On a recent family trip to Southern California, I had the opportunity to make a side trip to El Cajon to visit the Taylor Guitar factory. Anyone who knows me well also knows that I am a Taylor Guitar poster-child. I fell in love with Taylor's about 2+ years ago when buying my first guitar. I now own and (try to) play four of them.
Before I get to the tour, let me tell you about my little Taylor collection and thus the reason why I wanted to see where they were born.
I committed that I was going to do something I wanted to do since I was 12, that is become a competent guitar player. In elementary school I started taking lessons from a Vietnam-vet neighbor of ours who taught me cowboy chords and strumming. In the seventh grade armed with about 4 chords and a horrible guitar, I played on stage for the Christmas presentation. Shortly thereafter, that (cheap) guitar self-destructed and my parents couldn't afford another. That ended my guitar playing for 30 years.
So I went with a buddy of mine to Zone Music in Cotati to see if a guitar would find me. After listening to my friend (I couldn't really play anymore) play about 20 acoustic guitars, he played the first chord on the Taylor and I shouted "that's the one". Even my friend's eyes got big when he hit a big fat E chord. Then in Dropped-D he started jamming. All he could say was "Wow!, Wow!, Wow!" I tried to coax a few chords out of it, but comparing the fret board feel to the others, I knew it was a match. So that is how I got my first Taylor 110. Yes, it wasn't a $99 special, but I wanted a guitar I would enjoy playing every day and I mean every day.
After taking lessons for about a year or so with my beloved guitar teacher, Tony Gagarin, I started venturing into alternate tunings and started writing a piece of music in Open-Gm. Tony for what ever reason let me try it on his 12-string which happened to be in that tuning. That spoiled me right there. There is just something about a 12-string, I guess it is the chorus effect of all those harmonics running around. After doing a lot of reading online and chatting with others I took the plunge and ordered up a Taylor 355-ce online and hoped for the best. When it arrived at my office, I rushed home and spent the next 2 hours in musical bliss. That guitar can ring forever. It is like lush sweet honey in my hands.
Just recently I purchased a Taylor 314-ce from Charlie down at Tall Toad Music. At this point in my playing I wanted a guitar with a cut-away and built in electronics so I could start digitally capturing direct from my 6-string. My grand plan is to start doing open mic in a couple of months as well so having a 6-string with electronics was desired. The 314-ce is a similar construction to the 355-ce in terms of wood composition, neck radius/width. The bodies differ slightly. The 355 is a Jumbo body, huge in fact, where the 314 has a smaller girth and pinched waist. Both deliver stunning bass response and crystalline high notes. They just sound and play incredible.
Oh yeah, The tour...
Taylor offers tours Monday-Friday leaving from the main lobby at 1PM sharp. The give you a no-holds-barred look at how they make guitars. You get to see every facet of how they turn out some incredible musical instruments. The one thing you get from talking to the people there is that they are passionate about making the best quality instrument possible and they really, really care about the environment and conserving natural resources.
Taylor Guitars for the most part aren't "hand-made", there is a lot of automated machining that goes into them. Some comment on this as a negative, but Taylor does it for 2 reasons. First and foremost is that it reduces waste, second it gives them a high level of consistency between each guitar and thus a higher quality product.
Guitars are made of wood. Duh! This is a renewable resource, however, as I found out, the prized sound board wood, Sitka Spruce is about to run out and it takes 500 years for a Sitka Spruce tree to become the right size to make a guitar sound board. Sitka spruce is just the choice wood for steel-string acoustic guitar sound boards. It has great strength & weight and has exquisite sound characteristics. That is why it is used in guitars and pianos. Some of those qualities also makes it a great wood for sailboats. At the current rate of consumption, there is 9 years of Sitka Spruce left. Then we all have to wait another 500 years. Here's a picture of a 600 year old cross section of the beloved wood.
The tour starts by a walk through the lumber yard. Taylor uses a wide variety of woods in the construction of their line up; Sitka Spruce, Sapele, Mahogany, Ovangkol, Red Cedar, Indian Rosewood, Ebony, Maple, Walnut... Some of the wood is so rare and expensive it is kept in a locked cage. Walking through the lumber yard was a sensory experience. The smells of the woods was quite something.
Here's picture of raw walnut that was just dragged in. That day the guys in the shop were getting ready to cut-up this walnut for a run of solid bodies.
