Why would anyone thumbs down this video? This is totally fascinating! Slabs of wood on their journey to become someone's dream guitar 🎸. Thanks for all you do.
My family owned a sawmill and wood supply company in England for over 100 years. They supplied cabinetmakers with exotic woods. They had a large drying facility which stabilised the wood moisture content, gas fired ovens at work 24/7/365. The thing about England is that it is very temperate climate, it rains a lot, all year round. I forget what moisture content they dried to, but no matter how “dry” the wood was when it left the ovens, in a few days it had re-absorbed moisture from the atmosphere, like a sponge.
Last time I had the factory tour the showroom was the living room of a house. Things have changed a bit since 1981. Hope you have another successful 30+ years.
I had the same tour. Went down to see Ken when I was living in Everett. The shop was in his garage. I was working in a cabinet shop at the time so we spent a lot of time out there. Bought a hardtail Strat body for my first partscaster. I still have it and recently renecked it. I remember Ken was pretty proud of the homemade swinging jig over a horizontal belt sander for radiusing fret boards. With all that new automated equiptment its nice to see an old Rockwell radial arm saw in use.
As someone who has done a bit of woodworking, it's oddly interesting and satisfying to see the racks of wood where my guitar started it's life. This was uploaded around the time it was being made too. Who know perhaps one of those roasted maple blanks was used for my neck. Very cool to see the inner workings.
Thanks for this video tour! Really loved seeing this. You guys are really doing the right thing by promoting yourselves on RU-vid and showing the process of the factory. Things that were not possible before RU-vid. Hats off!
@john cash I agree. Though I can see some people like to have some kind of branding on their guitar - they like having the distinction of a 'Gibson,' a 'Fender,' a 'Warmoth'. Brand loyalty is pretty ingrained into our psyche and culture, for whatever reason. Regardless, it's extremely easy to just buy custom decals that say whatever you want on like Etsy or something. You could very well have a classic stratocaster that says Gibson on the headstock haha.
I am forever grateful to Warmoth for the custom neck they made for me. Crazy expensive - worth every cent! It looked and felt so precise like if was CNCed from aluminum. And of course the stainless steel frets - game changer.
Arron I’m jealous about the shorts, And your are a great guitar player. I watch all your info commercials , they are very helpful. I’ve bought a roasted strat neck and body and I love the feel of the neck. The only guitar I have that has a better neck is my Suhr custom. I’m going to buy a roasted Telecaster body and neck next . Thanks again 😎
This is a great company to do business with. They discovered a tiny nick on the custom neck I ordered.. They went above and beyond my expectations to make it right.. Great one on one communication.
Love Warmoth guitars, I have built up 3 now, plus have Warmoth necks on a genuine American Fender Jass bass and American Standard Telecaster. Beautiful woods, craftsmanship and equally important, great quality control. Good stuff guys:-)
I'm a guitar builder and I can say from experience that Warmoth is a top quality outfit. They produce exceptional guitar components for a very reasonable price. If I didn't already have my own shop and have the ability to build whatever I want I would only buy necks and bodies from these guys, still might purchase a neck with there side access trussed that is to cool.
I have three Warmoths, soon to be four. The necks are the most expensive part. Save for a body, buy it, then buy the neck when more money gets saved. The nice thing about Warmoth is you can build a guitar specifically for you starting at around $700 for everything, if you know where to go for electronics and hardware.
Really enjoyed watching this production tour. The shop is much bigger than when I worked there (89-94...I was the first CNC operator). Would love to have a short tour sometime. Let me know if this could happen. Thanks
Very interesting. I enjoyed the tour. I generally prefer rosewood fingerboards, but I have a compound radius maple neck made by Warmoth , that I like very much. Its not just a copy of a Tele neck but a dramatic improvement on an existing design. For example, the truss rod is easy to adjust. I don't have to pop the neck out of the body since the adjustment screw is located on the outside base of the neck. I would highly recommend Warmoth parts for any project.
Loved the tour. Would like to see en extended version. I will never forget my amazing fretless with Warmoth alder body and maple neck w/ ebony fretboard. No lines! It was like staring into midnight. The tone was incredible. Got compliments all the time. Her name was Misty. Had to sell her in 2000 (that killed me). Called to try to buy her back recently and it turns out she was stolen along with an entire truckload of gear a few years back in Oregon. Some shitbag just drove off with the entire trailer.
I absolutely love my Warmoth Strat. Bodies and necks from Warmoth are second to none. That being said, let's play a game I like to call "count the OSHA violations in this video".
LOL....yes I do, apparently. People have been posting "A man has no name" on all our videos for months now, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Thankfully you also mentioned "Jaqen H'ghar", so I was able to Google it...and now I get it. Thank-you!!! I would like to have a funny retort, but obviously I don't watch Game of Thrones, so I'll just have to start replying with "My name is Aaron! AARON, I SAY!!!" :) Or, since you are a fan, maybe you can suggest a funny retort. LOL.
