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Perhaps everyone's already seen this but It was only posted earlier this month and it looked pretty interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... type=&aq=f

75 guits a day

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My guess is the guy in there has never really bent a side set ... even in a fox style which the operator ahs to control, which can be tricky as lots of us have found out. I remember laughing the first time I watched it and he says he's bent 1000s of sets ... in actual fact, he hasnt bent anything. He loads a totally automated machine, and then makes the mind-numbing decision to press the fast or slow button...

I also find it interesting he thinks that thier higher grade indian, the really oily stuff as he calls it, is pretty tough to bend .... IMO it is probably the easiest - more oil and resin, the more plastic the wood gets with the right heat.

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

All the Factory Friday videos are on Taylor's website too. They are a couple years old now.

Ah, automation. It can make anybody a good guitar maker Tony

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absolutely Rod !!!!! I figure a couple automated benders, a timesaver sander, robo carver, couple CNCs and a laser, a PLEK fret machine, and someone else to do the polyester finishing, and anyone could do it .... make a Taylor that is ....

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Someone on this forum has built a similar bender. It is a superior design, just tougher and more expensive to construct. If you use heating blankets and move things manually instead of using heated shoes and PLCs then the cost to make one isn't prohibitive. The ones at Taylor cost them $XXXXX apiece to build, but having had them do all the R&D to make sure the design worked one could make something similar for $XXX or $XXXX if they didn't have access to a welder and/or a milling machine.

I'm still figuring out whether I'll make one of those or go strictly with laminated sides when I start building acoustics again...

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

The couple things that I did think were interesting was that they bend the waist separately. I don't bend guitar sides but I do study guit building and that was one of the main things I didn't understand about the Fox style light bulb powered bender - there didn't seem to be a way to get heat in to the waist before bending.

The other thing was the tensioned steel straps. I've read about many complaining about ripples and cupping. It seems that with some springs or something one could do something similar with the small builder Fox type bender to improve yield. I would think that yield would be even more important to a small builder.

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Lutherie on easy-mode... I want one.

That guy running the thing is an operator and you are correct he may or may not know squat about bending. However, the guy who built that thing and set it up probably knows more about bending than 98% of us on this board...

The same applies for any other "automated" equipment.

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That's not necessarily true... you don't need to know anything about bending a guitar side to build a bending pipe and you don't need to know anything about bending guitar sides to build a machine like that... If the machine was specifically designed to have some sort of intelligent AI that's specifically optimized for bending sides I might have agreed with you, but more likely than not this machine just has a temperature setting and is designed to heat up something, read the temperature of the item being heated, and then bend the item to whatever shape. So really, it's nothing more than a glorified heater with thermostat... The only person in the entire process that needs to know anything at all about bending guitar sides is the person that decides what temperature to set the machine to.

My bender is a combo of the Fox design and the taylor. It has swing arms that pull the ends of the steel bands around the bout in a similar fashion applying as much pressure (the pull increases as the arm is pulled around) as the heaviest spring I could find will do. I have not broken a side (figured or otherwise) since I started using it. Of course mine is simply manually operated, no buttons except for the heating blanket.

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John .. you just posted the picture of what I was just thinking about in my mind about making/modding, and how (no pun intended) it would work.... thats awesome.

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Yes! That's what was forming in my minds eye. Looks like it would work great.

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+1

I don't know but it seems that using a heating blanket and a form one could accomplish the same kind of quality and it would be much cheaper than some automated machine. I have to say though the guys who bends the side or whatever they're about as skilled as any other assembly line worker. The guys who has skills or talent would be the guys who design the machines or tooling (like the guys who designs/makes the form for vacuum holding the bodies while it's being milled)

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Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

I'm in the process of building an automated bender too. My old bender is very old and I love building new machines. I'll post some progress when I get to the acutal building. Mine will be computer or microprocessor operated. I plan on one machine not two like taylor. It shouldn't be hard. There is no reason that taylor couldn't build one machine. All they had to do was add an actuator instead of the lead screw and instead of a plywood caul, as on the Fox, use the same rubber/silicon heating caul they use to do the waist.

I would bet that they tried the single machine idea first. The problem as I see it is that the spring slats can only apply pressure to one side of the wood, and it would be really tricky to design a form with over bend. Now, we know that that's not that big a deal because plenty of small makers use Fox type machines that don't use this methodology at all. However, I suspect that using the spring tensioned slats yields a more consistent product with less breaks etc. At 75 sets a day x 260 days = almost 20k sets per year. 1% improvement would mean a savings of 200 side sets year.

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I don't know that spring tension would really have a lot of effect vs no tension. The slats on the Taylor machines are tightened by either pneumatic or hydraulic cylinders putting out a force orders of magnitude over what would be feasible with a spring setup. That said, pneumatic cylinders aren't very expensive when you look at the cost of one nice set of tonewood.

+2 on the builder of the tool understanding things. In most cases it is -harder- to design a machine that works with no feedback to account for errors, not easier. The only thing 'automated' about the design is that it pushes a couple arms in a straight line on its own, the rest of the design elements are just plain old smarts. The combination of intense support pressure on the wood with only inside bends is the big deal here, not that they used an actuator to rotate an arm.

As for the single machine VS two machines: I think they just used KISS. The cost for two machines VS one combo machine isn't significantly higher. The throughput is much higher, though, and it keeps the moving parts a bit simpler which is always handy with Murphy around.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services