The beginning looks like wood-shop from 8th grade except for guys punching each other in the arms and making grunting noises.
After the wood is chopped up into manageable pieces like neck blocks, bodies, etc. It needs to start being acclimatized so that the moisture level is just right for working with the wood. Taylor is very fussy about keeping the temperature inside at 75 F and a relative humidity (RH) of 47%. Here's a stack of sticked walnut that is being fanned to wait until the water level wood reaches the ambient RH.
The next step in the process for non-solid bodies is to have the sheets of wood go to the laser cutting facility. They use a white-light laser (some CO2 + some other gas, forgot to ask) to precisely cut the tops and sides. It takes about 2 minutes for the laser to zip out the top with incredible precision. This helps them avoid "oops" with the tops using a saw to reduced their waste from bad cuts.
In parallel, the neck facility is using a CNC machine to router the necks that have been assembled up by a another group. This machine can do 8 necks at a time and takes about 15 minutes.
Before going on the CNC machine, the fret wires are installed by hand. This part of the job needs the precision of the human hand I guess.
Once the tops have been cut up, higher end models of Taylors have abalone rosettes installed around the sound hole. This is all done by hand. The abalone is purchased in arcs then hand applied to the laser cut recess in the top. They use "super-glue" to apply the rosette, then the top is finish sanded and polished to remove excess glue and make the rosette smooth with the top.
Finally all the pieces join up on palettes to make their way to the side-bending shop.
The side benders are custom designed equipment by Taylor. They used to waste 20% of the sides because bending takes a precise amount of pressure, heat, and moisture to coax the wood into a completely unnatural shape. By hand, a little too fast or too much pressure, and into the waste basket it goes. Now with automatic benders, waste is less than 2%.
Once it comes off the bender, it goes into a buck to be glued up with the other half and clamped so that it can cool and dry into shape.
Out of the buck, the guys in that same room apply curfing around the edges. Curfing I guess is a wood-working term. The curf is a piece of wood with slits cut in it so that it becomes highly flexible. This is glued on with wood glue. This room was just stinky and hot. The side benders throw off lots of heat and the glue smelled like hell.
Here you can see the curfing on a stack of bodies. The purpose of the curf is to provide a much larger surface area to glue the top on.
In the next room, a small team of women were gluing the bracing on the tops. There is 200+ pounds of shear stress across a steel 6-string guitar top. Without bracing and curfing, the sound board would tear apart and peel off the top of the guitar. Here's our guide, Martin (wrong name for working at Taylor), showing the template for bracing a steel-string guitar. The 12-strings have MORE bracing and the nylons have minimal bracing.
The next group is responsible for putting all the pieces together. Since the gluing process now is on all visible parts, it is crucial to make sure all glue that can ooze on to exterior parts is sanded off. The reason is that that finish will not adhere to the wood. So Taylor uses a glue that is doped with an ultraviolet marker that can be seen under a black light. Nothing on the body or necks can glow before going to finishing.
Here's a rack of guitars waiting for finishing. The finish application is done by a robot in a clean-room. Taylor takes great care in the finishes they use for low volatile organics (VOCs) and capturing the VOC's that would contribute to pollution.
Now it is on to final assembly. These guys have the great job of playing every guitar that exits the plant. They will do a QA on assembly, playability, tonal purity across the entire fret board. By the way, each department has guitars hanging on the wall. Everyone plays during breaks. Yes they are passionate about guitars!
I was a bit envious of this part. First off these guys have all the good stuff. Boxes of beautiful gold and silver tuners, and a crap load of Elixir strings of every gauge you can fathom. Next, they get paid to play guitars all day long.
Sean below is doing a final check out on a brother of my 355ce 12-string.
And finally a long rack of finished Taylor goodness. Each guitar has a name tag on it. That person was responsible for the quality assurance of the guitar.
The Taylor facility also has a complete repair shop for warranty and out of warranty repairs. These guys and gals had great stories of guitars coming in that had been dropped, kicked by angry spouses, over tuned, dried out like prunes in a desert, etc. They were confident they could take an abused guitar and make it playable again.
And here's the beautiful Chantha, doing a final tune and check on a guitar that had come in for repairs.
Hope you enjoyed reading about my Taylor-made day! It is a great tour if you are into guitars or fine woodworking.
