Hand built or factory?

[Rev Roy]

Originally Posted by hifivic

Not sure I agree with higher variability. We've all read on these forums about factory guitars every now and then just seem to hit a home run while the rest are mediocre...

Huh? Sure, individual guitars vary. But the idea that folks like Martin and Taylor only occasionally produce a “home run” then go back to a long slog through mediocrity hasn’t been my experience.

[RP]

Originally Posted by Rev Roy

Huh? Sure, individual guitars vary. But the idea that folks like Martin and Taylor only occasionally produce a “home run” then go back to a long slog through mediocrity hasn’t been my experience.

Mine either and without naming a specific boutique brand, I recall playing one from hifivic's list, and it left me unimpressed....

[stringjunky]

Originally Posted by merlin666

There are two different distinctions here. The first one that involves use of advanced machinery and tools that replaces labourers which takes place in a factory setting. The second distinguishes between individual production and mass production where division of labour takes place. For me the factory denotes this mass production where many labourers perform routine tasks such as polishing bodies only or bending sides only etc. The result is a relatively high output of standardized products. Individual building will have much smaller production numbers and higher variability from one guitar to the next.

Not in the area of tone. The variables shift for that.

[gitarro]

This is a tough question to forensically define but easier to intuitively differentiate, and there have been quite a few previous threads on this topic i believe. It is very interesting though and i rhink it is worth ventilating again here to get the views of more people.

I don't think that it is useful to use the term handbuilt because Factory guitars r mostly handbuilt anyway and there are small shops and solo luthiers who heavily use the same manufacturing techniques that factories use.

Weather the guitar maker customise their instruments for their individual customers needs is also not as useful because most Guitar Factories also have custom shops.

We also cannot use the Criterion of whether the guitar maker will build a guitar from scratch for the exact requirements of the customer even though it is not similar to any existing model on it's range of guitar models comma because most solo luthiers will only customise to a certain degree as based on their existing model range as well.

And yet we have no problems usually putting Jim Olson in the Luthier category and Santa Cruz guitar company in the small shop category and Martin and Gibson in the factory category for example.

I think the biggest difference is whether the overarching priority of the guitarmaker is to produce a consistent product that needs a set of uniform dimensional criteria and parameters that will facilitate the Longevity of the product, or whether the guitar maker is instead seeking to optimise the total response of each instrument that they produce to be as good as they can make it vis a vis the particular woods used for the build so that there isnt a one size fits all approach. Their methodologies and techniques will reflect this fundamental purpose.

[stringjunky]

Originally Posted by RP

Mine either and without naming a specific boutique brand, I recall playing one from hifivic's list, and it left me unimpressed....

You probably don't like that brand's signature tone.

[stringjunky]

Originally Posted by RP

Mine either and without naming a specific boutique brand, I recall playing one from hifivic's list, and it left me unimpressed....

You probably don't like that brand's signature tone but that says nothing about their probable greater consistency in producing that tone from one guitar to the next.

[RP]

Originally Posted by stringjunky2

You probably don't like that brand's signature tone but that says nothing about their probable greater consistency in producing that tone from one guitar to the next.

Au contraire. I've played several over the years including while visiting their "factory." I've also come very close to buying several, but this particular one was lacking in tonal quality. It happens....

[hifivic]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

Merlin666 was right to mention division of labor. When you're making guitars that way, you're necessarily doing what iim7V7IM7 talked about; making standardized instruments with interchangeable parts. The whole point of division of labor is to save time: each worker becomes very skilled at a particular task, but they can't take the time to adapt to variations. When I took the Martin tour the woman who was trimming top braces was incredibly fast, but she wasn't 'voicing' the top in the sense of trying to optimize the brace heights for that particular top. She just matched the brace profiles to the standard model in front of her, and went on to the next one. This is, of course, 'hand work', but it's not done to improve the quality of the final guitar; it's simply a sales gimmick that allows Martin to say that they 'hand shape' their bracing, rather than using 'evil' CNC machines to cut them. Me, I'd like to know who sharpened that chisel.

Factories live by fit and finish; it's the only way they can make money. To the extent that F&F determine what a 'good' guitar is, they have the edge over anybody who feels the need or desire to make changes from one instrument to the next. Any maker who does make changes 'on the fly' is depending on skill to preserve the quality of F&F. This introduces an element of risk on that front, since even very skilled workers sometimes make mistakes.

The trade-off there is supposed to be in the interest of more control over tone quality. This is not guaranteed, as it depends in part on how well the maker understands what produces tone. It has been shown that, due to the amount of variation in wood properties, highly consistent dimensional tolerances yield variable tone quality. This is not an issue for production shops which build mostly 'on spec', since it's likely that somebody will like every guitar they make. Many small shops and individual makers build to order, and that often includes specifications on tone that need to be matched reasonably closely. It's probably not possible to make guitars that sound 'identical', but a skilled maker who understands tone can consistently come quite close to a target.

