Touring the Taylor guitar factory

on friday i had the opportunity to tour the taylor guitar factory in el cajon, california. these folks have been in business for 35 years and have created a well respected name for themselves in the acoustic guitar community based on their high quality and consistency of product. next to martin, taylor is probably the most well know and sought after mass-produced acoustic guitar. bob taylor, the founder, turned the guitar building community on its head by revealing and sharing his 'secrets' and design improvements with other builders in an effort to create more of a open dialog between luthiers. nowhere is this attitude of idea-sharing and education more evident than in the free factory tours available to the public during which you are encouraged to snap as many photos and ask as many questions as you like.

stacks of raw wood, cured and waiting to be shaped into guitars:
neck blanks:
view of the headstocks. the taylor logo is inlayed by a machine after a laser cut removes the wood from the headstock. a perfect fit every time. this is one of the many ways in which taylor is able to speed up production in order to pump out roughly 300 guitars a day.
the side bending room: taylor engineered many of its own machines to preform specific jobs in the building process. side bending is one of the most time consuming and difficult steps in crafting a guitar. these machines can bend the sides of a guitar into proper shape in 2-3 minutes. the wood blank is lightly sprayed with water then wrapped in thin paper before being fed into the bending plates. the plates themselves run at about 300°F in order to heat and mold the wood to shape.
these wooden molds retain the shape of the newly bent sides as they cool down after being pulled from the bending machines:
each step of the building process is preformed by 1-2 craftsman. here two guys work on gluing pairs of sides together:

the mold at work:

a stack of completed sides:
strips of kerfing are glued along the inside edges of the sides. kerfing is a strip of wood (typically mahogany or basswood) cut in small intervals so that it may bend and be molded to the shape of the guitar. up close it looks kinda like a wooden zipper. it is used to strengthen the bond between the top and back to the sides of the guitar by providing a larger surface area to glue these all together. the metal clips seen here were designed by talyor as a more efficient means of clamping the kerfing to the sides. a very particular angle must be used to ensure a tight bond. in the past, most builders simply used clothes pins as clamps but bob taylor engineered these specific clamps to provide the appropriate grip and angle necessary for this crucial step:
a quick shot of one of taylor's hallmark innovations, the 3 bolt neck attachment system. typically a guitar neck is attached to its body with a dovetail joint. while this method provides a strong bond between neck and body, it is quite time consuming to preform work on. as years go by and humidity changes and environmental stress add up, many guitars will require a 'neck reset' which means removing the neck from the body and reshaping the joint so that the guitar fretboard is level and plays in tune. this can be a 10-12 hour job and cost upwards of $600 by some estimates since a dovetail joint needs to be steamed open and then sanded, shimmed or reshaped. taylor's 3 bolt system allows the repairman to remove the neck and preform the necessary work in as little as a half hour. below is a neck and body pair set aside for demonstration purposes during the factory tour. you can see a single bolt on the top or fretboard side of the body and two more where the bottom of the neck joins the sides:
our tour guide holding up two tops to show off taylor's bracing system. the top on the left is a jumbo sized steel string, beefed up with extra bracing to compensate for the 150-200lbs of pressure a set of steel strings places on a guitar top. on the right is a nylon string classical guitar top with lighter bracing:
the machines that route out the sound holes:
holding docks with metal molds keep the glued together bodies stable as they setup:
here's a shot of a few cutaway instruments. interesting to note that the areas of the top and backs that are removed for the cutaway are left on until after the top, back and sides are all glued together:
a couple shots of the spray booth. bob taylor sat down with a team of chemists to develop a new finish which can both easily be sprayed onto a guitar as well as producing very little in environmentally toxic waste. essentially, the new finish is positively charged so that when it is sprayed at the guitar body, it is attracted to and instantly bonds with the wood. typically you will spray a fair amount of lacquer finish off into the air when finishing a guitar, wasting expensive materials but this chemical process ensures that the vast majority of the sprayed finish ends up on the guitar. the spray booth here used to be cleaned out and all the filtering material used to 'catch' the wasted finish was brought to the dump twice a day. now they only make two trips to the dump per week. nice way to save $ and the environment, eh?
enclosed in the spray booth is a robotic arm which grips guitar bodies by the three bolt neck attachment system. the arm moves the body around a spry nozzle, going over the top, back and sides in three coats. you can see a guitar body hanging in wait on the left side of the photo. when the robotic arm finishes with one body, it hangs it on a spinning window on the far side of the booth. the arm then pops back over to the other side and grabs the next instrument to be sprayed. a single spray booth operator sets up each new body in the 'ready' to be finished after hanging a freshly sprayed body up to cure.

a close up of the arm in action: you can see the arm on the left, holding the guitar body by the three bolt neck system with a steel rod.
finished bodies hanging with newly glued and clamped bridges:

and the final assembly room:

it takes about 10 days to build a taylor guitar start to finish. the tour was great and our tour guide was very knowledgeable about the entire process. the tour ran for about two hours and was pretty exhaustive in covering all the work that goes into crafting a taylor acoustic. if you're ever in san diego, it's definitely worth visit. pretty amazing stuff to see the whole process from start to finish!