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A Taylor Grand Concert bout bender holds a pair of sides in place as they set
Mechanical Sidebenders

Coaxing wood into the sensuous curves of a guitar body is serious business. For years it was a highly manual, skill-intensive process that meant being hunched over a 300-degree bending mold and slowly pushing wood to the brink of cracking. It takes skilled hands to apply the right balance of moisture, heat, and tension, to slowly bend each set of sides into submission, taming the physical idiosyncrasies of each wood species without overly warping or burning it. Even with well-trained people, the breakage rate was often five sets of wood a day.

Taylor’s in-house tooling department changed all of that. Bob Taylor had envisioned a machine with automated, mechanized controls that could perfectly synchronize variables like temperature, tension and bending speed in a way that the human approach couldn’t consistently manage. Taylor’s Wayne Brinkley spearheaded the prototype development, which eventually spawned a trio of “autobenders,” each responsible for a different curve: a waist bender to bend the inside curve, a bout bender for the outside curves, and a cutaway bender.

The “brain” of each bender is a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), which incorporates circuitry that’s connected to sensors that monitor variables such as temperature, clamping pressure and tension. The bending speed (slow, medium or fast) is chosen manually to match the natural pliancy of particular woods. A distinctive pair of waist and bout benders was custom built for each Taylor body shape.

Before being bent, the sides are encased in paper, which serves two purposes: It absorbs the oils secreted by the woods, keeping the bending sleeves clean; it also helps “activate” the bound moisture within the wood, effectively causing it to “sweat” and become more pliable. The paper also keeps much of the moisture from escaping, which helps reduce instances of cracking — now rarely more than one a day.

Depending on the shape and the speed setting, the waist and bout benders each take from 90 seconds to two minutes to bend the side into its respective curve, plus another 30-45 seconds of setting time. A red light signals that the sides are ready to be removed.

The autobenders not only work more efficiently and replace a difficult manual process, they also eliminate the need to belt-sand the sides to remove surface irregularities that were a regular by-product of the old bending process. As a result, the sides all have a consistent thickness. That consistency ensures that every Taylor is structurally sound and yields the signature tonal response that players love.

Outlines of Taylor guitar parts that have been cut with a laser
Lasers

Laser technology is an indispensable manufacturing tool at Taylor. A laser’s precise cutting and etching capabilities have found an ever-expanding array of applications, from cutting the shapes of our guitar tops, backs and sides to intricate inlay components to custom-etching. Without lasers, neither the implementation of our NT Neck® design nor our daily production volume would be feasible. Laser technology has also proven to be a sophisticated partner of the design process, allowing us to cut delicate shapes for some of our most beautiful guitars, including the Cujo and Liberty Tree LTDs and our Gallery Series, along with many production models.

The development of the Baby Taylor in 1995 marked our first use of lasers. Our first 25-watt unit was used to engrave a decorative pattern around the Baby’s soundhole. When the laser also proved capable of cutting through wood with extreme precision, it was adopted as the main tool for cutting Baby tops, bridge pin plates and soundhole braces.

As a cutter, the .008-inch-diameter laser beam (twice the thickness of a human hair) cleanly incinerates the material in its path. Unlike the use of blades and tool bits that inevitably dull or break with repeated use, the laser suffers no tool wear. Capable of cutting intricate lines with precision and speed, the laser also eliminates the occurrence of “blowout,” a ripping open of wood caused by a rotating cutter that meets wood against its natural grain flow. Blowout tends to be a costly mishap: the woods most prone to it are the more figured, expensive species like maple and koa.

In 1998, Taylor acquired a much more powerful 200-watt laser, which was used to cut tops and backs for the entire Taylor line, as well as profiling the sides of all full-size guitars. The laser was highly instrumental in achieving the precise tolerances required for Taylor’s NT Neck alignment. On guitar tops, in addition to cutting out the soundboard shape, the laser also lightly etches a bridge masking outline and registration mark to enable precise positioning of the bridge — a critical aspect of properly aligning the neck with the body. Spacers that must fit into the NT body pocket at tolerances down to the thousandths of an inch are also laser-cut.

Other laser-cut guitar parts include truss rod cover blanks, any type of level bracing pieces, and rosette pieces for our Nylon Series. We currently have three 200-watt machines in use.