** ooh, ooh, I love name-dropping when it involves fairly obscure people. In this case, I'm friends with Dick Boak, since before he founded ASIA
http://asiartisans.org/content/ He told me that when he was hired to manage Martin, the first thing he did was perform a technique from A Passion For Excellence called management by walking around.
His pet peeve was the Martin pickguard crack (between the pickguard and the south edge of the bridge) so ubiquitous that it's actually used by collectors for authentication. In ten minutes, he solved a problem that had existed for over a century: the glue for the pickguards was a holdover from the 1890s. It and the pickguard were inflexible - for a decade or two, when the glue started breaking down - and were glued to a thin sheet of soundboard that was chosen for its flexibility. A half-inch away, the inflexible bridge was glued ... Y'see where this is going?
Dick said he went to an ACE hardware in Nazareth, bought a bunch of tubes of a much more flexible glue, brought it back to the factory and said; here. Use this. Problem solved. (After over a century.)
Here's another hot tip you won't see in any book: Dick was walking around - managing - and stopped to watch them laying out headstocks using ancient wood templates. The craftsman proudly noted that the template Dick was holding had been in continuous use since the factory was located in New York, shortly after the Civil War.
Dick said that all he saw was that the constant use had worn away the corners of the template, to the point where they were more like half-circles. Time for a new template, he said.
Take a look at the corners of the headstocks on Dreadnaughts. You'll see it, once you know it's there. The old ones are nice and crisp, then... And you'll be able to see when they made a new template, too.
(Message edited by Ed_zeppelin on August 17, 2015)
