txbumper57
Enlightened Member
I stopped into my local Guild Dealer earlier today to check on when I can get the F612 I recently purchased in for repairs and got to Shoot the BS a little. The guys at my local store are all friends and Musicians as well. Most of them own or have owned vintage Guilds in the past so we all have that common thread. Recently the Guild rep stopped in and updated them on how things were going. As I was taking a look at some of the Newark Street Offerings my friend dropped a bombshell on me. He said that the rep stated after they get production up and going and the Acoustic lines rolling off the presses, They plan on making some American Made Electrics out of Oxnard, Possibly as early as the beginning of next year. He said the plans were to not make any solid bodies here in the USA. Only Hollow and Semihollow, and possibly Chambered. How Cool is That? They also have plans in the works to get the Custom Shop back up and running as well. I was also told not to be surprised if Ren Ferguson finds a Special stock of wood every now and then and decides to make a limited run of guitars out of it on the fly.
We got to talking about the permit process and what was holding things up. You won't believe why they were having a hangup with the permits. According to the Rep they had permits for everything including the Hazardous chemicals used to make the Nitro Cellulose Lacquer and everything was in order. The hangup came from a Machine press that they use in the guitar making process. Apparently the machine was drawing more Current than the State of California was happy with when it was in use and this was the hold up for final permitting. LOL.
Now this is all second hand but I have no reason to think that the guys at the shop would be lying about anything. They also mentioned that Cordoba/Guild wasn't trying to keep secrets about anything they were building or planning to build as they strongly feel the following for the New Guild offerings start on Forums such as this one. Just some food for thought. Sounds like our Favorite Brand is in good hands and there are some wonderful things on the Horizon!:triumphant:
We got to talking about the permit process and what was holding things up. You won't believe why they were having a hangup with the permits. According to the Rep they had permits for everything including the Hazardous chemicals used to make the Nitro Cellulose Lacquer and everything was in order. The hangup came from a Machine press that they use in the guitar making process. Apparently the machine was drawing more Current than the State of California was happy with when it was in use and this was the hold up for final permitting. LOL.
Now this is all second hand but I have no reason to think that the guys at the shop would be lying about anything. They also mentioned that Cordoba/Guild wasn't trying to keep secrets about anything they were building or planning to build as they strongly feel the following for the New Guild offerings start on Forums such as this one. Just some food for thought. Sounds like our Favorite Brand is in good hands and there are some wonderful things on the Horizon!:triumphant:
touring guitar factories that making a custom instrument is not as simple as it seems. You need some process that confirms that the request is feasible, i.e. something that can be built and then you need a way to track the build process. One key issue is making sure that the Adirondack pine neck gets fretted for a 25" scale, not the expected 24.5" and that the resulting neck is married to the closetwood Cedar body that was built last week and not the petrified Sequoia one. This does not have to be rocket science but the factory floor needs to be trained that they have to tag certain assemblies as they are made and they have to read the tags before using them, making the obvious comparison to a build sheet. Newt Hartford had the technology to handle custom orders easily. What they did not have was a way to track them or a good handle on the costs. Do we charge $5 or $500 to reset the fret machine to handle a different scale? Do we do that now or do we wait until we have 8 necks that need to be cut the same way?
