[Doc Scantlin]

Originally Posted by MC5C

I looked at the L-4 that Steve linked to in the "Next best thing to an L-5" thread, and the first thing that leapt off the page was "hand carved spruce top". Gibson and every other factory making archtops used copy routers, they didn't hand carve anything. Maybe in the very early days they did, and maybe pre-war they finished them with hand carving, tuning, graduating, but by the 1940's they were doing all the rough carving on machines, and probably just doing finish sanding by hand. I have nothing against machines doing grunt work (when I toured the Benedetto shop in 2018, the first thing I saw was the CNC machines and the now semi-retired old hand-made copy router). I just wonder if describing every solid top instrument as "hand carved" isn't getting a little romantic and deliberately evoking some fictitious image of a worker with a top on a bench surrounded by shavings knee deep on the floor as he "hand carves" a top (or a back, which is around 10 times harder), which when I do it involves several power tools, and at least three or four days of actual hand and arm numbing bench time with planes and scrapers. The reality was wood clamped on machine, carved top ready for finish work in 30 minutes, next one please.

...'getting a little romantic"... ha! At Gruhn Guitar's repair shop we would grin and wink at each other when the "you know what" got a little deep regarding the supposed "old world" craftsmanship of this or that instrument factory. Our pet phrase was ..."sweat from the craftsman's brow"... Of course this was in the late 1970's and while we did some wonderful repairs, none of us even knew how to sharpen a plane or what a card scraper even was...This includes some who went on to be very famous builders. Our favorite "old world" tool was the drum sander!