Fender woodwork shop 1959

[PRR]

Fender woodwork shop 1959

Fender Factory Tour 1959

[John]

Pretteee cool!

[duke of earl]

Thanks PRR. Amazing how fast they were cutting out those bodies and necks and still kept their limbs in tact. That has to be the coolest career next to building amplifiers. I love those old laquer finishes... I want a yellow laquered stratocaster myself-a rare find for sure.

[stingray_65]

WOW!
No safety glasses, No hearing protectors, No respirators, poor lighting

BUT I didn't see anyone smoking!

That has to be the coolest career next to building amplifiers.

It's still a production shop! anywhere on the line sucks!

Still got to be one of the coolest vids on youtube!

Thanks for sharing it

Ray

[bigsbybender]

It's amazing to me how much stuff was just "eyeballed"!

Also, spraying finishes without respirator... Chances are this guy put down a pack of filter-less Pall Malls a day too. I'd have hated to see what his insides looked like.

  Several years back I was a painter at a factory. I worked graveyard shift for a while when the management wasn't around. I didn't like the fit of my respirator, so I painted one night without it.  BAD move, I was coughing up stuff for over a week!

j.

[G._Hoffman]

I saw that a few years back, and it is pretty cool. 

Thanks PRR. Amazing how fast they were cutting out those bodies and necks and still kept their limbs in tact. That has to be the coolest career next to building amplifiers. I love those old laquer finishes... I want a yellow laquered stratocaster myself-a rare find for sure.

It's a band saw.  It's remarkably hard to do any real damage with a band saw.  It doesn't self-feed, so you have to actively push your hand through the blade.  Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but it is more common in butcher shops, where the stuff they are cutting is a little harder to tell from your own flesh.  I've knicked myself 2-3 times on the band saw, and it's no fun, but they were band-aid injuries, not emergency room injuries.  I'm no where near that fast, but that is not a safety issue, but a precision issue.  My dad is that fast, and he stays 1/16" from the line with remarkable precision.  Those guys were doing a lot more of it than either of us, and you can be sure their limbs were just fine at the end of their careers.




Gabriel

[Madison]

It's amazing to me how much stuff was just "eyeballed"!

Chances are this guy put down a pack of filter-less Pall Malls a day too. I'd have hated to see what his insides looked like.

Chances are he lived to be 75, with the smokes, because he wasn't eating GMO food.
Not to mention all the other contaminants we are exposed to now days.

Ok ok, he lived to be 70......and missing a few fingers.

What I notice is most people were in decent shape.

The working conditions weren't glamorous (production work never is) , I'd like to have their "rejects" at that time though!
From that shop, I bet you'd either get a GREAT guitar or a piss poor one.

[spacelabstudio]

It's amazing to me how much stuff was just "eyeballed"!

No kidding.  I'm terrible at making any kind of manual operation I do look neat or precise.  So I found that whole operation to be astounding.  Just practice, I guess.

Chris

[G._Hoffman]

It's not eyeballed.  They aren't showing the guy laying things out, but everything is laid out with a template, and the guys with the big power tools are just roughing things in so the shapers and routers don't have to remove so much material.  You cut well outside of the line.  The final shaping is all done with jigs on shapers and routers.  Very precise - well, not compared to modern CNC machines, but compared to anything else it's the bee's knees.


Gabriel

[PRR]

The process was mature in the 1920s.... furniture-making. There's hand-carved from 1770, then with power and railroads there were shops making the same shapes by the million. Only thing really different by 1959 is that each machine had its own motor, instead of being belted from a shaft in the rafters.

The Fender guys were "lucky" in that the tooling was reasonably newer, there were fewer shapes, and the wood was generally better. (My grandpa ran a furniture mill-- he had to use any old machine he had, make thousands of shapes to cover every taste, and the lowest grade of wood that would stay together in shipping. He was very glad to move over to aircraft making.)

[gmoon]

Great video!

While it's not the book promoted in the vid, my wife bought me Fender, The Sound Heard 'Round the World (Richard R. Smith) for Xmas last year. It's a good read.

The Fender factory featured in the 'tube wasn't the "original" Fender factory. Fender moved production to that facility in late 1951 or '52.

Assuming you don't count Leo's radio shop, the original Fender factory was two steel buildings on Santa Fe Ave in Fullerton, which was the production base starting in 1946. So much of the early stuff (including the Broadcaster/Tele) was developed there. By comparison, conditions in that factory make the building in the video look like a modern Behringer factory. No heating, little ventilation and poor lighting.

Saws were operated without guides, etc. Apparently several accidents did occur. One less serious anecdote has Fender recalling a near, well, circumcision by flying wood splinters. Which was mighty amusing to good old Leo.

Not that any of this was unusual for manufacturing at the time. Not at all.

The tagging of employee names in the vid is cool. Leo was an avid photog, so there are quite a few photos of employees in the Smith book, but only a few IDs (and not a single female employee is identified).

[G._Hoffman]

Saws were operated without guides, etc. Apparently several accidents did occur. One less serious anecdote has Fender recalling a near, well, circumcision by flying wood splinters. Which was mighty amusing to good old Leo.

That would be from a table saw or a radial arm saw.  THOSE things will take your arm off.  A shaper, too. 


Gabriel