Takamine Factory Tour

we take a steel block of radius that is true and a hammer and we hit them in a very, very even way, that way we control how much person is hitting it at any given time and there is never too much pressure from someone who overuses a spindle press or someone who just hits a hammer and puts it on one side to compare it to the next, so if you had a bad guitar or at least a bad fret job, so you read it a little more first just to make sure that everything is as clean as possible and you see that all the frets are pre-cut and placed in slots for whatever number of frets they are, so there is no real waste as you go, this is what is called a fret and what it does is to allow you to hammer in the end of the extension without having to tape the top of the guitar.

Something important, yes, very important, so I mean, this is something that many, many designed. years ago and you know it is commercially available until now. I was going to say throughout the whole process how many tools are made because obviously a CNC machine is made, but that's not the case, there are so many guitar builders, yes, they need half the guitar maker. Your battle when working with guitars is to create tools to build a guitarist, so there are a lot of clever things that come up so you see the top of the fret and then use the radius, the hammer of the radio block at home, so to speak, and there are particular wire frets and they use them, you know, I'm not sure, but I think we use just our work, there's only a few fret wires, yeah, and that continues up the fretboard, so here's the 341 SC ready for bridge prep, you're removing the tape from the fingerboard, you're adjusting the truss rod to make sure the there is tension on the truss rod making sure that's true and then putting up a couple of pictures on how to drill the holes for the holding points a pill into the system and then it will take it to this other station here where it will actually draw a hole. through the body of the guitar to accept the pickup system, but now you're positioning it making sure it's very precise, so now there's a channel for the paddle etic pickup system, it's going to come back to this station and then we'll put a piece of put tape on the finish under the bridge that will eventually peel off so there's wood to wood contact when you're ready to stick the bridge on, okay, so here you're going to take and just peel off the mask under the finish.

It's got a nice clean line that gives you enough room for the bridge to overlap the finish and then also have a lot of surface area, particularly wood to wood, so now you're checking to see if the bridge is the right height for the guitar that I'm going to go and I'll adjust it here on the sander once you're happy with this, you're checking that it's nice and clean and flat, then they'll come back and put it on, check to make sure everything's good again, mark it, wipe off any excess material, put the bridge on which is designed for this guitar in a bag that goes inside the guitar and goes on to the next station to believe it, so here we have a small, very small saw that cuts the bone nuts for the guitars that it will go on. photo and go over this, we have very sharp blades here and it cuts and you perfectly know the perfect thickness and the perfect widths every time in a jig that just rolls, we show you in high school and I imagine there has to be a piece or a jig that o a router that makes 12 strings 4 by 1 by 12 strings one for different nut wigs another for different strain gauges yeah so you know they're all like little 12 little blocks here I can show them to you so look these are the sets of saw and they just sit there and they will position themselves in the machine that the guitars go for, yes, this would be forty-seven millimeters, no so this one is wide, you know, like a seven-eighths, okay, of this we're talking about, we need to get to become a Takamine because, as you know, they're proud of their pickup system electronics that's been in the works for fifty or I mean, most guitars would have a preamp, yeah, and the preamps are on top. from the shoulder of the guitar and it is removable and replaceable, but this is a machine that actually cuts the hole to receive the bezel that holds the preamp, so here we will show a Glenn Frey model cut to make it look great, so once . the hole is cut through the side of the guitar, the preamp is installed, so we're going to show you here starting with a little sanding on the edge, make sure it's all clean and how it holds in there.

The suction cups you know will actually hold it tighter than you know most clamps would, then the motor fills up and cleans up nice. Do you want a 78? Probably yes, and now when you put the pin in, this just has a mini plug on the end. stereo mini jack and it is held in place by three screws, is this an OEM connector or is it a baby for Takamine and the three screw idea is a good idea because it makes it very field replaceable without having to worry about tightening the nuts or bolts or things like that so now you put on some padding to keep it from vibrating and now you put on the bezel and then you put on four little anchor clips to keep it in place and then a new free app pops up and there you have it , okay, so here at this station we're going to put the etic pallet collection system on the van, it's the same wheezing collection system that's been used since '77, so here's going to put this on this one, go ahead, and to enlighten the people.

I'm not talking about a bad guru, it's a transducer underneath? Yes, it's a Paizo transducer, but it's six very, very large, heavily shielded individual elements, so one of the things that's a benefit is that it gives you a much better noise floor. dynamics than you normally associate with a Paizo sound and none of that ties in the oak madness. You know it's because it's such a large, almost impractical design that it ends up being very practical, and you know that the crystals are literally at least eighty percent larger than anything else. more on the market and here he's testing the cables together, they're going to end up hitting those aluminum clips on the inside of the instrument that were stuck in the cutout right now, you see he's bending them right now and then it's kind of idiot proof. because the RCA is the input of the pickup and then the output of the output jack is the little mini so you can only go one direction and there it is so here we see that this gentleman is installing some Takamine brand go . to the machines right now he screwed it into the back of the headstock and now he's putting the nuts and washers on to finish it off and these particular ones have amber buttons and gold hardware so at this point the label has just been placed inside . the guitar you're getting ready for stringing and so on on this particular guitar and it has a pinless bridge, what we call a pinless bridge where you run the strings through the back and without pins, hence the term gun-whipless Finally with the strings there we placed it with a saddle, I suppose, and the saddle was also made of bone like the nut on all Japanese

takamine

guitars, the bones and the nuts are the nuts and the saddles are all made of bone and what is the theory behind the broken chair, not broken, yeah what?

The cell allows you to know good intonation because the a and the if are going to have a different course than the g from now on, so you end up knowing that you have better intonation, the place of the guitar tunes the neck better, like on a guitar electric has an adjustable saddle, this is a saddle that is already pre-adjusted and it is something that we came up with and is now also adopted by some other manufacturers, now the final position of the saddle is just by friction and tension. del, would kill it and then hold it, yeah, yeah, I mean, they can come off very easily once the strings are taken off, hey, you know, it's designed to be replaced as it wears out, you know, over the years, although I have never replaced this. as much as I can and at this point we have a whole guitar, so tuned it, going over it again, making sure it's spotless, getting it ready to go out the door, a little spot cleaning, here it's starting to look like a guitar.

I was going to say it's someone's. a beautiful thin line coming to you very soon it's also a nice piece of koa so get in the case killer close the zipper thanks Joe thanks for showing me everything behind the doors of magical talking this is Chris Keith Hork from your guitar