Old Martin Guitar Factory - City Music Martin Factory Tour Part 1

you good morning my name is Brendan we're here at the old Martin guitar Factory on North Street in Nazareth Pennsylvania this building was started in 1859 when the family moved from Cherry Hill down into Nazareth and as you can see behind me it's a beautiful old brick structure that's been added to a couple of times started down here on the corner with the the house and the original part of the factory and then was added on to right behind me where the C F and M are and it was moved into this other structure where we'll see a little bit later inside the inside the barn and as we progress through the building we'll go into the barn and then later on we'll see the extension that happened in the early 1900s let's go inside and see what it looks like so we're now inside the the old factory this is Gail and she's setting up a top to send out to somebody this is now what we call guitar makers connection and this is a place where people can buy it's our parts you can also buy complete guitar kits and Yael and Liz and Ron and the rest of the crew will get all this stuff out all over the world take a step in here if we look down here in the corner there's a shaded window and that used to be the door where CF Martin would come in from his house in the morning he would come in through that door and he had his desk in this area and as you hopefully you can tell from the video this is a very very small space it's much smaller than what it looks like on the outside so he would have set up his desk there a little bit of a shop here and moved on from there right now we're upstairs in what we call the barn and we can see the old slat boards on the wall feel the old flooring and leaded windows so this is all this is all original for the most part some things have changed over the years and what you can't feel from the camera is that it's very hot we're late middle to late May right now but it's very warm up here and it's still early in the morning so we can just imagine that when people were working here building guitars in July and August in Pennsylvania it gets very warm and very humid so they would have had difficulty working in some of the hot afternoons generally they would start pretty early in the morning and try to avoid as much of that as they could there's a lot of writing on the walls in this part of the building and some of that has been preserved so we have all sorts of things from people keeping track of snow and rain to writing specifications on the walls and these little these little tidbits of information are all over this room this is a little bit newer right here but the full string display will work on getting some old string packaging in there and what's happening right now in this part of the building is our company archivist his name is dick Boak and dick Boak has spent a lot of time bringing some of the materials that have been sitting in closets and up in the attic down here to showcase them including old work benches and fixtures used for next shaping we'll see some of these at the new factory as well we use very similar pieces over there but a lot of these old benches would have come out of the ports or areas in Philadelphia when CF would go down to the ports to pick out wood he would often come back with one of these benches a couple of old old pieces here this is an old building form you'll see a lot of these hanging on the walls and each body size had to have its own exclusive building form down here we have a violin case and we don't we don't hear a whole lot about Marc guitar and violins but we think that CF built maybe six violins and we've acquired some recent pieces that that he definitely worked on we're not sure that he he'd built so we haven't officially seen a Martin violin yet but we know that his his cousin CF Hartman who was the N company in the name though violins and left the company to do that later this batch is interesting we have an old blue pot copper pot they would have put the the hide glue in to keep it warmth a couple of clamps and chisels up here and old double o 15 and we notice that the benches are all in front of the windows to try to attract as much light as possible onto the work area there's an old ukulele form and this is fitting because we also have the old bending irons here and these have been electrified but originally these would have been heated up in a probably coal or a wood stove to get them hot and what would happen is with the individual side they would bring them on to the iron add a little bit of steam and bend the piece of wood over the iron very slowly another old 15 here just to display how the workbench might have looked at that time and of course when electricity came we added some added some lights where we could see an old coffin case in the corner see some more of those later these are interesting so we have the form but we also have little jigs that they would use to determine where braces would go or different strips you can see all the different markings in here this jig was somewhat adjustable and it has markings on here for a double O 25k to use the mahogany mark we have some markings on here for double O 18 so this is basically a double eighteen double O form used for several different pieces this is a nice old roll-top desk still functioning beautiful piece of woodwork unfortunately this is not the desk that we see in some of the old videos with CF Martin but it's very very similar to that style mandolin form up in the corner so we built a number of mandolins not one of our most popular instruments but we certainly come across quite a few and up here on this hook is a martin tipple some reason had two cards on on both sides at some then we're also using this opportunity over here to display we have members of the Martin family that would have worked in this building so CF jr. Herbert and Frank Henry and as this area over here evolves and improves what we'll use it for general education as well so we see some sick-ass Bruce laid out showing quarter sawing and how the wood would actually be extracted from the tree some old jigs here used for determining bridge location nice piece of Brazilian rosewood don't see much of that anymore this is a body press very old body press it's been fixed up a little bit just for demonstration the the body would be inside this form and then the top and back would be glued on and then it turned this wheel and press everything together and hold it while it would dry so now we're here in the extension to the old factory and this building was built in the early part of the 1900s when Google Ali's became very popular weren't manufacturing legal alleys up here but we needed room in the other parts of the factory to be able to manufacture those and had moved some of the guitar production up here in this part of the building we see very old metal windows so if you're looking at old photos from Martin guitar you'll you'll notice which part we're building you're in based on the type of window that's that's in the background you have a beautiful building very old old wooden floors and this part of the building would have been built with electricity as we've seen earlier in other parts of the building made they were built prior to electricity and had been retrofitted later on so this this part had the advantage of having lectures so you put in as it was built you you

Channel: CityMusic Sg

Views: 63,650

Rating: 4.9317698 out of 5

Keywords: Acoustic Guitar (Musical Instrument), C. F. Martin & Company (Business Operation), Martin Guitar Factory Tour, Martin Guitar Factory

Id: bGdnFhv5YdA

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2015