Gibson Guitars

By Ed Kemmick - 08/16/2008

Travis Sumter gives a final buffing to a Gibson acoustic guitar with a sunburst paint pattern at the Gibson Guitar factory in Bozeman.

BOZEMAN — Josh Dierman spends most of the day with a guitar in his hands, looking and listening for flaws.

His job is to make sure that some of the best-known guitars in the world are everything their makers want them to be.

Before the acoustic instruments reach Dierman’s work station at the Gibson Guitar factory in Bozeman, they will have passed through the hands of dozens of other craftsmen. During the final inspection, Dierman makes sure that every string sounds good in every fret, that the tuning pegs are in good working order, that the lacquer finish doesn’t have any scratches or smudges.

When they pass muster with Dierman, the guitars go into cases, are entered into Gibson’s computerized inventory and are shipped to music stores, guitar players and collectors all over the world. Whether the style of music is country, rock or jazz, Gibsons have been one of the bestselling guitars for more than 100 years.

Some of the signature guitars the Bozeman factory makes today are named for the famous people who played them: the Dwight Yoakam Honky Tonk Spruce, the Pete Townshend J-200 Limited, the Elvis Presley Dove, the John Lennon J-160E Peace and the Emmylou Harris L-200.

One of the most famous Gibson owners isn’t even known primarily as a guitar player. Johnny Depp has a custom-made Gibson commissioned by Walt Disney when “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” came out in 2003.

Ren Ferguson, Gibson’s master guitar maker in Bozeman, lavished all of his considerable skills on the instrument, carving a ship’s female figurehead into the bottom of the neck, inlaying 22-karat gold on the fretboard and a skull and crossed sabers in the headstock, to which the tuning pegs are attached.

Though he declined to say how much Gibson charged for the guitar, Ferguson said Disney valued the instrument at $100,000.

Ferguson, who turns out special-order instruments and one-of-a-kind guitars with two other luthiers in the factory’s custom workshop, is proud of his creations, but he is just as proud of the plant and his fellow employees.

“The reality is, this whole factory is a custom shop,” he said.

The plant employs about 100 people, most of whom work on the main woodworking floor, a clean but crowded workspace jammed with racks of fine wood, power machinery and hand tools of every description.

“It really, truly is a passion, not just for the people here, but for the ownership and the company as a whole, in terms of what comes out the door,” said Doug Koffinke, general manager of the Bozeman factory.

A long history Gibson instruments have been in production since Orville Gibson started making mandolins and guitars in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1894. The company changed hands a few times over the years, and there were periods when the quality fell below Gibson’s traditional standards.

The Bozeman factory was opened in 1989, three years after the company was purchased by Henry Juszkiewicz and several partners. All of Gibson’s electric and acoustic guitars were then being produced in Nashville, and the new owners wanted to free up as much production space as possible for the firm’s biggest seller, the Gibson Les Paul solid-body electric guitar.

Bozeman was chosen partly for its dry climate; humid Nashville proved to be a tough place to make acoustic guitars.

Ferguson had previously worked for the Flatiron mandolin company in Belgrade, which was bought out by Gibson. He helped persuade Juszkiewicz to make the move to Bozeman, and Ferguson helped develop the Bozeman plant from the ground up. It is located on the west end of town off North 19th Avenue, on a little street fittingly named Orville Way.

Although some parts are made elsewhere and computer-controlled machines do some of the work, the plant more closely resembles a medieval workshop than a modern factory, and it produces only about 60 guitars a day.

Each guitar is worked on by many individuals, with the necks moving down one side of the factory and the bodies on the other. At the far end of the factory floor, the necks are joined to the bodies before going in for painting, lacquering and finishing.

The plant used to start with actual trees, cutting and planing its own wood.

Don Ruffatto, a product specialist at the Bozeman factory, said the plant now ships in rough-cut wood from all over the world. That saves time and trouble, he said, because you never knew until you cut into a tree how much good wood it contained.

The vast majority of all fine guitars are made with rosewood, maple and mahogany backs and sides, but the Bozeman factory is always shipping in other, rarer woods for special models and custom-made guitars. Those woods include quilted maple, whose grain, after it’s been lacquered and polished, looks like billowing smoke. Other woods used by Gibson include macassar ebony, ziricote, koa and zebrawood.

The woods are selected for their looks but also for the sounds they produce. Like all stringed instruments, guitars work by amplifying the sound of vibrating strings inside a soundboard or resonating chamber, in this case the hollow body of the acoustic guitar.

The thinner the wood, the more it vibrates. That’s why luthiers always struggle to make an instrument light enough to sound good but heavy enough not to collapse on itself under the pressure of the tightened strings. On an acoustic guitar, which has a metal truss rod in the neck to give it strength, the neck is under well more than 300 pounds of pressure, Ruffato said.

The necks, generally made of maple laminated with walnut for strength and stability, are roughed out with a computer-controlled router. The machines can be programmed to rough out four necks at a time for each of the 60 to 70 acoustic models Gibson produces.

