The Great Cargo Truss Rod Poll

[Jaygits]

Larry - huge respect for Breedlove. I remember the initial resistance to the shape and design. Cool to watch their growth for them of late

... years of MI retail, and years of MI manufacturing here .... from steel string, to carbon fiber, and currently nylon. Don't know what's next? Violins? hahahah ...

Tarp --- I don't know how our paths haven't crossed especially considering the CA connection and the LA (i live in Los Angeles) connection. It would be fun to chat some time soon. I'm sure Ellis did think of his little guitar as a traveler - I don't know this for sure, but it's likely he was thinking of the Baby Taylor. I can tell you for sure I was thinking of the Baby Taylor ... I was fresh from the Taylor womb where I spent 5 years handling National Accounts. I met Laurie at Summer Namm 2007 where our booths were adjacent. I basically cold called them because I thought it would be cool to get to author things. In the end, I was able to do that with Cargo. Ellis is due all credit for the guitar - I just flew the flag for it and worked on market positioning and branding.

One of the things we never did, that I felt strongly about, was to purchase the URL www.cargoguitar.com .... I thought we would have done well to market Cargo under a seperate URL which links to the main CA website. Same concept - utilizing the Cargo as doorway into the carbon guitars, and into the CA brand. But then again, that would have caused the "problem" of way too many orders.

Cheers,

Jay

[Tone Gopher]

Originally Posted by Jaygits

The other aspect I haven't heard mentioned is stiffness can be controlled by the layering of the carbon, and the exact elements that make up the composite with the carbon fiber. This is where Ellis's 10 plus years of product development really bore fruit. That information was kept pretty close to the vest. I suspect that knowledge will be shared with the new owners.

Jay

I tried to address that in the previous thread regarding the Peavey acquisition:

Originally Posted by Tone Gopher

Given that the necks are currently engineered to maintain geometry without a truss rod, adding a truss rod would require that they make the neck less stiff so the truss rod could have an effect without excessive force. The good news is that such a modification is easily accomplished if one understands how to critically tune a composite layup. The resultant product should still be just as stable as one could hope for.