Mythbusting

First off, i think there’s a perception issue when it comes to what people think a “handmade” guitar is. (For the sake of this discussion, i’ll limit myself to solid-body electric guitars, which is what i make and is what i’m most familiar with from a historical and production perspective.)

I’m sure many people have romantic ideas of the stringed-instrument artisan sitting in a dimly-lit workshop, carefully and lovingly carving guitars from solid blocks of wood using hand saws, rasps, spoke shaves and chisels. While a lot of these hand tools and traditional woodworking techniques are indeed used in modern guitar construction, i would say a very large proportion of modern guitar construction is done with the assistance of machines of some description or another: The table saw for cutting raw lumber down to size; the bandsaw for re-sawing or cutting out body and neck blanks; the jointer or edge sander for prepping wood for gluing; the surface planer or drum sander for leveling and smoothing out body and neck blanks; routers for cutting cavities and contours; the drill press for accurate hole drilling, and so on.

Guess what? Your “hand made” guitar was touched by a lot of machines in its creation!

Along with these tools come a variety of templates and jigs to ensure accuracy and consistency. Many of these templates or jigs will be hand-made, but sometimes they’re made by machines. The templates i use are laser-cut acrylic, created by a skilled and knowledgeable technician with the tools and knowledge to give me outstanding results. Yes, they’re cut by a machine and i use them to guide another machine over the surface of the wood because human hands cannot cut straight lines or accurate curves with a motorized cutter spinning at 15,000 RPM. And i prefer to cut out the contours of a body in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours – or days – it would take to get the same result using nothing but hand tools.

Let’s just pause here for a moment and consider that: Why do modern artisans use power tools and accurate templates and jigs rather than purely using hand tools? Because they’re faster, they produce cleaner, more consistent cuts, and with good templates and jigs, the work is repeatable from one workpiece to the next… something very valuable when you’re in any production environment.

Heck, some builders even use copy-carvers… sort of a three-dimensional pantograph, allowing them to make one “master” neck or body and carve one or more copies at a time by using a router on a hand-manipulated control arm that’s linked to a probe that traces the original master workpiece.

Yes, there are instrument makers who use more hand processes than others, and more often than not, these are hollowbody acoustic instruments that require human intervention in more aspects of the process because there are so many more parts and variables in an acoustic instrument compared to a solid-body electric. But many acoustic builders also rely on machines these days for the same reasons of accuracy, consistency and speed in their builds.

Closing the perception gap

Yet for some reason, when those three letters – C N C – are uttered in the context of the manufacturing of guitars, some people lose their heads. “A guitar made by a machine can never be as good as a hand-made guitar,” they say, even though most luthiers who are “hand-making” guitars are likely using routers and templates in addition to many hand tools. Some (like me) are using templates that were cut with (*GASP!*) a CNC machine or a laser. If i’m already using a router, why should it matter if i’m using a router that’s attached to the end of a robotic arm or hooked up to a stepper motor that can work more smoothly and accurately than i can with my hands?

Maybe there’s a perception that guitar building is being handed over by the artisans to the technicians, who simply load a slab of wood into the CNC, press “print” and out comes a finished guitar in a few minutes. It’s not quite that simple, as even with guitars manufactured with the assistance of CNC machines there is still a significant amount of hand work to be done. But the advantages offered by computer-controlled machines give the luthier a tremendous advantage in the three areas already mentioned:

Accuracy: Parts are milled to an extremely fine set of tolerances. You want things like your frets, nut and bridge to be as accurate as possible, also any parts that mate up like neck heels and the pockets they go into. CNC excels at cutting things accurately, to within thousandths of an inch.

Consistency: When building guitars in a full production situation or even in small runs or individual instruments built at a slower pace, the builder can be sure that necks and bodies built cut at different times will come out more or less exactly the same, meaning parts and components can be stockpiled, allowing for greater efficiency. Matching spare parts can also be swapped out if there are warranty issues down the road.

Speed: Bodies and necks can be roughed out in much less time, and can be done while the builder works on other things. Less time doing time-consuming and routine work like cutting out necks and bodies and routing cavities in multiple operations, means the luthier can spend more time on the things that are better done by hand, like final neck profiling and fretwork… things that require that human touch. This allows instruments to be turned around with excellent quality in less time.

When people get unsatisfactory instruments made using CNC machines, it’s not because of the machines… they just execute the tasks they were programmed to do by their human operators. It’s because the manufacturer likely cut corners on the human component… the neck carving, the final sanding, the fretwork, the setup, and final quality controls. These are the elements of guitar building that no machine can do well. (Although the Plek machine is a giant leap in the right direction for final fret dressing.) A computer doesn’t know what a “good” neck feels like or how to interpret a player’s preferences into a workable neck profile.

But what does it all mean?

CNC machines do, however present tremendous opportunities for the small builder to increase production speed while not sacrificing quality, and perhaps even improving accuracy and consistency from one instrument to the next.

“So if CNC machines help increase production speed, prices should come down, right?”

I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to that conclusion. As i pointed out in earlier editorials, the time invested in the production of a guitar is quite possibly the largest cost in making each instrument. Reducing that time investment does yield some cost savings per instrument, but those savings are usually offset by the cost of owning and maintaining the CNC mill, or of outsourcing production to a dedicated CNC shop that can absorb that overhead. In order for the CNC to pay for itself (and for the full-time operator/technician to run it and maintain it), it pretty much needs to be kept busy all the time. Not all small shops have the luxury of doing this, so they outsource production of components.

Get used to it

In my view, moving to CNC-assisted production is a critical step in the growth of most luthiers’ business, where time needs to be reduced and volume increased in order to maintain profit margins that will allow their business to continue to grow and sustain itself. Some luthiers building high-end boutique instruments can sidestep this if they have built up enough of a name for themselves that their pricing and production time (and the length of their waiting list) can sustain their business. In the solid-body guitar world, that’s a tougher sell. There’s a certain price threshold that can’t be exceeded in all but the rarest of cases, so something has to give somewhere.

I definitely see CNC in the future of Decibel guitars, because there are definitely advantages in accuracy, consistency and speed to be realized, but also because there are some technical things i think the machines may be able to do better than human hands (multi-scale fretboards, for example) but also because i’d like to have my time freed up from some of the drudgery of the routine cutting and drilling operations to focus more on the high-touch parts of the building process such as the fretwork. It also gives me more time to think, to dream, to design and to write blog entries about all of these things.

Today’s supplier shout-out is to Guy Hilliard at Sawdust & Noise. They’re a small shop with laser-cutting, laser-engraving and CNC capabilities. I first learned of Sawdust & Noise through a luthier event hosted by the Golden Triangle Luthier’s Group at A&M Wood Specialty out in Cambridge a few years ago. There was this tiny, laser-cut acrylic Strat “business card” for Sawdust & Noise in the package we got from A&M, and i was very impressed.

As we started tooling up for building, i knew a set of accurate laser-cut routing templates would be the way to go, and i knew Sawdust & Noise could deliver. And they did. I’ve got a full set of headstock, neck, fretboard, neck pocket, body and control cavity templates just waiting to be used, and more will be coming soon.

Guy also gave me this as a little bonus…

… my own version of the “business card” that put me in touch with him in the first place. The precision and detail are incredible. He can produce items like this as promotional giveaways, but the range of what he can do is pretty much limitless.

If you need anything laser-cut or CNC’d, give Guy a call… he’s a pleasure to deal with, his rates are very reasonable, and the quality is top-notch. We’re looking forward to sending more business his way!