Ruffatto picked up one neck and showed how it was shaped by the router.

“This gives us a starting point,” he said. “Before this neck is finished, it will have a lot of handwork done. This is going to be a J-200 when it’s all said and done, kind of the flagship of our line.” Men and machines And, even though some of the work is performed by machine, Gibson employs its own machinists and toolmakers to fashion all the detailed machine parts and even the work tables.

“We’re the only place in the world that makes what we make, so you can’t go out and buy the tooling to build them,” Ruffatto said.

Similar blends of machine and handwork are seen at other stages of the production line. A machine cuts the circular grooves around the sound hole, for instance, but workers apply the inlay — usually mother-of-pearl or abalone, a kind of seashell — by hand.

One distinctive feature of a Gibson acoustic, Ruffatto said, is the dovetail neck joint. Most other manufacturers join the neck to the body with a steel bolt, which is quick and makes for a firm, accurate joint.

The trouble is, he said, when the neck is bolted onto the body, it is basically just an attachment. Because the Gibson neck is attached by means of a dovetail joint, a wood-on-wood connection, “it helps transfer vibrations from the neck, down through the body,” he said.

Now the neck is not merely an attachment but an important element of the guitar’s tonal quality.

For the same reason, Ruffatto said, Gibson still uses horsehide glue on the dovetail because it believes synthetic glue doesn’t transmit vibrations in the same way and doesn’t age the way natural glue does.

“You can’t build 60 years of aging into an instrument, but what you can build into that instrument is the opportunity to become that guitar down the road,” Ruffatto said.

After the neck and body are joined, the guitar goes into a spray booth for painting. Most guitar makers, including the Gibson plant in Nashville, use robotic spray guns, Ruffatto said, but in Bozeman each guitar is hand-painted by a worker using a sprayer. They manage to achieve considerable consistency while retaining each instrument’s individuality.

The last stop before the finishing room is the lacquer booth.

The guitars travel on hooks, like sides of beef, where a worker sprays each one with a coat of lacquer. After each coat, the guitar passes through the “oven room,” where it is exposed to infrared light.

The guitars get seven coats before sitting overnight. Then they’re sanded and hit with one more coat of lacquer before sitting for four more days before buffing.

Traditional treatment Ruffatto said other companies use one coat of lacquer sealed with ultraviolet light. The UV treatment makes the lacquer hard as glass. It also looks great, and the process takes just 10 minutes, Ruffatto said, but what those guitars lack is the ability to age gracefully.

The nitro-lacquer used by Gibson will slowly “gas off” solvents for decades. When they get old enough, guitars made the old-school way almost look as though they have no lacquer on them.

In truth, Ruffatto said, the wood has absorbed the lacquer, which allows the wood to vibrate more and create deeper, richer tones.

“We firmly believe this is the best way to build a guitar, to give it every opportunity to age and become a classic guitar like the old Gibsons,” he said.

In the buffing room, the workers look as if they’re dancing as they carefully twist and turn to get the floor-mounted electric buffers onto every surface of the guitar. The job requires strength and agility; if a buffer catches on any part of the guitar, it will rip the instrument right out of the worker’s hands.

This is only a partial sketch of the process.

A complete account would have to describe the way the sides are molded in an “S” shape, the way the thin strips of wood bracing are glued to the inside of the body for strength and sound, how inlays are put into the neck and headstock, the way binding is attached to the seams between the sides and the body and the means by which the bridge is attached to the body.

Suffice it to say, all these steps come together in the finishing room, where the final few details are attended to.

Workers glue on a cow-bone “nut” at the top of the neck to get the strings from the fretboard to the tuning pegs, and the tuning pegs themselves are attached. If the acoustic guitar has electronics so it can be plugged into an amplifier, the electronics are added here.

And at last the strings are put on. Where before all the sounds were of whirring machines, screeching sanders, whooshing spray guns and the din of countless other tools, here at last is the sound of music, as the workers make the final adjustments and check to see that the guitar plays as it should.

When they’re through with the guitars, the instruments pass through the hands of Dierman, or whoever is occupying his slot that day, for the final inspection before being readied for shipping.

If you’re wondering how the Bozeman factory can supply the worldwide demand for Gibson acoustic by producing just 60-some instruments a day, the answer is that Gibsons are not cheap. They start at more than $1,000, and many of Gibson’s standard guitars go for two or three times that amount.

As Ruffatto said, most of the guitars sold worldwide are at the very low end of the market, starter guitars that sell for anywhere from less than $100 to a couple of hundred dollars.

At Gibson, said master luthier Ferguson, “it’s all about what will take you to that next level.” These are guitars for serious players who know what kind of sound and feel they want. And, though some Gibsons are purchased for display, Ferguson said, “We don’t want them in museums. We want people wearing them out.” They also come with an irresistible promise.

“Our guarantee is, we’re bringing you a guitar that is completely full of unwritten songs,” he said.

Contact Billings Gazette reporter Ed Kemmick at ekemmick@billingsgazette.com or 657-1293.