PRS Guitars USA Factory Tour: Stevensville, Maryland

[Music] hi I'm Jack Higginbotham we are at the PRS Factory in Stevensville Maryland on the Eastern Shore and today we're going to have a factory tour we're going to focus on core s2 and our Bolton series we've been around now for more than three decades which is a little strange to think about because it doesn't feel like we've been around for three decades and a lot of the people inside of this company are the same people that walk through the doors in the 1980s in a way that continuity allows us to push and change it allows us to be flexible what isn't changing is our core principles of what makes a good guitar and the discovery that comes along with that is what really drives us every day that's the passion of making the guitar that's the passion of chasing sound every day when we walk into this factory we're basically walking in on a tightrope and we are performing a balancing act and a lot of different ways some of those ways are the balance between history versus technology and where we're pushing the art of making guitars then there's the balance of the art of the guitar itself versus manufacturing and then that leads us to the balance between manufacturing and machines versus the craftsmanship in hand Burke that goes into making a fine instrument so let's go out on the factory floor and see some of the practices that we've talked about watch some of those balancing acts that we've discussed and see what we see hope you enjoy the tour the first stop on our tour is in our rough cut guitar making is comprised materials designed and processes and in rough cut that's where we compile all of our materials these materials form the foundation of the guitar it creates the sound of the guitar from the wood working point of view once we have these materials in-house it's up to us to nurture them and to get everything we can out of this wood to make the very best guitar that we can and that starts with the drying process you have to be very careful with the drawing of Abel because curly maple is very sensitive and it actually can be easily damaged if you don't dry the wood correctly so we start with an air drying process where the wood is book-matched book matching is the process where we take a block of wood and bandsaw it in half on our horizontal mill and it folds out just like the pages on a book the wood is then put on a pallet and separated by stickers just pieces of wood that separate them from each other so that air can flow between them and slowly dry the moisture off of the wood once we get that moisture content down to a reasonable level we're then able to put the wood in our drawing rooms where we have forced hot air that circulates in the room and again just slowly works the moisture out of the wood and gets it down to below what our humidity levels are in our factory how well you dry that wood is directly correlated to how well that guitar is going to vibrate it also has a direct correlation to how it will stay in tune because if you get that moisture out you lock it down and that guitar becomes very stable you still have to make sure you've got a quality bridge quality tune or quality set up that the nut is cut correctly out of the right materials all of those things still can ruin a guitar easily but you don't stand a chance of having a guitar that stays in tune if you don't have a stable platform we divide our materials basically into two groups we have our core materials and we have our s2 bolt on materials inside of both of these groups we use a grading process so when you look through the factory and you see stacks of curly maple with different colors on the end of them and it's basically that way so that we can quickly build a schedule put our guitars together and make it ours each day based upon the demand of customers before we actually start building a guitar there's a supporting cell which is the inlay and fretboard so this is a cell that actually feeds virtually every aspect of the business it starts with thickness sanding the materials so we take that wood that's out of our oven we acclimated in our wood shop then we run it through our thickness sander and get it to the proper thickness of a final fretboard once the fretboard is thickness sanded we take it to a CNC machine where we'll cut the outline of the guitar and then we'll rout the holes for the bird inlays or whatever the inlay is this in that fretboard the peghead veneer is also thickness sanded and then it goes over to our CNC machine where we'll cut the perimeter will cut the negative for the signature and the headstock and then we'll cut the holes for the tuning pegs to go through the fretboard that's also routed and then the peghead veneer that is routed then go to be inlaid @ inlay we have a lot of options we have cases of inlay material here that span many years so we have the ability to mix and match and come up with a lot of fresh designs and ideas just based on what we've done in the past once we've selected that inlay material we take the fret board and we carefully glue each bird in place we glue the signature into the peghead veneer that's cured and then we have a finished fretboard and peghead veneer set that's ready for manufacturing so now we have our wood selected and we have a fret board and we need a neck making a neck has always been a very fascinating process to me because it's a complicated thing and if you get it right it's really right and if you don't get it right it can go wrong in several different ways it's a precision sub component of making a guitar S to bolt on