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| Spare guitar bodies waiting to be turned into a new player’s dreams. |
Indistinguishable companies selling widgets and signs and accounting
services blend into the monotony of suburban America. But one of these
bland office parks happens to be the production facility for the company
that helped define rock and roll with the first mass-produced electric
guitar.
Fender has produced some of the most
recognizable instruments in modern music, with designs that have stood
the test of time. Founder Leo Fender—an electrical engineer by
trade—borrowed the prevailing trends of hot-rod cars from the late 1940s
and ‘50s to design the Stratocaster, Telecaster, Precision Bass, and
Jazz Bass, to name just a few of his company’s most famous designs.
Although refined ever-so-slightly over the years, these instruments’
designs have remained vastly unchanged since they first rolled off the
production line when Baby Boomers were still a glint in their parents’
eyes...
But building all of these instruments and accessories is still a very
manual process. The Corona factory produces most of Fender’s high-end
and custom guitars, and can produce a few hundred instruments per day.
While some parts of the building process are aided by longstanding
computer-aided technologies—like CNC milling machines used to cut the
basic shape of a guitar out of wood—the guitars are still hand-sanded,
their fretboards crafted with individually hammered-out pieces of metal.
Many women work on the factory floor at the plant, as their hands are
generally smaller and more adept at some of the more dextrous tasks
required to build a guitar.
Source: Quartz
