Becky Manogue assures the final neck fit

Paul Werkheiser performs a final inspection

south from U.S. 80 in eastern Pennsylvania just west of the New Jersey border, about a 2-1/2-hour drive from my home on Long Island.  Factory tours leave at 1:15 each weekday, led by guides who have worked in the plant itself.  They will walk you through an operation that produces 220 instruments each day, from $600 models made principally of wood fiber composite laminates to special editions of classic rosewood, mahogany, ebony and spruce, accessorized with finely accented appointments, that cost upwards of $10,000 and more.  Immediately apparent is a level of care that transcends the price of the instrument.  Some of the work is performed by computerized machines, but the vast majority of the processes are in human hands, and it is a wonder observing the meticulous care of these craftspeople. 
    "It takes three months to make a guitar," our guide told us, pointing out, for example, that every time a step in the process called for gluing - which was often - the instrument had to sit for 45 minutes before proceeding to the next step.  Every craftsperson serves as a quality control to the work done before it reached his or her station, then carefully QC-ed his or her work before passing it on.  There are processes for heating and bending the wood for the sides, bracing the soundboards, cutting the sound holes, meticulously placing mother-of-pearl pieces in the rosettes that circle the sound holes, fitting and gluing the edge bindings, lacquering and buffing, and so on. 
    "When visitors see all the personal care that goes into making a Martin guitar, they understand why they cost what they do," says C.F. "Chris" Martin IV, the latest in the uninterrupted line of descendants who have run the company for almost 170 years.
    Christian Frederick Martin, Sr., the progenitor of the Martin line, the first of six generations, emigrated to New York in 1833, when a dispute among crafts guilds in the Saxony region of his German homeland was preventing him from plying his craft.  After a brief period operating in the stiflingly close quarters of New York's Lower East Side, Martin moved lock, stock and barrel to the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania in 1838.  The company operated out of a factory the midst of Nazareth for decades, before outgrowing any further expansions and moving into its new facility in the mid 1960s, one of the most productive periods in the country's love affair with the guitar. 
    Many innovations were born at C.F. Martin & Co., some nuances in design, others dramatic.  Perhaps the most dramatic was the development of the "dreadnought" design.  Named for a class of World War I battleship, the first of these instruments were produced during that war, the most distinctive being considerably larger and deeper than guitars produced before them.  Their shape was less an hourglass than predecessors, and became the design most associated with the acoustic guitar of today.  Not nearly as visible, but perhaps even more dramatic was the company's unique X-bracing, affixed to the underside of the guitar's top or soundboard, and a critical element in Martin's distinctive sound.
    Martin does make a number of lesser-priced guitars, its "X Series" and "Road Series" models, whose lower price tags are a function of the materials used, wood fiber

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