and core all have slightly different processes but they really share the same goal and the goal is to have that good neck it has to be stable it has to be tonal it has to be generally very dense and very resonant this neck process is something that I did in the 80s and I really grew to love it so s2 was created at a time that we needed to learn how to make a different price point and we were looking to bring a new player into the PRS family we all agreed that many things could change but the thing we would not compromise on would be the integrity of the instrument based upon the neck which is really really at the heart of things it takes about one month to make a core neck from start to finish s2 and bolt on take a fraction of the time because it's closer to the finished dimension the neck blank itself is four quarter instead of twelve quarters so you're much much closer to your final dimension therefore you bypass a lot of the time the way we're able to use a four quarter neck blank instead of a twelve quarter is with a very accurate cut that scarfs the headstock so you make your very accurate cut on a very precise chop box basically you finish that off with a CNC operation and end up with two perfectly mating parts that when flipped over and joined together form our perfect headstock angle the end of that neck blank is then cut off and is eventually glued to the bottom of the neck and that forms the heel and where the neck pickup is going to rest upon once the headstock is scarfed and the heel is applied the rest of the process is very similar between core Bolton and s2 series we slot the neck for a truss rod install a double-action truss rod we then glue in a truss rod slot insert we clamp that truss rod slot insert in the same fixtures that we ultimately will clamp the fretboard to the neck when it sets we remove it will fly cut the surface put our tooling holes and for the fretboard and continue on the neck manufacturing process after the fretboard and the neck have been glued together we then go on to our carve program once the neck is carved then ready to round level and Fred the rounding of the fretboard is first done on a CNC machine from there on out comes a lot of handwork the first stop on the hand work is the radius and leveling of the fretboard this is used on an aluminum jig with a highly skilled craftsperson that will ensure that we have a perfect radius that's very consistent from the nut to the heel and we also have a perfectly level fretboard from the nut to the heel once we have that perfect platform then we go on to fretting fretting done perfectly will allow us to put a bead of glue in each fret slot press in each fret perfectly consistent so that when we're finished with a very flat fretboard radius very well we then have frets that are pressed in very equally and by the time we go to level the frets in our finish process there's very little material that we need to remove to make sure that that playing surface is absolutely perfect since the beginning of the company we've been very careful to think about what are the applications that a machine should be used in and what are the operations that a skilled craftsman should be responsible for in general a machine can be used for very repetitive processes but a craftsperson is absolutely essential in making sure that when you put your hands on that neck it feels perfect it's home it's comfortable that takes a person that understands what the guitar player wants to feel and can get that neck to that spot we do a lot of work with the guitar by hand and the sanding operations when compared to a neck a body is a fairly simple thing to make we start with a back and a book match top and we laminate them together in our laminating press the press is at a pressure between 6,500 pounds and about 7500 pounds so a matte a Chevrolet Suburban sitting on top of each of these stacks of bodies that's about the downforce that we're using on these guitars some guitars are solid body guitars they bypassed that laminating process and they have no maple top so it doesn't go through the book match they simply are billets of wood that are glued together joined and planed then they're ready for their dance all cut tooling holes and ready for the CNC the CNC operations for s2c II and core are all very very similar except for the programs we use a beveled carve for our s2 bodies we use a shallow violin carve for our seee Bolton's and we use a contoured car for the silver sky obviously we use our traditional violin carve for our core guitars the first cuts on the CNC are what we call back cuts the body is put in a fixture upside down located by the tooling holes that we just drilled the outside perimeter of the body is shaped the belly carve is shaped the electronics cavity is routed if there is a tremolo cavity that'll be routed here the recesses for the back plates and then the radius for the round over on the back edge the second CNC machine does all of our top cuts it's going to take care of our violin carve our neck pocket pickup holes tremolo through holes the divots for the controls or the wells for a stop tail guitar that's all done on this second machine when the body comes out of the CNC machine the first step is to sand the flat surfaces which we use a semi-automated panel sander that helps maintain a flat surface on both the top and on the back of the guitar after the panel sander we're basically sanding a body that's off of a CNC carving machine that has mill marks on it into a finished surface that's ready for staining there's a couple of things that we're achieving when