Gbase.com heads to PA – Greetings one and all – I was lucky enough to travel to lovely Nazareth, PA, home of C.F. Martin & Co. -  you must make a point to stop by and take the tour. It’s a guitar players dream.

In all my years of traveling and cruising around the country, I’ve never had the pleasure and now I’m glad that I finally took the time. It’s a walk thru the past and present. Still filled with craftsmen and women, right along side the many technological advances that factories have to implement in order to remain competitive. More importantly, I finally got to visit the birthplace of my ‘70 D-28!

The first thing that strikes you, when you walk onto the factory floor is how clean it is. I mean, it’s a factory, right? But it’s squeaky clean.

The second thing is the smell. It has this kind of ethereal, mystical smells of outdoors – kinda of like woodsy, new guitar smell. Hard to put into words but it’s quite intoxicating. Our tour guide said that they should bottle it. It would most definitely be a big seller.

Our first stop was the Custom Shop. All the major guitar manufacturers have taken on this project and Martin is no exception. Guitar Players can work directly with Martin on a guitar customized to their specifications. The Guitar on in right is a very interesting project. Martin purchased this 60’s era guitar and rebuilt it, soup to nuts.  This conversion is a work of art. It’s been completely redone and looks and plays magnificently (yours for only $50k). They had a wall of equally impressive custom built instruments.

Our next stop was Martin’s most impressive wood warehouse. Encased in a climate controlled environment, keeping the wood at a delightful 50% humidity, necks, neck blanks, and more wood than you can shake a Tiple at, is stacked and stabilizing in the controlled environment. Rows and rows of wood, some in various states of production, others, just waiting for their chance to become a portion of the next great Martin Guitar.

Martin has a receiving team that checks in the wood and reviews it by quality and grain. They also prepare it for its next phase in production. For some woods that means drying. They several drying kilns on-site, to help stabilize the many  in different types of woods that they utilize in their production process. With so many traditional wood building materials becoming more and more difficult to obtain, Martin has been experimenting with more exotic materials to offset the shrinking supply of certain types of woods.

When you pull up to the Martin factory, there is no doubt that this place is big……really big. But when you go inside, you begin to appreciate just how large this production facility really is (that and you can walk until your feet hurt and you still have to walk some more to get out). It’s a non-stop labyrinth of space; lots and lots of space. One could easily get lost amongst the many different departments, hallways, paint booths, warehouse locations and other unknown caverns of space. I found myself asking our tour guide “Haven’t we been here before?” Only to get a chuckle and a smile, as we moved onto another portion of the tour (i’m such a knucklehead).

The X-Series Martin has been quite successful for Martin, if not simply indicated by the amount of factory space occupied by the many departments dedicated to its production. The top picture shows flats of necks drawn onto “Stratabond” material, which is many layers of this material, glued upon other layers. Then these necks are milled perfectly smooth for fitting onto one of their 36 different models of X-Series Guitars.

There are many different production processes that have been mechanized. This certainly helps keep Martin competitive in an increasingly difficult market but there are still many tasks within the creation of a guitar that have not transferred well to machines. Therefore, craftsmen and women are still quite abundant at the factory. Take for instance, the rosette – as guitar players, we may take this slightly decorative addition for granted. But to watch the woman install this delicate trimming with such grace and agility, it’s truly a craft and something to watch. Clearly, she makes it look much easier to do.

I always thought that the tops and backs of guitars, when labeled “matched” meant that they were from the same piece of wood. That’s apparently, not always the case. In higher end instruments, this can be true but matching really comes from the eyes of a trained specialist. This specialist compares hundreds of wood blanks and finds pieces that “match” up and can be used to make the back of an instrument, so that it looks uniform in appearance and grain. Sounds easy on paper but in practice, it’s much more involved. This can be the difference between what makes a guitar look spectacular or like something you’d like to use to row you across the pond. How about a  somewhat humorous reminder, hanging on the wall at Martin where they select the wood:

The production process seems never ending. In discussing this with our tour guide, depending on the model and materials used, a Martin guitar can take anywhere from 4 weeks (X-Series) to 16 Weeks (Custom Shop) to complete.

Unfortunately due to time constraints, I started dragging down our tour group. My picture taking was becoming a bit of a drain. I kept holding up the group and we were on a schedule. I have tons more pics and will gladly post them. I have a few pictures of some Ovangkol Guitars;  from early in their production life that are really sweet – to near completion. I had never heard of this type of wood before but it’s indigenous to West Africa. The color is a smokey brown/yellow with some green thrown in for good measure.

If you’d like me to post some more in this regard – shoot me an email or post here in the blog and I’ll do so shortly!

To see more of this expansive and wonderful tour, our good friends over at Premier Guitar Magazine have done an exceptional job of capturing the entire event on video. You’ll have to view several Parts (1 thru 4) but it’s acceptable version, if you can’t get to Nazareth yourself.

Don Dawson