In all of this it's well to keep in mind that we're working with designs that have been highly optimized over many years of refinement. Simply building a guitar carefully to a proven design using good quality wood will get you most of the way there. In any such system the difference between 'average' and 'very good' is small, but it's also important, and difficult to achieve, and that adds value.

So I guess I'd summarize it by saying it comes down to who calls the shots. A 'hand maker' is going for a particular result, which is defined either by him/her self, or by a customer. The builder can chose any means they like to realize that result, from all hand tools, to CNC, to farming out steps such as inlay and finish, to produce the product. In a 'factory' the designs have been pre-defined, and the worker reproduces them by whatever means seems appropriate to the managers. This can include a fair amount of hand work, or almost none. Design goals are, for the most part, in terms of physical dimensions that can be objectively specified, rather than subjective things like 'tone'. I'm aware that this is all debatable, and far from satisfactory. There's a lot of wiggle room in there, and very few examples at either extreme.

Excellent well written post Alan, thank you.

[YeOldRocker]

Much like professionally done set-ups, an awful lot of what makes an already good guitar great are the final touches to an already fantastic build and well-selected woods, saddles, etc.

So when companies like Martin or Taylor make "factory" guitars, they still produce top notch instruments, overseen throughout the process and finalized by skilled craftsmen. The final product, while undoubtedly made more rapidly in a "factory" (and maybe more accurately, due to advanced tech) the product is overseen by skilled craftsmen throughout its creation.

Obviously, higher-end guitars built in these factories are given even more oversight, and the cost reflects it, but - beyond personal, subjective opinions on who makes the best guitars, the products are competitively equal to some if not all so-called "boutique" brands.

To my mind, outside of unique custom orders that cannot (or are not desired by enough players to merit repetition), top-notch "factory" guitars are essentially on par with any truly handbuilt guitar in terms of creating a quality instrument.

Now, are all factories/brands equal? Not by a long shot.

[Rmz76]

Originally Posted by iim7V7IM7

FYI, Jim Olson is an early pioneer of a solo luthier employing a CNC (a Fadal) into is highly fixtured building process. Jim typically builds in batches of 20 guitars at a time (mostly one model, an SJ). He used to build 3 batches of 20-guitars a year, but has eased back his practice to a batch or two in recent years. His use of CNC, level of fixturing, use of a catalyzed finish and focus on a single model enables an output of about 4x over most one at a time solo luthiers.

I didn't know that... Very interesting.

You might be shocked how many small builders and one-man shops have CNC machines today.

[dneal]

I still don't understand the contempt for CNC.

[1Charlie]

I had the great fortune to tour the Huss and Dalton shop week before last.

H&D purchased a CNC machine in 2004, and slowly incorporated it into their operation. It churns out bridges, rough-cut necks, fretboards, etc, which are taken across the parking lot into the assembly shop. Mark Dalton told me that the CNC can make parts more reliably, faster, and with less waste. For instance, the machine had just finished a run of bridges, and out of 20, only one of them had to be thrown out.

What happens in the workshop is that these individual parts are made into exquisite guitars with human hands and a variety of power and hand tools.

Mark Dalton takes care during his discussion of the CNC machine to describe what it does and why. It does not generally spit out "finished" parts. Instead, it frees him, Jeff Huss and their team to do what they do best, which is to take the CNC parts and sculpt fine guitars out of them. They are not just slapping CNC parts on without lots of further handwork to suit each instrument.

I own two H&D's, one that predates CNC (2004) and one that fully utilizes it (2014). While it is cool to think about all of the handwork that went into the '04, the '14 is every bit its equal in terms of fit, finish, tone and playability.

So, from at least my tiny sample size, I can tell no difference between "before" and "after" CNC from a quality perspective.

Probably the coolest thing I saw in the shop was one of the simplest. H&D use a simple weight and gauge to test the flexibility of each top. All tops are then repeatedly sanded to achieve a thickness that falls within a specified range of flex. This is regardless of species. Mark told me that through trial and error during their earliest years, they found that the best guitars they made fell within these flex parameters. So they built that process into every guitar.

[Steadfastly]

Originally Posted by murrmac123

This is the thing that always intrigues me, Charles ... like ... how does the builder actually know that one more stroke with the sanding block will ruin the top ?

I totally get the top stiffness measurement thing (not part of this thread discussion so far, admittedly) ... but it seems to me that many builders like to propose an almost mystical , tai-chi kind of approach to their voicings, and I am not sure that I can altogether gel with that .

AFAIAC if it can't be measured, then it doesn't exist.

Now there is reasoning and thinking ability.

[RP]

Originally Posted by dneal

I still don't understand the contempt for CNC.

I think that the contempt is more apparent among guitar forum purists than builders themselves. I visited the shop where Rockbridge guitars were built several years ago. I don't know if they've since moved, but at the time it was in the basement of an old house in Charlottesville. My recollection is that a staff of three did the actual building in the mishmash of small rooms. I asked about whether having a CNC machine would be desirable and was told that they'd love to have one but their space and small output didn't really support such an expenditure at the time...