Fender has bought out G&L guitars and rumor has it got 2 of plek machines from G&L. Would be an eye opener for Fender to at least randomly check their bass guitars in the plek machine as part of their quality control. Doubt they will do it...
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Fender now has 2 plek machines?
- Thread starter David56
- Start date
For the price they charge now… they ought to.
QC has been spotty for a long, LONG time. I own a P bass, J bass and a mustang bass and none of them have a fender decal. To be fair, one is a G&L, and that’s definitely a Leo Fender product.
QC has been spotty for a long, LONG time. I own a P bass, J bass and a mustang bass and none of them have a fender decal. To be fair, one is a G&L, and that’s definitely a Leo Fender product.
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It'll be a $300 upcharge. Also, now Fender purists can send their prized bass to be leveled by a "certified" Fender PLEK machine.
A PLEK will only be as good as the person who operates it. For factory production instruments it can be used to make sure every one that rolls off the line meets an exact set of specs. Which is great for manufactures but might not be what YOU want. I can't comfortably play a Fender that's set to factory specs. Too much relief and too much string height. In reality FMIC is a huge company and could've bought PLEK,s whenever they wanted to. I'm sure they got a good proce on them. My guess is that these will go to the Custom Shop. I also saw a post where someone said some CNC machines were also pulled out of the line. I can't see Fender actually having a shortage of CNC machines but if you could pick up some at a decent price it would be good to keep them around for backups in case something on the line goes down.
I think it honestly made sense for Fender to buy G&L because they had the rights to the one thing that Fender didn't have. and that was Leo Fenders name, likeness, and his ideas and probably patents as well. So, in a sense Leo's coming home.
I think it honestly made sense for Fender to buy G&L because they had the rights to the one thing that Fender didn't have. and that was Leo Fenders name, likeness, and his ideas and probably patents as well. So, in a sense Leo's coming home.
Pleks are fine for low quantity shops (G&L was very small, even smaller than the Fender Custom Shop) but would not make sense for the huge amount that Fender makes. They would need a whole lot more than 2
Plek machines are not all that uncommon though they cost about a quarter million a piece. I would wonder if Fender doesn’t already own another one. Lakland does, some of the big shops do - even Klos (the graphite instrument builder in UT) has one. I wish it meant better things for QC at Fender but sounds doubtful.
FWIW, Gibson instruments have been PLEK'd for more than a decade now...
I would think that Fender USA and Gibson make a similar amount of instruments a month. It looks like Gibson has 8 machines with plans for 2 more. So I stand by the fact that they would need more to do it. Maybe I overshot by saying a "whole lot" more
Do bear in mind that Gibson has two factories in the States (Nashville and Montana) so they would definitely need more machines than FMIC.
The first instruments that were PLEK'd by Gibson were Custom Shop units, some ~15 years ago. I'd expect Fender to take a similar approach, at least in the beginning.
As someone who has owned a few instruments which received this treatment in the factory I'll say it's a nice perk/feature, but won't turn a Trabant into a Rolls Royce so to speak...
A Trabant bass would be 5/8 plywood, pine neck, no pickguard, single strand strings and no tone or vol controls. People would buy it.
It would become a cult bass.
IIRC They were one of the first companies to jump on the PLEK bandwagon
Might there be a clue in hell how to confirm this before a "rumor" generates 70-some-odd pages of comments?
