Uncle E wrote:
Suhr told me that every guitar from their Chinese-built Rasmus line had to be completely worked over in the US factory. They said that when all was said and done, the US factory was doing almost as much work on them as if they'd built-in themselves from the beginning.
This is the same thing that happened with Cort. There is a documentary which shows the demise of the company. Cort farmed out labor to India.
India would send it back and the work had to be redone in their Korean Shops.
China is changing but it still takes oversight. My CIC Fender Telecaster Modern Player Plus was right as rain aside from the poor quality chinese built pups. My MIM Vintage Modified Blacktop Telecaster was a complete disaster. The saddles where flipped over when I got it. The edges on the frets are as sharp as hell. I had to sand down the nut. It arrived direct from an authorized dealer that didn't even look in the box. The paint is chipped. Oddly the pup's sound good.
The thing about Raines is he does all the finishing work himself. Same with Raven West. As far as Trev Wilkinson goes. He's been dealing with the same factory in Vietnam for 10 years now. He has a QC guy from the states living in Vietnam inspecting the guitars before they are shipped.
Spanish is my third language. I haven't kept up with it in recent years. When I was living in Florida I worked in a kitchen where I was the only anglo. It was a busy full service restaurant (extremely busy 3500 covers a night on the weekends) The cooks were great at their craft and fast. They were from various Latin American countries. Well paid by industry standards with benefits. Finding the right people to do the job isn't about nationality. But you can't get quality work for bargain basement labor.
When Gibson shut down operations in Kalamazoo and moved south they stated it was because the old factory couldn't keep up with demand. Kalamazoo has plenty of places to build new factories to this day. It would cost the same in construction. The real reason is because they wanted to cut labor costs. None of the workers wanted to move south. The first 6 years or so quality dropped dramatically. Cheap inexperienced labor and mass production without QC put in place. I knew an authorized dealer for Gibson guitars. And between the crap they would send him as well as the new pricing structure which meant he had to buy more guitars than he could move led him to parting ways with Gibson.
Meanwhile back in Kalamazoo the workers that stayed behind pooled their resources and reopened the plant as Heritage Guitars.
http://heritageguitar.com/
While things are starting to fade on heritage they still do the dog and pony show. The guitars cost a pretty penny. Apples for Apples though they still come under the price of Comparative Gibsons.
Maple back with walnut cap wings. I wish I could remember what happened to that. It was meaty strong and you could pull harmonics from outer space on it. Extremely low action. Mighty, Ballsy tone. Harsher and longer lasting than an LP. More like an Ibanez Iceman or a Gibson Explorer.