we're sanding a guitar body first of all it has to be the right shape secondly it has to be absolutely scratch free because that's our challenge to ourselves is to be able to look at a stain guitar and say that there are no defects or scratches or anything to detract from the beauty of the stain and the maple that's on the guitar one of the keys of having a very good guitar is to have a very thin very hard finish and the requirement of that being able to be possible is the wood to be absolutely flat and true neck body assembly or NBA is where we make sure that it has a snug tight fit between the neck and the body the neck angle is struck so that we have the proper height on the tremolo or the stop tail and we make sure that the neck and the bridge position line up accurately with our string gauges once the neck and the body are clamped glue squeezes out of the neck joint and we spend a lot of time making sure that we clean up not just what's on the surface but we also have to be very careful to get any glue that has soaked into the pores of the wood because this is going to show up inside of the staining operation and inside of the finish operations once the body and the neck are glued together we basically have a finished guitar and we're basically finished with the wood shop in 1985 when we started the business largely the electric guitar market was opaque colors a lot of bright neons really flashy guitars and we came in and said our signature is going to be curly maple classic colors but vibrant colors and guitars that the beauty of the wood is part of what it is that's drawing you into the instrument we started out the company with three colors there was a vintage yellow a scarlet red and a royal blue but over time we've evolved those colors and those processes to be literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of colors and a lot of creativity has gone into the vision of those colors and executing those colors in a way it culminates with what we started doing with our Dain fades after our stain process we go to grain filling we use a paste grain filler that's rubbed into the wood and then wiped off which takes the open pores of the wood and fills them in so you have a flat surface to build your base coat upon after grain fill we prepped the guitar tape off the fretboard and the guitar is ready for base coat operations what most people think of with finish is a protective surface we agree with that we're trying to protect the guitar but more than anything we think of it as a tonal process finish has a lot to do with what the guitar is gonna sound like you can kill a guitar by coating it with something that is very thick and not very hard and wrapping the outside of it with it and that is something that we're very very careful inside of our company to make sure we have very thin finishes very hard finishes and to make sure that the beauty of the guitar all comes through very clear finishes from a very 30,000 foot point of view a guitar should look good feel good and sound good and finish is surprisingly a major part of executing those three fundamentals when we apply our base coat it's one and a half human hairs thick it's about six thousandths of an inch not much material on there to level off so it has to be a perfect substrate and base coat is one of the places where we believe a machine is capable of doing the job more consistently and accurately than a human because the goal of base coat is purely to put on a very thin very even very concise amount of material on the instrument just like a CNC machine a robot is capable of doing this day in and day out exactly the same after we sprayed the base coat the guitar dries and is cured after a couple of days we sand the guitar body level the surface and it goes to spray prep if a guitar has a black back or a tone back or a sunburst we go into our color coding operations a perfect sunburst is an art form and it takes an artist to apply the sunburst on our guitars everybody does it a little bit differently you can look at our guitars over the years and we can actually tell who the sprayer was that put on a particular sunburst because it's almost like a fingerprint at the end of the color coding process if we see a spot that may be a little bit light or needs a little bit of a touch-up we can go to our touch-up booth and skillfully apply matching finish to even out that back or that neck after color coding we're ready for topcoat very carefully by hand a sprayer manually sprays the coat onto the guitar and it takes a very highly skilled craftsperson to apply the finish in the way that we need it sprayed in order to achieve really what is the look the feel and the sound of the instrument by the time we finished with our spray operations the total thickness on our guitars is less than two human hairs thick we've taken material and put it on we've sanded it off we've blocked the guitar we've leveled it at base coat and then we've done it at topcoat and at the very end of the process we want to take that fretboard and essentially make it feel comfortable and familiar and like a guitar you've played all your life and it just came out of a case we do that at fret level this is also where we level the frets on our core guitars using straight sticks and make sure that the frets are absolutely level with each other after the frets are leveled then the topcoat will be machine sanded and then hand sanded the katara will be inspected carefully and then go into our buffing room when the guitar comes out of the buffing room it's carefully critiqued to make sure there's no flaws