Quote:
Originally Posted by Wade Hampton
John, part of the mystery for many is why these guitars should cost so much more. Nowadays there's a laminated abalone shell product called "Ablam" that makes trimming guitars out with copious amounts of shell inlay cheaper, faster and infinitely easier.
So thanks to Ablam it's not at all difficult to find guitars selling for under a thousand dollars that have lots of abalone trim.
But the Martin D-45's price reflects the extra amount of time and highly skilled labor it takes to inlay abalone around the edges of a guitar the old-fashioned way, with lots of tiny rectangles of shell hand cut and inlaid. It's very labor intensive to do it that way, hence the added cost.
Hope that makes sense.
Wade Hampton Miller
|
Wade, Martin has been using Ablam since 2005.