Gibson Guitar Factory

This is Mark again. Aside from Graceland, the other Memphis attraction we'd planned on was visiting the Gibson guitar factory.

We had to get up early to make up for our lost afternoon yesterday, and made it to Memphis just in time to miss the noon tour, thanks to more torrential rains. It rained so heavily that we had to take cover at a gas station since it was impossible to see on the highway. On the bright side, we each scored a egg & cheese biscuit for $1. Mmmm. This picture of the "Welcome to Tennessee" sign will give you an idea of how hard the rain was.


Anyways, we arrived at the Gibson guitar factory at about 12:01 and got tickets for the 1:00pm hourly tour. I spent the hour noodling around on all the awesome guitars, basses, and even a lonely looking mandolin and a banjo that were hiding way off in the corners. One of the acoustic-electric guitars had a tuner built in that would let you tune the strings to any note (including flats / sharps), not just the boring EADGBE that you get on most tuners. Pretty cool. None of the guitars had price tags on them, so I wasn't tempted to take home any souvenirs. This one has flames on it. That makes you play faster.


If you don't care about building guitars, you can skip the rest of this post. To sum up, the tour was very cool.

To make a short story long, this factory is the one where Gibson makes all of their semi-hollow body guitars. These are the guitars that have a solid 3- or 4-inch wide block of wood (the ones we saw under construction used mahogany) in the middle, running from the neck to the base of the guitar. The rest of the body is hollow, hence the name semi-hollow body.


Gibson has at least 2 other factories that our tour guide mentioned, one in Nashville that makes their bluegrass instruments, and one somewhere in Wisconsin (located there to be close to good sources of wood). I don't think you can take tours of the other two factories, but the one in Memphis is shiny and new, and was probably designed with the idea that people could tour around.

Anyways, the guitar construction proceeded more or less like I thought it would, with the following exceptions.


The arched top and bottom pieces of the guitar are not carved like some arched instruments, but instead the wood is left in high-moisture environment until it softens a bit, then is pressed into shape with a huge machine. The tour guide mentioned that it is very similar to the contraption that crushed The Terminator in the original movie.


Another thing I hadn't expected was that the pieces for the sides are not bent individually, instead they bend long sheets all at the same time, and cut it up afterwards. It looks funny - like you could use it to make a guitar 3 feet thick. Also, did I mention that they use child labour?


Unlike the Jelly Belly factory, where you can buy misshapen and mutant beans ("belly flops") for cheap, all the reject guitars that can't be fixed for whatever reason are SMASHED TO SMITHEREENS. For some reason, nobody else on the tour other than me was interested in this part. Once they're finished smashing them as much as can be by hand, they take any recognizable chunks and cut them up even smaller on a special bandsaw that's only used for this purpose. They call it the grim reaper.


I asked our guide who exactly got to smash up the guitars, and he said it's the factory manager who has final say over whether a guitar can be repaired, or whether it's beyond rescue. He also said that once during a tour, he'd made a flippant remark along the lines of "Hey, keep it down there, I'm trying to conduct a tour here!" while the destruction was underway. Later, the guy told him to lay off, because he'd just finished wrecking $300,000 worth of guitars that day, and was not in a mood to be trifled with. Eep.

I won't go into any more of the minutiae of guitarmaking. If you want more details, post a comment.