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Inside The Secret Underground Laboratory

#241
A few more pictures from the big move 5 years ago:

Loading the LeBlond 13 lathe onto the trailer. This hydraulic-lift trailer was so handy for moving the big machines. You can see that the bed drops right down to the ground. I used my gantry crane to lift each end up onto the bed, then pulled it on with an electric winch. I really did do all of this working by myself. That's what machines are for!
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Filling up bay 14. Lots of things in random positions. The routing bench is in place.
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My faithful Logan lathe in its final position. That whole base frame and cabinet behind all moves as one unit with a pallet jack.
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Bandsaws, drill presses, stuff.....
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This was Christmas day 2013, as I was assembling my couch/sleeping pod. I had designed it and cut all the parts down in Burbank, before pulling out all the saws. The first job on Christmas day was to put it together.
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A day or two later, the whole pod and office are roughly assembled.
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Around New Years Day 2014, the whole shop is starting to come together. Getting most of the machines and workbenches shuffled around into their proper places. Yes, I did actually plan out the shop layout pretty carefully back in September/October. And most of it fit together well as planned. Only a few changes on site.
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Most of the shop coming together, but still a lot of extra machines and junk parked temporarily across the hall.
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And here's the shop by around the end of January 2014. Most of the main machines operational, running on extension cords. It was around August before I had everything packed in and running.
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Since then, I've added a few more machines and made a few changes to the layout. But most of it remains as it was in mid 2014.
 
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#243
Unfortunately, some very sad news today. My friend and fellow Luthier Mike Lipe died yesterday. His shop is right down the hall from me here in the Lab, and he was here working less than two weeks ago. We were scrambling finishing up guitars, getting ready for his booth at NAMM. He complained of a strange pain in his chest. That night, his girlfriend Kathleen drove him to the hospital. It turned out that he had something seriously bad going on in his lungs. He wasn't coming out of the hospital. By his agreement, they took him off life support Wednesday and he passed away Thursday afternoon. He had just turned 70.

Mike had started building guitars when he was 16 and, other than a couple of years in Vietnam, had been building instruments professionally almost all his life. He worked for many different guitar companies in the early days, and made his own Lipe brand guitars and basses for the last 28 years or so. He must have built at least two thousand instruments. Mike was also a seriously good blues guitarist and singer. He was doing regular gigs up until a few weeks ago.

I first met Mike and started working with him in 1992 on the SWR project. I was the mad engineer and he was the veteran Luthier. I helped him solve difficult technical problems and he taught me the skills of building instruments. We worked together on so many crazy instrument projects over the years, for many different companies and clients. Since about 2001, I've been doing the main machining of all of his necks, and supplying him with custom truss rods and hardware. I've built around 800 necks for him since then. He's been my friend and main client for a long time.

I moved up here to Fillmore in 2013, and I convinced him to set up a shop here in the Lab in 2015. He has a house in Tujunga, about 50 miles away, with a small garage shop where he did most of the detail work and final assembly of his guitars. He'd drive up here about twice a week and spend a few hours doing his heavy woodworking in his shop down the hall. I kept his machines running and supplied him with partially machined necks and parts.

It's still sinking in for me that he's gone and it's all ended.

Rest in peace, man.

Mike Lipe.jpg
 
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#260
Mr. Johnson, I have a deep respect for your work and expertise, but this post is informative in new ways.
Thanks.

Bruce Johnson said:
One other note about these pencil sharpeners, which relates to our business of designing basses: Look at the difference in the styling (aka Industrial Design) between the Dexter and the Berol machines. Both are nicely designed products, but they come from different eras, and represent different design philosophies.

Some people would call the Dexter "Steampunk", but most machines in the first half of the 20th century were designed like that. It's a style that proudly shows off what it does. You can see inside and watch all the spinning parts and flying chips. The style promotes how it works, and how many parts it's made of, and how well all the parts fit together and work together. It's proud to be a well-made machine! That's what I love about machines from that era. The manufacturers were showing off the technology.

Now look at the Berol from the 1950's. Everything's all covered up, like it's trying not to look like a pencil sharpener. You know, one of those icky, messy machine things. It looks like there are hardly any parts to it. It's a smooth pod with nice lines. You put a pencil in the end, and it comes out with a point! It's magic! You aren't supposed to know or care how it works. It's just a beautiful object that also happens to perform a function. A whole different styling approach.

Think about how we see these two approaches when applied to the design of basses.
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