I bought a neck to put on a made in japan fender strat body. Its been a few years and the guitar is great. Nice fat neck made great. Very little fret work was required, just sanding the edges to remove the rest of the points on the end. Well worth the money for a custom neck.
i have some really nice high-end guitars but at the end of the day if i had to choose just one to keep, it would be my warmoth strat build i did about 4 years ago. maybe i got lucky with a body and neck that were the perfect marriage for each other? whatever the reason, this guitar continues to amaze me. i purchased both the neck and the body unfinished. i put a super-thin nitro finish on the chambered ash body. for the neck i got their 59 roundback profile and reshaped it into an asymmetrical profile (still meaty), then finished it with Tru-Oil. Fishman fluence pickups, Super-Vee trem, and Sperzels were the finishing touches. super lightweight (approx 6 lbs) and very resonant for "new" wood. it should only get better. also worth mentioning is the neck fit into the pocket is superb. if it were any tighter it would be a glue-in!
Great tour, thank you! My first 2 guitars were built around Warmoth bodies and necks (Tele-styles). Both were clearly superior to Fender's productions, even their high-end gear. No regrets whatsoever.
WHERE IS ALL THE SAWDUST?! You can tell a lot about a company and the products they sell when you see them from the inside. An unhappy, poorly managed staff would NEVER be able to keep a warehouse that tidy. That attention to detail definitely revealed itself in the few parts I've ordered over the years.
Without getting all obsequious, I do have to honestly say that Warmoth is a great place to work! Regarding the sawdust, every workstation is equipped with vents that immediately suck the sawdust away, and deposit it into a trailer...which gets hauled away and emptied about once a week.
I love your work! I want to build my dream guitar and to make it come true it must be made with your parts! The perfect body & neck from your craftsmen
@@warmoth It was a joke based on my own personal circumstance. I'm both a desktop designer and 5-axis CNC machinist, so worked either side of that door is amusing to me. Shop floor staff think of the office as being "in there", and office staff think of the shop floor as "out there". I just enjoy playing both ends of the ice producing defensible designs from a desktop standpoint, but doing so with the knowledge of how things work off the floor and in the wood efficiently and realistically. You should mess with the staff and put the hinges on the other way around. 😀
I'd get lost in there sniffing all the different woods. I love using Ash, but hate the smell of it. I don't use mahogany often, but I really love the smell. Edit: I have to say, my wood shop teacher years ago, back when I was in high school, would had us leave the glued wood in clamps for 48 hours before removing the clamps. Kinda overkill. I don't think we heated the glue or anything else, just your standard consumer wood glue, but still that was a long wait and we were only making 2-piece wood candle holders.
Yes, definitely! It's tough to see, but he does have hearing protection in. You can kind of see it when he turns his head at an angle. All the guys in the shop wear earplugs at all times.
What variables could cause a neck pocket to end up slightly larger than another even though they were milled by the same process at the same facility? Do some some woods shrink or expand more than others after routing the pocket?
On your roasted flame Maple necks do you guys grade your woods? Do you have like a high-end super awesome figured vault where you keep the good stuff or you just get what you get?
is it at ALL possible to get a 51 p bass body with a forearm contour? on the site it says you cant. I am aware that the 54 is the same however the edges are rounded out more. which i dont really want.
Help! I'm a bass guitar tech and even against my advice (begging and pleading) my client wants a bass body unfinished so he can draw custom art on it. What's actually bad about it, is he doesn't want to put a finish on it afterwards! I want to put tung oil or lacquer or something on it. He does custom art with regular ball point pens on drift wood, so he wants to do the same with his custom bass body. He's a great artist, so I won't deny his art skills, but there is a big difference between drift wood you only hang up on the wall and an instrument's body that travels all over and has to stay in tune and in one piece and gets covered in sweat. I don't think he realizes the nightmare of sweating and climate changes from touring on a guitar's wood body is different. Is there something I can use for a finish on ink pen that won't make it run once applied? lol, I know, weird question, but man am I stressed over this one!
Oh man....we have so many crazy kinds of wood in the warehouse! However, we have to restrict our "custom-builder" to only the woods we know we have a large are reliable supply of. If it's a wood that we just have a limited supply of, we will only offer in the in-stock showcase.
Will you stop using rosewood due to the new cites directive ? Huge delays here in sweden dealing with guitars with rosewood components due to the need for permits etc, pain in the ass tbh.
We are still using Rosewood, and we have all the CITES permits necessary to ship internationally. It was very complicated to find our way through the maze of paperwork, but we did it, and we are now shipping Rosewood all over the world, every day.
I am not exactly sure. I went to the circus last month, got invited backstage after the clown show, and I don't remember anything after that. Woke up in an alley three days later with them on.