Martin guitar serial numbers d 41
The first, rough template had the width of the neck at the first and 10 th frets after arriving at those dimensions, the shaper blended the neck profile carefully between the two points. The shaping was all done using small metal templates. A whittling knife and a very sharp paring knife were used to cut the diamond. Next, a shaper clamped the neck, fingerboard side down, onto a wooden fixture and carved it: first with a drawknife, then with rough and fine rasps and finally with files and sandpaper. The fitter pressed a steel T-bar – actually a length of sled-blade stock that might otherwise have become part of an American Flyer – into the portion of the neck that was slotted to accept it, then glued on the slotted fingerboard.
#MARTIN GUITAR SERIAL NUMBERS D 41 SERIAL NUMBER#
Eventually, a Martin employee who was trained as a fitter selected one of those roughed-out style 28 dreadnought necks and mated its dovetail precisely to the body that was built around the 58957 neck block, after which he penciled the same serial number underneath its heel. Necks were machined according to model – style 28 necks had diamond-shaped darts or volutes, style 18 necks didn’t, and so forth – and stacked on carts accordingly. The body was bound and decorated with imported herringbone purfling, which was carefully taped to hold it in place, and set aside for the glue to dry.Įlsewhere in the two-story factory, work was started on other components.
Meanwhile, a tree-size pinwheel of clamping jigs–which, according to company lore, began life as a railroad switch before Frank Henry Martin spotted it 30 years earlier and adapted it to a higher calling–held the two-piece top and back that would be trimmed, braced and voiced with painstaking care, then glued to the rims. Strips of kerfed lining were glued to the inner edges of the rims. The 14-fret dreadnoughts were among the newest additions to the standard Martin line, having been added to the catalog the year before. The rosewood sides had been shaped on a hot bending iron, using one of the cleanest templates in the shop as a reference. Later that day, the neck block was glued and clamped to a pair of bent rosewood sides, which had been selected from the many such pieces drying in the attic of Martin’s North Street factory. had been making fretted instruments for just more than a century–and their total production now numbered in the tens of thousands.) Within the hour, the neck block for the last guitar of the batch was completed:
Working freehand, the stamp man devoted one line to the model designations and then moved down to the next line for the serial numbers.
#MARTIN GUITAR SERIAL NUMBERS D 41 PLUS#
Mahogany neck blocks had already been cut on the table saw and dovetailed on the shaper table, and now they were brought to a workstation where a set of metal hand stamps was kept: individual tools for the numerals 0 through 9, plus a dash and a few uppercase letters. The first step was at once the simplest and the most momentous. New sales orders had arrived, and while the heating system creaked back to life and the sounds of power tools began to fill the otherwise quiet workspace, Martin’s shop foreman, John Deichman, directed his attention toward a new assignment: initiating work on a batch of 12 rosewood-bodied dreadnought guitars. It was business as usual for the mostly rural folk of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Martin Guitar Company, where a workforce of just more than 30 men arrived for their normal shift. By January 23, some businesses in eastern Pennsylvania remained closed–but not the C.F. A winter storm had come down from Canada, dumping a foot of snow on the Northeast before moving out to sea a few days later. Nineteen thirty-five was only three weeks old but it already looked to be one of the snowiest years on record.