Taylor Guitars factory tour

[dennisg]

As many of you know, it was my birthday a few days ago, and my wife gave me a tour of the Taylor factory for my present. Do I have a great wife or what? That gift was exactly the right size and color.

Located some 30 minutes northeast of San Diego is the little town of El Cajon, a leafy residential area with a small pocket of industry. It's in that pocket that Taylor has not one ... not two ... but seven huge buildings taking up most of both sides of Gillespie Way.

I won't lie to you -- I was excited to be there at the birthplace of my Taylor 814, and I was looking forward to seeing how it was made.

One more thing before I start the photo tour: I had fully intended for this to be a video tour. I brought along my trusty Kodak Zi8, fully intending to interview people in the Taylor facility, only to discover that the factory floor is phenomenally loud. So loud, in fact, that all the tour participants had to wear headphones while the guide communicated with us through a mic. Yeah, that loud.

[MarkM]

Oh Dennis what a gift indeed!!!! I'm looking for excuses to get out there. That must have been awesome. I'm heading to Austin at the end of the month and may check to see if Collings guitars has a tour there.




MarkM

[mcfingers]

I know how you must feel Dennis. It is on my bucket list too.
I just found out that the Taylor Road show is coming March 30th to my local music store. You can be sure that I will be arriving early for a good seat.

Happy Birthday, Steve

[dennisg]

I had no idea what form the wood was in when it was delivered to Taylor. For all I knew, they might be receiving entire trees. But as I soon found out, they received wood in essentially two forms. The first is 4-by-4 beams (like this mahogany) that Taylor will eventually turn into guitar necks.

[dennisg]

The other form the delivered wood takes is long flat boards, like these stacks of koa. An interesting thing about koa: in about five years, you won't see any more guitars made from it because it will be endangered. In fact, it's already endangered, and the wood that is being sold to Taylor today was actually harvested years ago by folks who knew it would be particularly valuable one day. They were right.

[Catman]

Hmmm. For my wife's birthday I'll send her to your wife for a course in birthday gifting!

David

[dennisg]

The boards are cut into very thin strips, then placed on these racks in a process known as "stickering." The idea is to get the wood acclimatized so that when it's finally built into a guitar, it doesn't start shrinking or expanding.

The sign is small, but it identifies this wood as East Indian Rosewood. It will eventually be made into the backs and sides of Taylor models from the 700 series on up.

[dennisg]

Before you do the tour, it's natural to be curious about which processes are done by hand and which are done by machine. Our guide put it like this: Any process that has a direct bearing on how a guitar looks or plays is done by a person. Any process that requires close tolerances is done by computer-controlled machine.

Makes sense to me. And an example of the latter can be found in this photo. This is a computer-controlled laser that cuts out the tops and backs from a thin piece of wood. Actually, it's two thin pieces of wood that have been glued together side by side ("bookmatched"). When you think about it, cutting out the shape of a top or bottom is not something a human could easily do to close tolerances -- in this case 3 one-thousandths of an inch, or less than the width of a human hair.

[dennisg]

The laser also cuts out the sound hole. And as thin as this wood is, a router is still able to cut a circular groove around the hole for the rosette, which is glued into place by hand.

[dennisg]

Remember all those long mahogany 4-by-4's you saw in the beginning? This is what became of them. Here the guide holds up a guitar neck. Notice the rack behind him.