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Pretty cool. Apparently they found this tape and had it digitized and just released it. A neat snapshot of time from before I was born. Check out that fret hammer at the 8:23 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-zOaOYB120

Ah, the good old days of spraying nitro with no PPE, lol…

Wow, that was awesome!

Thanks for posting--that was fun!

Dave

I had the opportunity to tour the Kalamazoo factory. The one thing that surprised me was the amount of work that was done by hand. I was a wonderful experience.

Blast from the past - cool.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

This is very cool and I put it on my Facebook page I liked it so much. What an era that was when Gibson produced some of the finest guitars ever.

They were not over priced either and were marketed to musicians and of course the rest is history.

This is the Gibson that I loved and love and I am reminded of John Thomas and his excellent book Kalamazoo Gals.

Some of us have been speculating about Gibson operations for years based on scratches we might see that are repeated and Dave Collins studied their fret spacing though the years down to the .001" level developing a forensic database that can help authenticate an original and disclose a fake.

I wanted to see the wire wheels that we believe that they used on fret boards and how the nibs were originally formed but I didn't see that in the "film." Seems odd saying film and not video.

Thanks JF this is great and I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Yes, that was really cool. Thanks for sharing, John.


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They did indeed employ a lot of women.

I had thought of that too, would love to see the original nibs process.

The other thing I thought was so cool was these huge machines and jigs that have no doubt been replaced by CNC.

Very cool. I had a couple of Martin facory tours, before CNC took over, and production was very similar. Lots of hands on work. Lots of skilled craftspeople that were confident about what they did. Must have been a few industrial accidents with those machines though! Thanks for posting the link.

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“ The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away” Pablo Picasso

Regarding the machines there is a cool story where Jon the owner of ThroBak PAF pick-up reproductions has purchased and restored the very pick-up winding machines that we see in the video and that is what ThroBak uses to this day to wind their superb PAF reproductions. I have a few of these on my guitars and they are excellent. So some of the original Gibson tooling and machines are still in use today.

Gibson was open to new ideas and improvement back then and they were not afraid to go outside to other experts from Loyd Lohr, Les Paul, Kasha and Richard Schneider. Some efforts were not all that successful and some are not legendary. I always admire companies who make the effort to not just be breathing their own air.

Wow, I graduated from college in 1967 and had a 1965 Kalamazoo made Epiphone FT-79 Texan I bought used for $75. Cool to see the womb it was released from.

Thanks!

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

And did you notice at around 10:42 the guy using a 'rolling pin' sander to clean up the bindings? Air driven by the look of it.

Having read Colin North's comments on the Elevate version I have just put an order in for one. Scrapers are all well and good but it does take a lot of time and effort!

Cheers Dave

I was surprised to see the neck profiling jig used with the terrifying shaper was almost like the one I built except I use the docile Robosander.

It does cut 1/32 wider than the template so you have to allow for that. I use a pin router for F holes too but did you archtop builders see the clever way they bound the F holes? Pretty ingenious. Can’t wait to try it!!

3EF2C838-46AD-488B-AFF3-9F49CB050F39 by Terence Kennedy, on Flickr


6175D8E2-73CD-4015-90CC-87FE7D31EAC7 by Terence Kennedy, on Flickr

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.