Designing a new Guitar!

OK....so it's been a while since I posted...I'm sorry.

Since I last posted a few things have been brewing that I can now tell everyone about.
A little over a year ago a new design for an electric pickup was being tested and a few of us were hard at work designing a new bridge. Sometime earlier this year Bob (Taylor) got the special "yeah let's do it feeling" and officially approved an Electric Guitar line for manufacturing and release in 2008. Pretty exciting for all of us in the product development group and now that it's been seen here and there and the official launch is coming up I can post a few pictures and talk a little about some of the details that go into designing a totally new product.

BTW: You can see some of the promo stuff on our websight.

http://www.taylorguitars.com/


Officially the product line was slated to be released at Jan NAMM 08 but sometime around July it was decided (by Bob) that we would do a pre-release the day after Thanksgiving! While the implications of that decision may seem cool...to us it means we have to make somewhere around 1000 guitars before that time so they can be in the stores ready to go! Here we were on a design and manufacturing schedule where everything was in the bag for January, (for the first time by the way) with us sitting back all fat and happy with cigars and beers and along comes BT and moves everything up by uuuu...three months! Well...as we say in product development at Taylor "It's impossible...so it might take a little longer!"

Well...manufacturing started Oct 1st! 21 a day for two weeks to 60 a day by the end of the month! The parts and tooling are literally being completed sometimes a day before they have to move into the build cycle. The first guitars begin arriving from manufacturing to shipping on the 12th and we don't have cases or shipping boxes yet...those should be ready on the 11th! Yeah yeah yeah...so it's hectic and stressful...what about the promise to tell some of the development details?

Since the development of this guitar series happened over a year and a half at least I want to write about some of the really cool moments along the way and the real specifics of what goes into something like this!

I promise...I'll cover everything over the next few weeks so keep checking back!

Here's a shot of Tommy Shaw with one of the first proto's!