're doing here is we're moving around the lacquer we're removing any little scratches that are left over from the initial uh um sanding process so this is going to reorient that lacquer the heat we'll physically move it around a little bit and uh what you end up with is a guitar that's ready for the hand treatment that it's going to need later to get that perfect mirror shine so next of course we don't have a machine to do the next so still need to be polished up by hand in the event that a guitar gets a full gloss neck although it's more common that people prefer a satin neck these days just because it's not as sticky yeah it lets you move around you start with the satin neck and as you play it it will shine up eventually you know over the years it'll get your own sort of Battle Scars and stuff but yeah I mean you could watch this thing run forever okay so final assembly absolutely so uh as you can see we have a uh dysfunctional guitar here we got a ghost Bridge um this is not gonna work out but it's a critical step in making sure we have a good glue joint again it all comes back to Good Wood on wood content a contact rather making sure that we're not gluing wood to paint because if you glue wood to wood you end up with a glue joint you do it properly that's stronger than the wood on either side right but if you glue wood to paint the paint is going to let go and you're going to have a bad time as they say so what we have is uh first this instrument has been through our automated neck fit machine and it's got uh it's got a neck that's fitted on here the pre-fitting of the dovetail really helps to get that pretty close we do hand fit next still when necessary and then we have this bridge pocket router machine basically what that does is we're going to load the guitar in there it will index off the nut and at exactly the right location it's going to cut a pocket through the paint to the wood as thin as possible to make sure that we have a great gluing surface for that bridge to adhere to now our folks who are working in this area they have to be careful there are certain hand creams that you can't use because it could contaminate the glue joint even the oils from your skin naturally could do so anything that could interfere with the glue up is you know sort of a controlled substances here at Martin we want to make sure we're not doing anything that could compromise the Integrity of the glue joint but at that point the bridge can be glued in we have a variety of different Bridges here to show you here's the standard modern belly Bridge here's an older Bridge it's got these these ramped slots here's a straight line Bridge very old school with the pyramid tips on the bridge wings and of course the Big Boss Hog there uh the 12 string of the 12 string Bridge which you can see if you were to try to glue someone like that that's got you know 200 plus pounds of tension pulling on it you better make sure you're going wood to wood because if you glue wood on the paint you're gonna have a bad time man well this is the end of the line uh for a Martin guitar from Soup To Nuts this is where the the rubber meets the road so to speak um and these instruments are getting strung up for the very first time so our final assembly and stringing department is full of folks who are really passionate about guitars they're mostly guitar players um they uh they do a few different processes here so basically before any of these guitars are ready to leave the factory they need to be strong they need to be set up we use Fleck machines for the most part to get the uh get the Fret work perfect we still know how to do fret work by hand of course but almost all of our instruments are going to get plaqued if they get Electronics those will get installed here uh and this looks like it's a non-electronic model standard D28 so pretty fitting to see at the end of the line as as caught not as classic as it gets yeah um and essentially uh we're doing all the final uh touches so whether that means the saddle needs a little adjustment whether enough slot needs a little uh needs a little love and to make sure that the guitar sounds good plays good looks good these guys are like the last line of defense to make sure that when that thing goes in its case that it's going to be perfect but that's not all once the guitar is cased up perfect ready to go ready to sell maybe already sold we let it sit for four days oh and we call that a four day hold and that's because as I'm sure you have seen sometimes a brand new guitar uh needs a little adjustment need it needs to get used to being a guitar right sure first time this piece of wood has been under this kind of tension so if something was going to let go for example if something was going to belly up too much uh if your action is gonna rise a little bit because your you know your neck relief has uh has risen a little and you know and it's under tension now and suddenly uh things are moving we want to make sure we take care of that before it goes out the door so we let them sit four days you in four days and then we open the case back up and we reinspect them and nothing leaves the building until it's been through a four day hold and re-inspection period thank you guys so very much for visiting us God that was such a thrill it's been a pleasure yeah a pleasure to show you around yeah well I I uh I can't wait to see what you guys keep doing in the next 100 years I'm hoping that I'll be here for the 200th anniversary uh celebration I think oh yeah so it should be a lot of fun guys thank you so much all you Watchers viewers out there guitar Freaks and nerds we love you here at Martin thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Premier Guitar

Views: 326,541

Keywords: guitar, guitars, guitarist, guitar player, tone, electric guitar, fender, fender guitar, gibson, gibson les paul, guitar gear, pedalboard, pedals, guitar effects, guitar pedals, premier guitar, factory tour, how to build a guitar, building a guitar, designing a guitar, how to build an acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar, acoustic, acoustics, acoustic guitars, martin, c.f. martin, martin guitar, dreadnought, martin d-28, martin d-45, d-45, d-28, guitar factory, how it's made, guitar builder

Id: _Uptr2zjWPI

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023