Leaderboard

Well, it just arrived . . . I'll unbox it soon and give a report . . . the Gibbie showed up a couple of hours ago and it's a keeper! btw, I have a Wildwood Spec Lester and it's da shizzle!

The guitars that I have played at the factory were every bit as good as my 2005 535. I don't think you'll find CNC robots making the H535s. I believe that they might be rough carving the necks (not sure if this is absolutely true), but putting together a semihollow body is a multistep process that doesn't lend itself to CNC manufacturing. The top and back are a 3 piece laminated sandwich that is then steam pressed in a form that gives it the arch. The center block is a solid block with the pickup areas cut out, and there is a piece that matches up to fill the gap between the top and block. Then you have kerfing that is applied to the rim before the top and bottom are glued. The pieces are then assembled by hand to form the body. Rough cutting the neck profile means that the starting shape should be more consistent in terms of thickness and curvature, but there is still a lot of handiwork to finalize things. If you've ever watched someone hand rolling a neck, there can be a lot of variation. It doesn't take a lot of sanding to go from a fat to a thin neck. In the past it was all done freehand, checking it with a pattern every so often. If you think about it, the old duplicarver was a primitive "cnc" machine, minus the computer. It's akin to the patterns that someone like Hillerich & Bradsby uses when carving baseball bats. A CNC just follows a computerized form to cut the wood.