and no issues in the guitar if we see anything at this point of the process the guitar can go back a step and be corrected or it can be addressed there at the bench we call this turnaround we call it turnaround because in the beginning of the business we only had one rack for the guitars coming out of the buffing room if the guitar wasn't ready for final assembly it faced towards the buffing room when the guitar was ready for final assembly we turned it around and it faced the final assembly room so we just started calling it turnaround and that stuck our bolt on guitars are finished in a different way obviously the neck is not in the body yet so the body is sprayed separately and the neck is sprayed separately they go through the sanding operation they go through the buffing operation identically but the neck and the body are mated together after the buffing process where we find the matching pair we check the neck angle we screw the neck and the body together and then the guitar is ready for the turnaround process this is one of our major check points for quality assurance when the guitar is met with their approval it goes into a rack and a guitar builder can select that guitar and start building it but before we can make that guitar we have to go to the electronics room when we come into the electronics room what we're really doing is coming into a room full of solutions when Paul started out in the guitar world he was repairing instruments and as he was repairing those instruments he was seeing why things broke or why things weren't performing the way that the guitarist wanted it to perform and he was coming up with solutions to those problems ultimately the solutions to many of those problems led to the design of many of the proprietary parts that we use whether it's our locking tuning pegs our patented tremolo bridge the Paul's guitar bridge with brass inserts the pickups that we use every part that's on this guitar isn't unique for the sake of being unique it's unique because we feel like it's the best way that particular part can be designed and with the materials that work best for that particular guitar they're made to be high-performance in nature and in the right combination on each of the individual models they come together to finish off the personality of that instrument as we exit the electronics room we go into assembly where the room is divided into two sections one section for pre assembly and one section for final setup final assembly is where all of those components match up with the guitar and the guitar is born again going back to Pauls history I think what sets us apart to a degree within the industry is the quality of our setups in addition to being a good repair guy and a great guitar builder Paul was very well known for his setups and he has very exacting standards for those setups what this room has is the ability to take what he does at a very craftsman level making a guitar feel very special and perfect and scaling that to a manufacturing process after the guitar is finished the final assembler will fill out the hang tag sign his name on it write the specifics of the guitar on it and date the guitar and then the guitar goes in to our quality assurance final inspection we haven't talked a whole lot about quality control but everywhere that we have gone on this tour there have been elements of quality assurance and quality control all through the manufacturing of the guitar you'll also see people signing their initials and a guitar we've done this since the beginning of the company at PRS today that tradition continues but there are many more signatures because the guitars are focused on in individual areas much more carefully than they were 35 years ago and when that guitar is signed off to go from one stage to another the person responsible for saying that guitar is good puts their initials in the guitar at final inspection the guitar is play tested make sure that everything about that guitar is performing the way that we want it to perform at final casing we're making sure the guitar looks perfect has all the appropriate accessories with the guitar then the case is closed the guitar goes into a box it goes into our warehouse and is preparing to go out to a customer but there's one more stop along the way on Friday mornings we go into our warehouse and we randomly select the guitars that are preparing to be shipped we pull those out of the shipments we take them to our conference room where our manufacturing managers and quality assurance come together and review the guitars to see where we stand on a quality level inside of the company and generally speaking we don't find problems with the guitars but what we do have is an opportunity to think about how we can improve the processes or improve the guitars and sometimes we'll even come up with ideas for new guitars for the future inside of this meeting I hope some of you will decide to come to PRS and actually experience this firsthand thank you for watching the video thank you for taking our factory tour and thank you most of all for being a part of the PRS family we hope to see you soon [Music] you

Channel: PRS Guitars

Views: 561,166

Rating: 4.9275999 out of 5

Keywords: PRS, Guitars, Factory, Tour, Stevensville, Maryland, USA, Paul, Reed, Smith, Guitar, Paul Reed Smith, Jack, Higginbotham, Jack Higginbotham, build, complete, wood, shop, woodshop, inlay, fretboard, neck, body, team, bolt on, on, bolt, core, s2, s2 series, finish, stain, final, assembly, casing, shipping

Id: BqVTY0f_sG8

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019